This is a story about a sixty-seven-year-old man who, in the spring of 2025, began dressing exactly as he had in 1987, what his daughter has made of it, and what the man himself has said when she has, on several occasions, gently asked him what he is doing.
The man — I will call him Walter, because that is the name his daughter chose for him during our first conversation, and because she said, when I asked why, “it was the name he almost gave my brother and I am still upset he didn’t” — is a retired civil engineer. He lives in a suburb of Minneapolis. He was married to my source’s mother for forty-one years. His wife — I will not name her, because my source asked me not to — passed away in November of 2023.
He began dressing as his 1987 self in April of 2025, about a year and a half after her death.
The change
The change was, by my source’s account, gradual. It did not begin with a costume. It began, she has told me, with a haircut.
Walter, for most of his adult life, had worn his hair in what his daughter has described as “the haircut a man gets when he stops thinking about his hair.” Short on the sides. Slightly longer on top. Combed dry. Trimmed every six weeks at the same Great Clips on East Lake Street. It was, she has said, “an unremarkable haircut. It was the haircut of every dad in every suburb.”
In April of 2025, Walter walked into a different barbershop — one he had not been to in approximately thirty-seven years — and asked for the haircut he had worn in his late twenties. The barber, who had not, as it happened, been alive in 1987, did the best he could. Walter, by all accounts, was pleased with the result.
His daughter noticed at brunch the following Sunday.
“Dad,” she said, “your hair.”
Walter said: “Yes.”
He did not elaborate. She let it go.
The sweaters
The sweaters came next. Walter, in May of 2025, began wearing a series of crew-neck pullovers — the kind with thin horizontal stripes in muted colors, the kind that fit slightly looser than a modern sweater would fit, the kind that her father, by her recollection, had worn throughout the late 1980s when she was a small child.
The sweaters, her father later explained, had been in a box in the basement. He had not thrown them out.
This is, his daughter has told me, “the thing that has bothered me the most. That he had kept the sweaters. For thirty-eight years. In a box. Below where I have walked, hundreds of times, in their basement. Without ever knowing they were there.”
The sweaters were followed by:
— A pair of pleated khaki pants
— A worn-in brown leather belt
— Brown Rockport walking shoes (purchased new, but the model identical to one he had worn in 1986)
— Aviator-style glasses (his actual prescription, but in the round wire frames he had abandoned in 1995)
By June, the look was, by his daughter’s description, “complete.”
By July, he had added the Polaroid camera.
The camera
The camera deserves its own paragraph.
Walter, in 1987, had carried a Polaroid SX-70 camera around with him for a period of approximately fourteen months. He had taken, by his own count, several hundred photos with it. The photos were mostly of his daughter, who was at that point five years old, and his son, who was at that point three. The photos are in albums in the family living room. His daughter has, on many occasions, looked at them.
In July of 2025, Walter found a working SX-70 at an estate sale. He paid eighty dollars for it. He bought a pack of film — which, in 2025, is an expensive and specialty item — from a website called Polaroid Originals.
He has, since July, been carrying the camera with him. He carries it on a thin leather strap, slung over his shoulder, the way he carried it in 1987.
He takes photos. He has taken photos of his grandchildren. He has taken photos of the produce aisle at the grocery store. He has taken photos of his daughter, who is now forty-four, in front of her car.
He has not, his daughter has told me, taken a single photo that looks like a 2025 photo. They all look, somehow, like 1987 photos. She cannot explain why. She suspects that this is partly the camera’s doing and partly her father’s doing — that whatever he is photographing, he is photographing it in the way a younger version of himself would have photographed it.
She has, in the months since the camera arrived, started carrying some of the photos in her purse.
What her father has said
The daughter has, over the months, gently asked her father — in three separate conversations — what he is doing.
He has given her three separate answers.
In the first conversation, in late spring, he said: “I don’t know what you mean. I am just dressing more comfortably.”
In the second conversation, in early summer, he said: “I am not doing anything. I am just being myself. I had been not being myself for a while. I am trying to remember how it goes.”
In the third conversation, in early autumn, he said something that his daughter has now repeated to me, in full, on two separate occasions, with the same hesitation each time. I am reproducing it here exactly as she told me he said it.
He said: “I think I am trying to find out which parts of me your mother liked. I don’t remember anymore. I think she liked the version of me I was when she met me. I think the parts that were already there before her are the parts that survived. I am dressing like the version of me that she chose. I am trying to find out what is still here.”
The daughter, when he said this, did not respond immediately. She sat with him in his kitchen — which is also her childhood kitchen — for what she described to me as “a long time, much longer than was comfortable.” Then she said: “Okay, Dad.”
He said: “Okay.”
They had pie.
What strangers have said
Walter, in the months since he completed his 1987 transformation, has been getting compliments from strangers.
He has been getting them, primarily, at Target.
This is, his daughter has told me, the part of the story that she has had the most difficulty processing. Walter, in 2025, walking through a Target in a suburb of Minneapolis, in his striped crew-neck sweater and his pleated khakis and his round wire glasses, with a Polaroid camera over his shoulder — is, apparently, in possession of a look that strangers find compelling.
He has been stopped, by his account, eleven times in the past three months. Most of the people who have stopped him have been in their twenties or early thirties. They have, by his description, “very kindly told me that they like my outfit.”
He has, on three occasions, been asked where he shops.
He has, twice, been asked if his look is “inspired by anything specific.”
He has answered, both times, the same way.
He has said: “My wife.”
The strangers, his daughter has told me, have generally not known what to do with this answer.
A photo I have not seen
There is a photo Walter has taken, in the past two months, that his daughter has told me about but that she has not let me see.
The photo is of an empty kitchen chair. Walter took it, with the Polaroid, in their kitchen. The chair is the one her mother used to sit in. The light, his daughter has told me, is the same light her mother used to sit in. The angle is the angle from which Walter, for forty-one years, looked at her.
The chair is empty.
Walter has put the photo in his wallet.
His daughter has not asked him about it.
She does not, she has told me, intend to.
What this is
I have, in the months since I first heard this story, been thinking about the question Walter’s daughter asked me, very early in our conversations, which was: is this grief, or is it something else.
I have decided, tentatively, that the question may be the wrong one.
I have come to think that the things we do in the months and years after losing someone we have loved for a long time are not usually one thing. They are not grief. They are not art. They are not rebellion. They are not nostalgia. They are not, strictly speaking, any of the things we have names for. They are the small and specific things that the people we are turn out to be capable of, when the people we have been around for forty years are suddenly no longer there. (For a related piece on the small private rituals of modern adult life, see the Wattalife story about the woman who has been drafting a resignation letter for six years and has not sent it.)
Walter’s daughter told me, in our final conversation, that she had stopped asking her father what he is doing.
She has decided, she has told me, that whatever it is, it is working. He is eating. He is sleeping. He is taking photos. He is, by every measure she can identify, gradually getting better.
She told me she has, recently, started borrowing some of her mother’s sweaters.
She did not say more about it.
I did not press.
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, in the course of reporting this story, located, in the back of her own closet, a coat she has not worn since approximately 2008, which she remembers her mother once told her looked nice on her. She has, this week, taken the coat out. She is not yet wearing it. She is just looking at it. She is, for now, leaving it on the chair.