One issue I’ve found with having a few people having died on me when they were younger is the issue of doppelgängers – people who freakishly look the same.  I’ve encountered them for my stepfather as I’m out around my city.  Sometimes the right shape from behind, sometimes a glimpse of a profile.  But I’ve not yet encountered Ian look-a-likes.

                           

Until that ‘what colour is this dress?’ thing dominated a large number of corners of the internet.

Someone in a private Facebook group I’m on posted a parody she grabbed of someone else’s news feed.

I chuckled because the dress in the picture was a bright pink.

And then I saw the reflection of the pretty much naked man in the mirror next to the dress.

And looked.

And looked again.

Then opened the picture and zoomed in.

They’d obscured their face with their phone and flash while taking the picture, but the person’s build and general body shape was pretty much the same as Ian’s when he was at the lower end of his fluctuating weight range.

Being triggered by seeing a picture of someone with a very similar body shape, especially when mostly naked, was never a situation I expected to encounter.

The additional reason for a double-take is they had a line of chest-hair right where Ian’s open heart surgery scar ran.  And at the usual Facebook feed size, the body-hair looked a bit like a zipper line.

It also doesn’t help that it’s the sort of thing he would have done (at least prior to meeting me, with the right encouragement from his mates), which made the experience all that more realistic.

It’s probably one of the weirdest widow experiences I’ve had to date.  I spent a good couple of days shaking my head in bewilderment.  It didn’t really bring me back to a place of the ache of early grief, but did trigger the memory of my personal hot water bottle, and was again acutely aware of his missing physical presence.  

How can all of this now be sitting in a box on my dresser?