Mother Receives Mysterious Letter From Late Son
Gail Sharp was dreading Mother's Day because her youngest son, Cameron, died in a car accident last year, but then she received a mysterious letter in the mail that made it something special.
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An envelope addressed to Cameron arrived at the family home in Andersonville, Tenn., recently, according to WBIR, an Anderson County, Tennessee local news affiliate. Shockingly, the letter was actually written by Cameron himself seven years ago as a school assignment.
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The 30-word letter reads: “Dear Cameron. On this day my brother will graduate from middle school. On the same day I watched the movie Night at the Museum. My favorite teacher is Mr. Cawood."
Mr. Cawood, or as he's better known, Dale Caldwell, explained that the project, which he assigns every year, was for the students to write a letter to themselves as a reminder of the things that they enjoyed most in life, goals and promises they might have set, and dreams they hoped to accomplish at that moment in time. Caldwell, an American History teacher at Norris Middle School in Norris, Tenn., saves the letters for years and mails them out during the month of the students' high school graduation.
“When I ran across [Cameron's], for just a moment I paused and asked myself, 'Do I mail this?' But I knew that probably it would be really special to his mother," he said. Caldwell’s intuition was right. "I really am glad that he did," Sharp said.
Cameron’s letter isn’t the only posthumous note to make its way to grieving family members. A letter that Brenda Schmitz, a 46-year-old wife and mother of four, addressed a note to a radio station in Des Moines, Iowa, a month before her death from ovarian cancer in September 2011 surfaced last December. She had instructed a friend to mail it once her husband had fallen in love again. And earlier this year, a letter 12-year-old Taylor Scout Smith, who died in January, wrote to her 22-year-old self about graduating from college and becoming a lawyer was found by her parents.
Sharp said she always used to tell her son that he needed to practice his penmanship because it was “atrocious.” But now, receiving a memento in his horrible handwriting, she calls it a treasure.
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