A few days ago I’m sitting in a train going down the coast. I can feel eyes on me. It’s the woman sitting in the seat across the aisle. I assume she’s staring past me to look out my window, but after a while I clock she’s staring at me. It’s the sort of stare you can feel. I write in my journal for a bit, check Twitter, look out the window.
Eventually she speaks. She asks my name then says, “I can’t stop staring at you. Even your mannerisms. You look so familiar.”
At our destination I have many second and third cousins. “We all look the same,” I tell her.
But it’s not that.
Then I tell her I have a generic face. Lots of people mistake me for someone else.
But it’s not that.
Her eyes are swimming in tears, she can’t look away. Something about me is provoking an intense reaction.
She tells me I look exactly like her sister, in fact she first thought I was her sister, but her sister died 30 years ago.
I don’t know what to say and shift a bit in my seat. Her eyes are searching my face, properly examining me. Her face looks stricken but is also full of wonder.
I wish I had risen to the moment with a bit more grace, at least asked about her sister (or as my brother suggested later – given her a hug). Instead I turn and look out the window, trying to break the tension by breaking eye contact.
When I turn back, the woman had left her seat and was wheeling her case towards another carriage.
Apart from the shock of seeing someone who resembles a dead loved one (or thinking you have actually seen that person), there is the unfair asymmetry of the exchange. It’s a variant of the exchange between a famous person and a fan. “I love you. I REALLY love you,” says the fan to the actor who doesn’t know her and brings no emotional content to the encounter that, for her, is earth-shattering.
Likewise in this encounter, this person was a stranger to me, provoking no emotion on first sight. My feelings were neutral, hers were heightened.
Some time ago, a friend died suddenly, aged 22. A year later his mother posted something I’ve not forgotten. Towards the end of that first year, she was walking down a street in Melbourne when she saw the back of a young man. It looked just like her son, the same hair colour and the way it was cut, the same height, the same gait. In the post she described her breathlessness and her excitement. He had come back! She followed him on to a tram, then off again. He walked down a street and into a shop. Once in the shop, she caught his attention and reached out and touched his arm. He turned around – revealing a face that was not the face of her son. In that awful moment she experienced the freshness of his death all over again.
The asymmetry lies in the moment the bereaved looks into the face of the stranger and sees her much-missed son or her sister, and the stranger looks back and sees just another stranger.
This asymmetry, like all asymmetry, is isolating and can compound the profoundly lonely experience of loss and grief.
We’d like to think we grieve communally – and on some levels we do. But the real pain of loss is felt at a very individual, cellular level. No one quite feels the same way you do about the deceased loved one. An asymmetrical encounter confirms this fully and completely. There is my sister, back from the dead! The sister speaks and reveals herself to be a stranger.
We don’t have a word in English for what this relationship between a loved one of the deceased and the deceased’s living doppelganger might be. Without language the experience sits suspended in a sort of wordless, unresolved tension.
What to call it? What does it mean?
But the experience for the bereaved – vertiginous, distressing, spooky and sometimes thrilling – is real. For a moment it feels like falling into a shaft that takes you to another time, and for a brief second that loved one is alive again in the features of another.
The only writing that has come close to acknowledging this exquisitely painful and mystical experience is by Nick Cave in a sporadic newsletter, the Red Hand Files.
He writes: “Often, while grieving, many of us are gripped by a form of madness, and start to believe, against our better judgments, all manner of lunacies and magical thinking; we believe our loved ones visit us in our dreams, we see them across crowded rooms, we think we hear their voices, we believe they inhabit other forms, we feel their ghost-hands in our own, we experience their presence ‘all around’.”
He concludes: “My advice… is [to] quietly, covertly, embrace the mystery that presents itself. It is yours alone.”
