A woman has unearthed a condolence card she wrote to a grieving teacher when she was seven years old, and the card is going viral due to its “blunt but compassionate nature.”
“I laughed so hard … and thought maybe the internet would find it funny too,” Lindsay Schraad Keeling, 32, tells TODAY.com.
Keeling shared images of the handwritten card on TikTok as one of her “shameful childhood stories,” where it has been viewed more than 3 million times.
In 1999, Keeling was 7 years old when she learned that her computer teacher’s mother had died.
“We had a substitute teacher that day and the principal told us that our regular teacher’s mother had died,” Keeling says. “He didn’t tell us to color pictures or make anything for our teacher, but apparently I decided to do it anyway.”
Keeling, who says she was a “very emotional child,” remembers wanting to do something nice for the teacher, especially because her own bird had just died. Her mother, upset and curious about the dying process, bought her a children’s book about loss.
“I guess I took my newfound knowledge and wrote a very matter-of-fact ‘sympathy card,'” says Keeling, who later became an undertaker and then an author. “I’m sure I was very proud of it, because I excitedly showed it to my mother – who was smart enough to gently take it from me so I couldn’t give it to my teacher.”
Keeling’s letter, in which she misspelled the words “sorry,” “has,” and “heart,” states:
From Lindsay, to Computer Teacher
Excuse me, teacher.
I’m so sorry, computer teacher, that your mother had to die. I’m sorry.
But everyone has to die one day.
And today it was your mother’s turn to die.
Love, love is in your heart.
Keeling drew a computer and a crying face on the card. “Should Hallmark hire me?” she wrote humorously in the teletext.
TikTok commenters joked that the letter was “very profound” and quoted from condolence letters they had also received from children.
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“What I like best is that her name is simply ‘Computer Teacher.'”
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“It reads like you’re the one who did it.”
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“Children go crazy. When my mother-in-law died, my son, who was three at the time, kept saying that Grandma had been ‘eliminated.'”
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“My grandpa died in December and the card my 8-year-old made for him when he got sick said, ‘I hope you enjoy life while it lasts,’ along with a picture of a tombstone.”
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“My grandma died. A student gave me a card. They drew it in the coffin.”
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“When I was in third grade, we had to make condolence cards for a teacher whose husband had died. I wrote on them: ‘Don’t be sad, be happy’, like in the garbage bag advertisements. That resonates deep in my soul.”
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“That’s wild. Such an aggressive apology.”
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“It’s nice that everyone gets a card. Every day my three-year-old tells me at least once that my mother died. For me there is no card. Only cold, hard facts.”
Keeling, who lives in Virginia, says she doesn’t remember much about that day, but her mother, Julie Schraad, does.
“She didn’t want to lie to me, but she didn’t want to upset me either, so she just said, ‘Oh, that’s very nice and I’m sure she’ll like it, but let’s leave it here for now,'” says Keeling. “That must have been a good enough answer for me because I never asked about it again.”
On July 10, Keeling’s grandfather Joseph died, and she made the two-day drive from Virginia to Oklahoma for the funeral. To cheer up her distraught daughter, Julie pulled out the long-forgotten condolence card she had kept for decades.
Keeling loves how people respond to her childhood letter.
“The feedback I liked the most – besides all the funny comments – was from someone who said their mother had recently died and this was ‘the first time she had laughed in weeks,'” says Keeling. “I was so grateful that I could bring joy to people who were grieving like me.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com.
