Daughter shares dying father’s illegible last note — the internet helps decipher it
By Ryan General
April 18, 2023
A seemingly illegible note left by a dying father to his family went viral on Chinese social media as netizens tried to decipher its message.
Unable to understand the message her father left them, the daughter posted a photo of the handwritten note on the platform Xiaohongshu on April 4, asking for help in deciphering it.
The daughter shared that her father tried to tell her mother something before he passed, but they couldn’t understand him clearly. Her mother then asked him to write down what he wanted to say, but what he wrote was too difficult to read.
The daughter’s post, titled “Can’t recognize the characters my dad wrote before he passed away,” soon became widely shared by the online community.
On Xiaohongshu, the viral post received over 1,000 comments and over 10,000 likes and was later shared on other platforms.
One user was able to decrypt the message and revealed that the note contained the encouraging words: “Don’t be sad. I believe in your strength.”
The message surprised the daughter, who revealed that she considered her father to be a “traditional Chinese man” who was not expressive and found emotional words to be “cheesy.”
“If this was really what he said, I can’t imagine how helpless and sad he must have felt,” the daughter was quoted by South China Morning Post as saying.
The purportedly deciphered message, which also earned thousands of likes, touched the hearts of many commenters, who expressed their sympathy and support for the family.
“Even though our loved ones may be gone, they will always be with us as long as we remember them,” one user wrote.
“My father also wrote me a note before he passed away, but I couldn’t bear to read it,” another shared.
Earlier this month, a video of an 83-year-old woman bidding her final farewell to her dying 87-year-old husband also went viral on Chinese social media.
The woman from Tianjin province was captured on film encouraging her husband to “Walk to the light. Don’t get lost.”
In January, a dying man went viral after telling his wife of 64 years: “Don’t cry. I don’t want to leave you but it’s not my choice.”
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