LONG BEACH, Calif. () — A Long Beach man received a postcard from the past. Bob Sheppard was amazed when he opened his mailbox, only to discover a letter sent by his late parents more than 26 years ago.
When Sheppard opened his mailbox on Wednesday, he could hardly believe what he found inside: a weathered postcard from Copenhagen, mailed by his parents 26 years earlier.
“I just started looking at it and go, ‘Oh my gosh. This is a treasure!'” Sheppard said. “It was the only mail I got that day.”
Signed simply “M&D,” the postcard carried a short message from his parents about their trip to Denmark.
“Flying in, we saw lots of water and green, green land everywhere. Love, M&D.’ From Mom and Dad,” Sheppard said.
But by the time the postcard finally reached Sheppard’s home, both of his parents had died.
His mother, Joanne, died four years ago. His father, John, died six years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of hospital restrictions at the time, Sheppard said he never had the chance to say a proper goodbye to his father.
“It haunts me to this day,” he said.
Sheppard remembers his father, an Army veteran, as “an intelligent man, very, very caring, very loving.”
His mother was a schoolteacher whom he described as a “world traveler” and “social butterfly.”
Travel was something his parents loved. Sheppard keeps a board filled with pages from their passports and photographs documenting their lifetime of adventures.
“I made it for my mom and dad for the celebration of life,” he shared.
“Easter Island, the Galapagos, Africa… there’s my mom in a boat,” Sheppard said, showing 7 the photos.
He also has a printed log of the places his parents visited, including Denmark, where 26 years ago, they handpicked out the postcard, wrote a note to their son and dropped it in the mail.
The card was postmarked in July of 2000, but its L.A. postmark is dated August 2026.
Sheppard’s mail carrier offered one possible explanation for the decadeslong delay.
“He believes that probably what happened to this postcard is that it 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,'” Sheppard said.
But Sheppard sees the postcard’s unexpected arrival differently.
“This was, to me, almost a postcard from heaven,” he said.
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