6-Year-Old Girl with Brain Cancer Hid Love Notes for Her Parents to Find After Her Death Just before her sixth birthday, Elena Desserich (right) was diagnosed with brain cancer and given 135 days to live. She lived 255 days, passing away in 2007. After her death, Elena’s parents, Brooke and Keith, found hundreds of notes from Elena hidden around the house — in between CD cases, between bookshelves, in dresser drawers, in backpacks…. “It just felt like a little hug from her, like she was telling us she was looking over us” Elena’s parents, Brooke and Keith Desserich, have now published these notes in a book called Notes Left Behind to fund a non-profit organization The Cure Starts Now dedicated to fighting pediatric brain cancer.
When 6-year-old Elena Desserich was diagnosed with brain cancer, she began hiding hundreds of little love notes around the house for her parents to find after she was gone. Here’s the story:
There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t, at some point, think of you. Or, some kind of memory we once shared. It’s like I look at a certain thing, hear a certain song or even eat a certain food, and suddenly I am reminded of you, the times we shared, the conversations we had, and the best friend you used to be.
I can’t help but remember everything. I mean, you see somebody and you think about all they’ve ever said and done. The good and the bad. It all comes back to you, and it feels so right and hurts so bad all at once.
It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.
