I wore my late granddaughter’s prom dress to her prom because she never got the chance to go. But when something inside the lining kept poking me, I found a letter Gwen had hidden before she died — and the words inside it changed everything I thought I knew about her final weeks.My granddaughter’s prom dress arrived the day after her funeral.I thought I’d already made it through the hardest part of losing Gwen, but seeing that box on my front porch made my heart break all over again.I picked it up with tears in my eyes. I carried it inside, set it on the kitchen table, and then I just stared at it.Seventeen years.That’s how long Gwen had been my whole world. Her parents, my son David, and his wife Carla, died in a car accident when Gwen was eight years old.

After that, it was just the two of us.She cried every night for the first month. I’d sit on the edge of her bed and hold her hand until she fell asleep.My knees ached something awful in those days, but I never once complained.Don’t worry, Grandma,” she told me one morning, about six weeks after the accident. “We’ll figure everything out together.”Just eight years old, and she was trying to comfort me.We did figure it out. It was a slow, imperfect process, but we did it together.And we had nine more years together before I lost her, too.”Her heart simply stopped,” the doctor had told me.He sighed. “Sometimes these things happen when a person has an undetected rhythm disorder. Stress and exhaustion can increase the risk.”Stress and exhaustion.I thought about that for a long time afterward. Had she seemed stressed? Had she seemed tired?I’d asked myself those questions every hour of every day since she died. And every time I came up empty.