It started as a parent’s personal journal to their younger daughter Gracie, so she would be able to remember her 6-year-old sister, Elena, who was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer.
Though her parents didn’t want her to know the severity of her cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening. The tumor slowly took away her ability to talk.
But Elena was still able to write.
After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter had left a message behind for them — a lot of messages, actually.
“We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf,” Keith Desserich said.
Then the couple started finding them everywhere.