When Bob Sheppard checked the mailbox at his Long Beach home on August 5, 2026, he found just one piece of mail: a weathered postcard from Copenhagen with a message written in familiar handwriting and signed “M + D.”
The “M + D” stood for Mom and Dad, but that didn’t make any sense. Sheppard’s mother, Joanne, had passed away in 2022. His father, John, died two years before that. Sheppard checked the postcard’s postmark and found two dates and locations. One came from Los Angeles in August 2026 and the other from Denmark in July 2000.
The mystery of a postcard arriving 26 years late
His parents had sent him this postcard 26 years ago during one of their vacations abroad. “Flying in, we saw lots of water and green, green land everywhere,” his mother had written. It was a simple travel update that was sent but not received for over two decades.
Who found it and where? Did it slip into a crack in a mail truck, only to be found 26 years later? Did someone buy an old mailbag at a thrift store with the card hidden inside? What did the person think when they saw it? What prompted them to drop it in a mailbox instead of a trash can? Have they seen the news story about what happened to it?
So many mysteries surround this little postcard, but one thing’s for certain: it meant the world to Sheppard to receive it.
“I just started looking at it and go, ‘Oh my gosh. This is a treasure!’” he told ABC 7.
‘A postcard from heaven’
Sheppard told ABC 7 that his father had died early in the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, hospital restrictions meant that Sheppard didn’t get to be with his father when he passed.
So many people didn’t get to say goodbye to loved ones properly at the height of the pandemic, adding to the heartbreak of those losses.
“It haunts me to this day,” Sheppard said.
His parents loved to travel and explore the world together, which explains why they sent Sheppard a postcard from Copenhagen. He described his Army veteran father as “an intelligent man, very, very caring, very loving,” while his schoolteacher mom was a “social butterfly.”
Receiving a postcard from them years after they passed still felt personal.
“This was, to me, almost a postcard from heaven,” he said.
The postal service has delivered other letters decades after they were sent
Most of the time, the postal service delivers cards, letters, and packages reliably. But sometimes something goes awry in the mailing process, and things get lost. Often, lost mail is never recovered, but occasionally an item emerges years after it was originally sent and somehow makes its way back into the mail system.
For instance, in 2014, a Brooklyn woman received a birthday card from her mother for her 19th birthday. But her 19th birthday was in 1969, which was when the card was sent. She knew instantly it was from her late mother, though, because she always sealed cards with a signature lipstick kiss.
Another example is when John Lennon wrote a letter of reassurance to folk singer Steve Tilston after reading an interview in which Tilston worried that the wealth and fame that came with success would hurt his songwriting. The letter was sent to Tilston and his interviewer at the magazine offices in 1971, but Tilston didn’t see it until 34 years later. The best guess is that it got intercepted somewhere along the line and sold to a collector.
Another letter took 80 years to reach the family of the original intended recipients. The letter, found in an Illinois post office, was a message of condolence to a couple who had lost their daughter, Evelyn, to cystic fibrosis.
Few letters delivered decades later actually reach the intended recipients, though. Sheppard is fortunate that his parents’ postcard arrived in time for him to see it, even if it was technically 26 years late.
