Grieving parents touched by note from their dead son
‘Still with you. Thank you mom + dad. Love,’ wrote Leland, 6, in red marker
Amber Shoemake and her husband, Tim, came home from the hospital to pick out burial clothes for their 6-year-old son.
That’s when the grieving parents found a handwritten note from Leland on the living room table, and immediately burst into tears. “We were shocked. We broke down and cried for a long time. We have no idea when he wrote it,” Shoemake told the Star in messages sent on Facebook.
“Still with you. Thank you mom + dad. Love,” read Leland’s note, written in red marker and shared by the family on Facebook. He also coloured in a red heart with the words “Mom dad Love” written inside. The note’s last line appears to read “Good bye,” but Shoemake said she believed her son wrote “Good day.”
“I cried hysterically. He was so awesome in life and this family revolved around him and here he was still caring for us even after he’s gone,” said Shoemake, who lives in Williamson, Ga., south of Atlanta.
Leland passed away on Sept. 25 from a rare brain infection caused by Balamuthia mandrillaris, an amoeba generally found in dirt.
He began complaining of headaches, his mother said, and the infection steadily worsened. Leland was being treated for more than two weeks at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta before he died on Friday.
“The one thing he loved most was playing in the dirt. I never imagined that would be the thing that would take him from me,” Shoemake wrote on a Facebook page for her son, called Prayers for Leland.
He loved movies — Jaws, Stephen Spielberg and Adam Sandler were his favourites — going to school, “ships like the Titanic and learning about things like WWII,” she wrote.
This also wasn’t the young boy’s first letter to his parents.
“Leland always wrote us notes and drew us pictures,” Shoemake told the Star. “(He) loved to draw sharks, tornadoes, volcanoes, ships, tsunamis, flowers for me and funny things for his dad. He drew pictures for everyone. And always wrote the sweetest notes.”
On Wednesday, Shoemake went to pick out her son’s headstone.
“Reality still hasn’t set in that he’s not here with us. We miss him terribly,” she wrote on Facebook. “I’m not sure how I’m going to go on without him. How do you not only say goodbye to a child but your best friend.”