 | | "Notes Left Behind" is a journal and compilation of the notes 6-year-old Elena wrote to her parents before she died. | |
 | | Elena was a special child, and already an accomplished artist at her young age. | |
 | | She left handmade drawings and notes hidden throughout the house. Her parents found them after her death. | |
 | | Keith and Brooke Desserich cherish the notes Elena left for them, and believe she was telling them everything would be okay. | |
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A mother and father cherish notes written by their 6-year-old daughter, each with a simple message.
"She would always write, 'I love you, Mom, Dad,' " says father Keith Desserich.
Some of the notes are heart-shaped, others are written on yellow Post-It notes. But what makes these heartfelt messages even more precious is that they were discovered after Elena Desserich lost her brave battle with brain cancer.
"I think this was her way of telling us that it was going to be okay," says Elena's mother, Brooke.
In the months before her death, Elena worked feverishly, writing little notes to her family and hiding them. But it wasn't until after Elena's death that they began to discover them. "They just started coming out, in between pages of books, in boxes, in bags of clothes," says Brooke.
They number in the hundreds...each one more special than the next.
Brooke says, "You want to believe she's sending a little message from heaven."
Elena was a special little girl. At a young age she was already an accomplished artist. One of her paintings, simply titled "I Love You," once hung at The Cincinnati Art Museum.
Even when her brain cancer confined her to a wheelchair and the treatments distorted her beautiful little face -- Elena still had one final wish...to dance with her father in what she called "her wedding dress."
"That was three days before Elena lost her battle. She got the chance to put on that wedding dress...and on that last day she danced with me. I guess in that regard I got to dance with her in her wedding dress," Keith says.
Elena's parents collected their daughter's notes and published a journal of her battle in the book Notes Left Behind. Notes left behind all over the house, precious memories that will make this little girl's brief time on earth last forever.
To read an excerpt from Notes Left Behind, please use the "Download a PDF" button at the top of this story, or click here.
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