Sometimes even when you get an explanation of how something strange happens, it still isn’t quite enough to satisfy your curiosity.  Sometimes you just get the feeling that there is something more behind it. 

A few days ago, a woman reached out to me on my Tin Box Secret Facebook Page.  I have never met her, I don’t know where she lives or who she is, but she was reaching out to tell me she was enjoying The Tin Box Secret and had purchased all three books of the trilogy and couldn’t wait to read them all.  Well, that was really special to me.   So I asked her, “How did you find my book?”  She said she had found it on Amazon while searching for a book to read.  She had bought the Kindle Version but then decided she wanted a physical copy because she enjoyed holding a book in her hands.  That could have been the end of the story, but then she said the book had an inscription in it and she was wondering if it was really written by me. 

I then looked at her Facebook page and saw that we had a friend in common.  That friend had bought my books for his wife and had asked for personalized copies.  Once he had also asked me to send him a personalized copy for his wife’s friend.  I now assumed, this must be the friend and she must be mistaken about how she found my book.  So I sent her a private message explaining this. 

Yesterday, I received a response.  She said she hadn’t received my book from our mutual friend.  She had bought it as a used copy on Amazon.  And then, the really strange thing happened, she sent me a picture of the inscription: 

Dear Mom,

I hope you enjoy this story about choosing your life no matter what pain you have survived in the past.

Theresa Dodaro

This woman who had reached out to me had the book I had given to my mother right after it had been published in October 2015.  At the time, my mom lived in a memory care unit of an assisted living home.  A few months later, mom went to a hospital and never returned to that home.  Instead she was sent to a nursing home, just a few blocks from my house.  When my brother cleaned out her old apartment at the assisted living home, the book wasn’t among her things.  So I gave my mother a new book and wrote her name across the front cover to prevent it from getting lost.  Each week, I read chapters of the book to her and some of the other residents in the nursing home.  Every once in a while, something that I read brought back a memory to her and she would repeat the words and laugh.  But most of the time she would zone out, as Alzheimer’s patients often do.  But it didn’t matter to her that I was reading a book to her, all that mattered, was that I was there.  Whenever she greeted me, she would always ask, “How did you find me?”  It didn’t matter that I visited her almost every day, it was always a surprise to her. 

Imagine my surprise that the book I had given to my mother in 2015 had ended up in this woman’s hands.  What chain of events had to take place for this to happen?  She looked at the millions of books on Amazon and found mine.  She ordered a digital copy and liked it so much that she decided to order a physical copy.  The book that she ordered was a used book and it had the inscription that I had written to my mother inside.  Then she went through the trouble to find me on Facebook and reached out to say she loved my book.  And the first thing I asked her is, “How did you find my book?” which in essence means, “How did you find me?”