A Trick of the Heart

A Warm Deja Vu

We’ve all heard the terms dead ringer and doppleganger. Both refer to someone who looks exactly (frighteningly) like someone we know, or love, who is gone.

I had my first experience with this not long ago and it was shocking.

I was always very close to my dad and he and I had many conversations about Robert and me moving to Florida. Daddy was all for it, because he wanted to come and stay for a week, a month —”or forever,” he said with a giggle.

He gave us his blessing for our move from icy Muk-Luk-Land in Pennsylvania to Barefoot-World in Florida. He laughed when I said I wanted to move there to go barefoot year-round.

A few weeks after we had this conversation, Daddy got up in the middle of the night for a potty break, caught his toe on the carpet, tripped and fell. He couldn’t reach the call button in the bedroom in his apartment of the retirement complex, so he waited, lying on the floor until they did the morning floor check of all apartments.

When they found him, he was rushed to the hospital where they X-Rayed and found he’d broken his hip. His hip was replaced and he was doing well in physical therapy when he fell and ruined the new hip. Doctors corrected the problem, but Daddy passed away a few days later after complications from pneumonia.

I missed him terribly, especially anytime I thought about how much he wanted to come and visit us.

Robert and I moved to Florida a month after Daddy passed away. One morning a few weeks after our move, I took our golf cart to do some errands. I went to Publix for groceries, bought a couple of things at the hardware store, and my last stop was for vitamins at CVS.

As I took my place in line at the checkout, my world suddenly flip-flopped, taking my breath away. For a split second, I was convinced the man in front of me was Daddy. How could that be? I asked myself in disbelief. My heart wrestled with my eyes, both vying for the truth.

The man had the same build, the same thinning hair, similar clothes, and he was sitting on the same red motorized Jazzy scooter my father had because of his painful knees and ankles.

When he reached up to the counter to swipe his credit card in the machine, it was my father's hand, so my eyes filled with tears.

It wasn’t until I saw his face when he turned to speak to the cashier that I knew it wasn’t Daddy —as much as I wanted it to be him. This was just a kind elderly man on a red Jazzy motorized scooter in the CVS drug store.

I wiped my eyes with a tissue and took some deep breaths. That's how life works sometimes. When you least expect it, something triggers a memory that comes screaming out, dragging your wounded heart along with it.

But there’s a heartwarming side to it, too. It brings a loved one close — just one more time — to help us heal.

Would he have been upset, I wonder, if I had asked him for a hug …?

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