Her mother’s last words: It’s OK to talk about me
The owner of a second-hand bookstore in a northern English market town was sorting through a pile of old books when an envelope fell from one. Inside was an undated letter and a faded photo of a woman holding a little girl on her lap. The letter was addressed to “Bethany (My tiny treasure)” and signed “Mam.” It said if Bethany was reading it, it meant the letter’s author had died.
Gordon Draper’s eyes welled. These were a dying woman’s last words to her child. He had to find Bethany.
“Whoever it is will want this,” he said he thought. “You wouldn’t throw away a letter like that.”
He assumed if the book ended up in his shop then Bethany was likely from around Bishop Auckland. And he thought he actually recognised the little girl’s face. Even if she’d since left the area, there might be someone in town who would recognise the picture.
He started with the local newspaper. The Northern Echo ran the story of the lost letter, which promised the little girl that her mum would always be with her, on its front page last weekend.
SURREAL EXPERIENCE
Meanwhile, Bethany Gash, now 21 and a mother herself, was on Facebook about 16km away when a close family friend messaged her to check out the article. As she read her mother’s words, words she thought had been lost to her forever, she said she thought she must be dreaming.
Gash was only four when her mother died of cystic fibrosis in 1999. Five years later, her family moved to a new home and the letter, tucked away in the pages of a book for safekeeping, was inadvertently donated.
Gash said she remembers unpacking and looking for the letter, and then frantically searching through everything in hopes it was there. A photograph of Bethany Gash and her mother. “That’s when I realised it was long gone by now and I’d never see it again,” she said.
She was still young when the letter was lost, but she remembered pieces from it, especially the part where her mum tells her it’s okay to talk about her after she’s gone.
In the letter, her mother wrote that she’d “gone to heaven to live with the angels” and “I will always be in the sky making sure you are alright and watching over you.”
‘DON’T FORGET ME’
“I hope you don’t forget me,” she wrote, “because I’ll always be your mam.”
Draper hand-delivered the letter, and Gash said she was greatly moved to have it back, but also by this stranger’s kindness. “It was all emotion. I wanted to burst out crying,” she said.
Gash said that as she got older, she spoke less about her mum than she did as a child with her dad. But this story, and all the attention it’s received in the past week, is like fulfilling her mum’s dying wish: Her daughter is talking about her.
—Washington Post