Bob Sheppard was amazed when he opened his mailbox, only to discover a letter sent by his late parents. The weathered postcard from Copenhagen was mailed by his parents 26 years earlier in 2000. Signed simply “M&D,” the postcard carried a short message from his parents about their trip to Denmark. By the time the postcard finally reached Sheppard’s home, both of his parents had passed away. His mother Joanne died four years ago, while his father John died six years ago during the pandemic. Travel was something his parents loved. In fact, Sheppard keeps a board filled with pages from their passports and photographs documenting their lifetime of adventures. He also has a printed log of the places his parents visited, including Denmark, where 26 years ago, they handpicked the postcard, wrote a note to their son, and dropped it in the mail. Sheppard's mail carrier offered one possible explanation for the decades-long 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. Sheppard, however, sees the postcard’s unexpected arrival differently. "This was, to me, almost a postcard from heaven," he said.
