When Janna Holm’s grandmother was dying of brain cancer and had lost most of her memory, she started writing a selection of letters on the back of index cards.
The family spent years trying to decipher the puzzle, but to no avail, so Ms Holm decided to turn to the Internet and openly appealed to Ask MetaFilter to help them.
Ms Holm wrote on the website: “In my grandmother’s final days battling brain cancer, she became unable to speak and she filled dozens of index cards with random letters of the alphabet. I’m beginning to think that they are the first letters in the words of song lyrics, and would love to know what song this was. This is a crazy long shot, but I’ve seen Metafilter pull off some pretty impressive code-breaking before!”
Within 14 minutes keen code-crackers had deciphered parts of the message – it was the first letter of every word of the Lord’s Prayer. When the results were returned, the family were over the moon with the mystery.
“I don’t know if anyone is going to be able to truly decode the whole thing,” Ms Holm told Mashable. “It’s nice to just have an idea of what it is and, in general terms, an idea of what she was thinking about in her last couple of weeks.”
Image credit: Thinkstock
