On Aug. 5, Bob Sheppard, a resident of Long Beach, California, went to his mailbox and found the last thing he probably ever imagined he would encounter — a postcard of Copenhagen, Denmark, sent by his parents.
That’s kind of sweet, but it’s not a big deal, right?
Not until you realize that Bob’s parents died years ago — his dad, John, in 2020, and his mom, Joanne, two years later.
Then there was the fact that their Copenhagen trip was 26 years ago — the postcard was dated July 2000.
Most people would probably shake their heads and grumble something derogatory about the postal service.
But Sheppard didn’t see it that way at all. He was thrilled to get the card.
“I just started looking at it and go, ‘Oh my gosh. This is a treasure!’” he told KABC-TV.
“This was, to me, almost a postcard from heaven,” he said.
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The message they sent was simple: “Hi — Arrived safely about 5:30P. It’s now 8:30 P & still very light out. AA136 was late in arriving in London so we had to rush to cach connection.”
“Weather now — warm and humid. Flying in, we saw lots of water and green, green land everywhere.”
It was signed, “Love, M&D”
It was not much different from a picture postcard anyone would send, but it was priceless to the recipient.
Sheppard said it was particularly touching because his dad died during COVID. Like many grieving family members, he never got to say a proper goodbye.
“It haunts me to this day,” he said.
It will probably forever be a mystery how the card came to arrive more than a quarter-century after it was mailed.
Sheppard’s mail carrier told him it probably “somehow fell out of a bin or a basket or a shelf or something like that, and it maybe went underneath a desk or a file cabinet or something like that, and they must’ve just found it recently and said, ‘Hey, the guy still lives at the same address. Let’s go ahead and send it to him.’”
It’s not the first time a piece of mail has gone astray for a long time.
In June, the BBC reported that Paul Edwards received a parenting magazine that he had ordered in 2007, when he was a new parent.
The Mother & Baby magazine arrived 19 years later, after his two children had grown up and left for college.
In January 2024, WIFR-TV reported on an 80-year-old letter that turned up at the post office in DeKalb, Illinois.
The recipients, Louis and Lavena George, had died, but the postal service was able to locate two family members who were happy to get the letter.
“The post office employee who found the letter says the most likely reason for its disappearance was the lack of a house number in the mailing address,” WIFR reported.
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