Man finally receives postcard from deceased parents 26 years after they mailed it

A California man received an unexpected message from his late parents after a postcard they mailed from Denmark finally arrived 26 years later.

Bob Sheppard opened his mailbox in Long Beach on August 5 and found a weathered postcard sent by his parents during a trip to Copenhagen in 2000.

The card, signed Mom and Dad, read: “Flying in, we saw lots of water and green, green land everywhere. Love, M&D.”

Sheppard told ABC7 that it was the only piece of mail he received that day.

Sadly, neither of his parents lived to see the postcard reach its destination. His mother, Joanne, died four years ago, while his father, John, died six years ago during the pandemic.

Sheppard said hospital restrictions prevented him from properly saying goodbye to his father, an Army veteran whom he remembered as intelligent, caring and loving.

His mother was a schoolteacher, world traveler and “social butterfly.” Sheppard still has a board covered with pages from his parents’ passports and photos from their many adventures.

“Postcard from heaven” arrives after 26 years

The postcard carries a Copenhagen postmark from July 2000, while a second postmark shows that it finally passed through Los Angeles in August 2026.

Sheppard’s mail carrier suggested the card may have fallen from a mail bin or shelf and remained trapped beneath a desk or filing cabinet for more than two decades.

“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,” he recalled.

It may have been delivered after someone recently discovered it and noticed Sheppard still lived at the same address.

Whatever the explanation, Sheppard believes the postcard reached him at the right time.

“This was, to me, almost a postcard from heaven,” he said.