As a child I used to have reoccurring dreams of a woman lying next to me in bed. When I was a teenager, I found a picture buried in a drawer. It was her—the woman I had always dreamt of. In the picture, she was posing in front of the staircase in my house. She was my paternal grandmother who had passed away a decade before I was born. When she died, her other children came and took all of her belongings and left my father with a broken jewelry box and one photo. My father was the only child still living at home while my grandmother courageously fought her battle with cancer. She lived and died in the house that I now live in. I’ve been told my whole life that I’m just like her and I’ve always felt like I knew her even though we’ve never met in this lifetime. My father now tells me that I parent my son the same way his mother parented him. He had picked up on my connection to her from a young age. On Valentine’s Day when I was 16 years old, he gave me a necklace with a note. The note said that he had waited my whole life to give me his mother’s necklace and felt that I was finally at an age where I could understand how much it meant to him. It was a gift he had given his mother on Mother’s Day. She passed away exactly a year later. I wore that necklace 24/7. With the help of his siblings, my father compiled as many photos of my grandmother as he could. He then gifted me a photo book with these pictures in them last Christmas and I sobbed. I cried for a person I have never known. She was beautiful, kind, and a wonderful mother; all of the things that I aspire to be. Her name was Dixie. #viral #trend #youdontknow #youdontknowme #ancestors #foryou #fyp #family #trauma