I left the train this morning one stop before City Hall, where I would usually get off —something I do on the mornings when I want a short walk to clear my head before work.

I’m usually a stander on the train. I don’t sit down because it’s only three stops to work, or home from work, and it’s usually packed, so I stand near the doors and let others sit. But I left home later than usual today, so there were plenty of seats.

I ended up sitting across from a woman who was sleeping, her head pressed up against the window — her feet in muddy sandals, her hood up, an overflowing backpack on the seat next to her. Initially, I didn’t think too much of it. Until I did.

Because I do love to imagine things about strangers. Before I knew it, I’d started down the rabbit hole of writing a little story about her in my head. I sometimes see strangers and this automatic reflex in me kicks in — like a sixth gear — that starts imagining their story.

Like maybe she’s a frazzled mother of four who slipped on the muddy flip flops she wore to the park with kids last night. Maybe she was fishing on the muddy banks of the Grand this morning. Maybe she’s without a place to call home right now. Maybe she ran through a muddy cornfield after egging the public school with her friends. (Wait. That was me.)

We hit the Kitchener Market stop and I look around momentarily and think that maybe I should open my work calendar and see what I’m supposed to be doing today. But then I trust fall back into my imagination. And suddenly, she’s running through that cornfield with me.

That’s kind of how it is, isn’t it? We constantly narrate life’s little moments with our thoughts, whether we even realize it or not. We launch into the world with our everyday brains voluntarily making assumptions and judgements on our behalf and, if you’re really lucky, making up entire fictional stories about lives people have never lived -– all within the space of two train stops.

Of course, the truth is that I really have no idea what she was doing sleeping on the train this morning. But in the midst of fictionalizing who she was, where she’d spent the night, and why her feet were muddy, I realized that it was her face I kept returning to over and over. She bore an uncanny resemblance to the younger version of a good friend of mine, dead now just over six years.

Terry had this photo of herself, taken when she was 24, that she used to show around the office once in a while. It was taken around the time that she was at the start of what became a pretty serious alcohol addiction. None of us had known her then. But we used to stand around marveling over what a good photo of her it was. And how drastically a person’s look could change in the course of 30 years or so. (Of course, another almost 20 years have gone by, and we all get it now.)

I realized that the woman asleep on the train looked just like that younger version of Terry. Right down to the reddish curls sticking out from her hoodie. I’ve been thinking about Terry quite a bit these last few weeks as I find myself struggling with what I should do about a couple of situations playing out in front of me. I know she has an opinion. I’ve been hearing her. I should probably listen now that she literally showed up on the train.

When I left the train, I was caught up in my thoughts and I didn’t wake up until the barista handed me a London Fog I hadn’t ordered -– but which I’m clearly regular enough to be associated with. I apologized and said I was lost in thought. And I was.

I was caught in a moment. In the aching realization that you can’t go back again -– that sometimes comes to you out of the blue, like when you’re stealing glimpses of a stranger on the train. And then suddenly, I felt the pull of the spiral that I’ve come to know is attached to life’s biggest, and often hardest, things -– grief and healing and shame among them. The spiral that says that you’re never quite done with these things. That just when you think you’ve handled it, they make a spectacular little comeback — on a train, or in a coffee shop on King Street.

I paid for the London Fog and walked the rest of the way to work lost in the spiral -– equal parts grief and nostalgia. For the good times spent with Terry, my mother -– and all the people who’ve gone on to The Next ahead of me. There are days, like today, when the knowledge that there will never again be another day with their voices in it creates a longing so intense that words are not enough. The same way there are days when the knowledge that the sparkly rush of a major accomplishment will always be followed by the hard realization that my mom, who’s always been at the other end of my first giddy phone call, is no longer there — still takes my breath away.

Terry and my mother are inextricably linked for me. They only ever met once -– at the dock in Tobermory where we both happened to be on vacation one year. But I talked to each of them about the other a great deal because they were both dying of cancer at the same time. Seven months before I sat at my mother’s bedside at the end of a 12-year tangle with blood cancer, I sat at Terry’s as she lay dying. She died almost a year to the day that I sat with her in another room, in another hospital, listening to a doctor tell her that what they initially thought was pneumonia was, in fact, lung cancer.

A friend — one of those people who used to marvel over that photo of a young Terry -– drove me to the hospital on that last day. I was filled with dread. I felt nauseous. I wasn’t expecting Terry to die before my own mother. She’d only had mere months that had seemed mercilessly slow at first, and panic-inducingly fast by the end.

I forced myself to look out the passenger window as we whipped through the downtown headed for the hospital that afternoon. I thought to myself -– all these stores and restaurants, designer dogs and fancy cars we’re passing right now — we’ve created all those things specifically to distract ourselves from the exact feeling that you’re feeling right now. Please have the courage to stay in this room. Please remember that this moment is such a privilege, I said to myself. 

I stepped into City Hall this morning, remembering that day and remembering Terry. And my mom. And the sacred privilege it truly was to be there at the end of their lives. I felt grief and love co-mingling as they do. You can’t have one without the other. And I felt the pleasure of remembering good times mixed up with sadness for what is gone. It seems you can’t have one of them without the other either.

It still shocks me sometimes, in the thick of feeling those losses all this time later, how much I still wish for what is lost and can’t come back. I think it’s the feeling I want back most. Like how I saved my mom and dad’s old phone number in my phone for so long – though it has long since belonged to someone else. It helped me keep those many years of giddy phone calls close. The memory of them. The feeling of them.

I wish I could go back and feel a few things twice. In my story, the woman asleep on the train does, too.