For four years, Chastity Patterson texted her d3ad father’s phone number every single day.
She never expected a reply. It was just her way of coping. She told him when she beat cancer. When she graduated college with honors. When she fell in love and got her heart broken. When she hit rock bottom and found her way back.
Then on the night before the fourth anniversary of his death, she sent one last message.
And the bubbles appeared.
Chastity threw the phone across the room. She thought it was a joke. She sat there for 30 minutes before she could bring herself to open it.
The message read: “Hi sweetheart, I am not your father, but I have been getting all your messages for the past four years. I look forward to your morning messages and your nightly updates. My name is Brad and I lost my daughter in a car wreck in August 2014, and your messages have kept me alive.”
The number had been reassigned years earlier. Brad had been reading every single text she ever sent. He had wanted to reply for years, but didn’t want to break her heart.
He told her he had watched her grow more than anyone. He told her she was an extraordinary woman and he wished his own daughter had become someone like her. He ended with a line that said everything: “I think your father would be happy to know you bought another dog instead of having children.”
A grieving daughter had been unknowingly keeping a grieving father alive.
Jason Ligons wasn’t Chastity’s biological father. He ran the skating rink in their small Arkansas town and became a father figure to her and dozens of other kids. He d13d in October 2015 at just 36 years old, when his car left the road and struck a tree.
Chastity posted the exchange to Facebook. It was shared more than 270,000 times.
She said it was her sign that everything was okay and she could finally let him rest.