The day after my dad’s funeral, a mysterious package arrived at our door — addressed to me, from him. And what I found inside didn’t just pull me out of grief. It pulled me into something stronger than goodbye. I’m a 21-year-old college student, and for most of my life, I thought I was the “lucky” kind of unlucky. The kind of person who loses something huge but somehow survives anyway. But after receiving my dad’s final gift — his very last message to me — I finally understood something:

I never thought I would outlive my whole family. For most of my life, I believed I would go first. My husband, Harold, used to tease me about it. He would grin and say, “If you die before me, I’ll know it’s because you wanted to haunt me for throwing away your old Tupperware.”I’d laugh and shake my head and tell him, “You’d deserve it.” That’s what sixty years of marriage does. It gives you the strange comfort to joke about endings, because you believe you’ll face them together. But

I used to think my biggest mom problems would be public tantrums in Target, spilled juice in the car, and fighting to get on a preschool wait list. I was wrong. One afternoon, I came home early and found my three-year-old son alone in his crib.The babysitter was gone.And on the kitchen table was a letter with my name on it… and a truth that cracked my life wide open. I never thought I’d be the woman posting on Reddit about her missing babysitter. But here I am. My whole