8-Year-Old’s Mom Receives Letter from Her After She Died in Camp Mystic Flooding: ‘I’m Just So Grateful’ (Exclusive)

Blakely McCrory had already faced tragedy in her young life but kept her “contagious spirit” until the end: “She’s looking down on us,” her mother says

This year was Blakely McCrory’s first at Camp Mystic.

The 8-year-old was following in the footsteps of her mom, Lindsey McLeod McCrory, who also “went there as a girl,” she tells PEOPLE. Lindsey’s stepmother, stepsisters and sisters also attended the Christian summer camp, which sits on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas Hill Country.

Blakely, a “third-generation Mystic camper,” was “ecstatic” to attend, Lindsey, 50, says. “She could not wait to be in the outdoors. It was like having the biggest sleepover you can imagine as a little girl, because you’re in a cabin with 11 girls who become your best friends, right?”

“You get to do all of these fun activities for four weeks. You get to do horseback riding, swimming, basketball, fishing — everything she loved to do,” the Texas native says of her daughter.

So on Friday, July 4, when Lindsey first learned that there was flooding at the camp, she imagined her daughter spending a rainy day inside the cabins, much like when she “was there during a flood in the summer of 1987.”

“They’re probably having a blast,” Lindsey — who was in Europe with her younger sister at the time — recalls thinking to herself, “because that’s what I remembered: ‘Oh, rainy day, stay in your cabin, play board games, or listen to music, whatever. It’s going to pass.’ ”

Several hours later, a call from one of Lindsey’s best friends revealed the gravity of the flooding, caused by overflowing in the Guadalupe River amid disastrous rains: “There are campers not accounted for.”

So Lindsey combed through her voicemail inbox, and a message from Camp Mystic confirmed the worst and left her “shaking.” Blakely was missing.

Along with her sister, Lindsey booked a flight back home to Texas that night, Saturday, July 5, with “no news” of her daughter’s condition. Meanwhile, back at home, Blakely’s older half-brother, Brady (whom the 8-year-old “lovingly referred to as Bro-Bro”) and his mom went to an evacuation center in Ingram, Texas, near Camp Mystic, to search for the missing camper, to no avail.

By Sunday, Blakely was still unaccounted for, and her mom “still had hope,” she tells PEOPLE.

“I thought, ‘Oh, maybe she and one of those counselors are somewhere dry, but they’re just lost.’ … ‘Maybe they’re just lost, and I don’t know, they’re surviving together somehow.’ I mean, of course, you want to think these things,” Lindsey says.

On Monday night, she learned that Blakely had been found dead. In that moment, Lindsey recalls being surrounded by loved ones, and glad to know what happened to her little girl.

“I think the most terrifying part of this ordeal was the confirmation that she was unaccounted for originally,” the mom tells PEOPLE. “Because I always had this fear of someone kidnapping her, and just not knowing what happened to her. That was the biggest, the fear of the unknown.”

“I felt comforted by everyone who loves me, and just by my faith,” Lindsey says.

But she also empathized with the ranger who made the call. “I know she’s tough to do that job,” she says of the ranger, “but to make those phone calls to the families, I can’t even imagine just the trauma that she’s going through, call after call, you know, have to bear witness to all this.”

“And I guess I had prepared myself mentally for that phone call, that I might get that call, that she has passed,” Lindsey says. “So I was calm. It gave me some closure, and I knew she was in a safe place, with her daddy, in heaven. I knew that it was going to be okay.”

Blake, Lindsey’s husband and Blakely’s father, died in March at age 59 following “a short battle with stage 2 cancer.” And, “right before” Blakely’s death, Lindsey’s brother died, also at age 59. Despite these tragedies, Lindsey says, her late daughter’s spirit remained strong.

“She was a live wire, just had a fun, spirited attitude, the type of child that doesn’t stay down for long,” Lindsey tells PEOPLE. After her father’s death in March, “she was sad, but she didn’t skip a beat — a very resilient child.”

The 8-year-old had “a contagious spirit,” her mom says. “People wanted to be around her. She was so funny, and she was a prankster.”

In addition to her humor — which manifested in pranks like putting her pet box turtle in her mom’s purse — Blakely was also a grounding presence, up until the very end: After the floods, one of her cabin counselors told her mom that “she encouraged the campers to not be afraid.”

In the wake of the tragedy that unfolded at Camp Mystic (at least 27 campers and counselors died at the Christian summer camp, officials previously announced), Blakely’s family found some solace in items recovered from her cabin — including a letter she wrote to her mom.

“Dear Mom, How are you? I am good,” the letter — pre-filled stationery filled in by Blakely — reads. The 8-year-old went on to tell her mom that camp is “amazing,” and shared her excitement about playing tennis and horseback riding.

Having the letter, Lindsey tells PEOPLE, is “actually very special because I knew that she was having the best time of her life.”

“I’m just so grateful to keep her spirit alive,” the Texas mom says. “I want to be the type of mom that honors my daughter, and keeps that spirit close, and not forget, not put pictures away, and not be able to look at them. That’s not me. She’s so close to me, and I know she’s watching me right now, and keeping me close.”

Now, she, Brady and the rest of the family are “healing together,” Lindsey says. “It’s so tough to be without her, and my husband, but we’re just, we are reassured by our faith, that she is in heaven,” she says of Blakely. “She’s there, and she’s okay, and she’s looking down on us.”

“And we strongly believe that it happened quickly. She didn’t have to suffer. I just have this feeling,” the mom says. “She’s with all those campers and staff who died, and other children. I just imagine it as a happy place, a peaceful place.”