An Arkansas woman who texted her dad’s phone number every day since his 2015 death was stunned when she received a reply out of the blue — from a man enduring his own kind of grief.
As a way to cope, Chastity Patterson, 23, poured her heart out via text to Jason Ligons, a close friend whom she knew all her life and considered a father figure.
But the Newport resident was unwittingly sending messages to a man named Brad, whose own daughter died in a car wreck in 2014.
“Hey Dad it’s ME,” Patterson texted on Oct. 25, the fourth anniversary of Ligons’ death. “Tomorrow is going to be a tough day again.”
The woman’s lengthy message — posted to her Facebook page and shared more than 288,000 times — included details about how she’d beaten cancer and hadn’t gotten sick since his passing. She also wrote about falling in love and having her heart broken, joking that he “would have killed him.”
“I lost all my friends and hit rock bottom, but I found someone who came into my life and saved me,” Patterson wrote in the emoji-filled message.
“I’m doing great, you would be so proud of the woman I have become,” she added.
She signed off with, “I just wanted to say I love you and I really do miss you!”
Then Brad responded — telling her in a heart-warming note that he’d been reading her messages all along.
“Hi sweetheart, I am not your father, but I have been getting all your messages for the past 4 years,” Brad wrote. “I look forward to your morning messages and your nightly updates.”
He shared that he lost his daughter in a 2014 car crash and “your messages have kept me alive.”
“I have wanted to text you back for years, but I didn’t want to break your heart,” Brad wrote. “You are an extraordinary woman and I wish my daughter would have become the woman you are.
“I’m sorry you have to go through this, but if it makes it any better, I am very proud of you!”
Patterson said Brad’s response was a sign that “everything is OK” — and that she could finally let Ligons go.
In a later post, Patterson explained that Ligons wasn’t her biological father but “blood could not make him any closer.”