California man opens his mailbox to find a postcard – it was mailed by his now deceased parents

According to ABC 7, a Long Beach man got a surprise in his mailbox this week when he found a postcard mailed by his parents more than two decades ago. Bob Sheppard told the outlet he could barely believe what he was looking at when he opened the envelope on Wednesday.

The postcard reportedly came from Copenhagen, Denmark, and was written by his parents during a trip they took there. It is said to have arrived at his home 26 years after it was sent.

“I just started looking at it and go, ‘Oh my gosh. This is a treasure!'” Sheppard said. He added that it was the only piece of mail he received that day.

The postcard’s message came from a trip his parents took decades ago

In the ABC 7’s video, the postcard is seen signed simply “M&D,” seemingly short for Mom and Dad. It carried a brief note about their flight into Denmark.

“Flying in, we saw lots of water and green, green land everywhere. Love, M&D.’ From Mom and Dad,” Sheppard said, reading the message his parents had written.

By the time the postcard reached him, both of his parents had already died, the report said. His mother, Joanne, reportedly died four years ago, and his father, John, died six years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sheppard said hospital restrictions in place at the time meant he never got the chance to say a proper goodbye to his father. Other families have described similar experiences of contact from a loved one after death, even though the circumstances varied.

“It haunts me to this day,” he said. Sheppard described his father as an Army veteran and “an intelligent man, very, very caring, very loving.” He said his mother was a schoolteacher who loved to travel and was known as a “world traveler” and “social butterfly.”

Travel was a major part of his parents’ lives. Sheppard said he keeps a board covered with pages from their passports along with photographs from their trips. He said he put it together for a celebration of life event held in their memory.

“Easter Island, the Galapagos, Africa… there’s my mom in a boat,” Sheppard said while showing the photos.

He said he also keeps a printed log listing every place his parents visited, including Denmark. He added that it was there, 26 years ago, that they picked out the postcard, wrote their note, and mailed it to their son.

The postcard was postmarked in July of 2000. But the Los Angeles postmark on the envelope is dated August 2026, showing the huge gap between when it was sent and when it finally arrived.

Sheppard’s mail carrier gave him one possible explanation for the long delay, he said. He believes the postcard may have slipped out of a mail bin or basket at some point and ended up stuck under a desk, shelf, or file cabinet for years. 

When it was eventually found, whoever discovered it apparently checked and saw that Sheppard still lived at the same address, and decided to send it along. Long-delayed mail showing up decades later is rare, though it has happened before, including a case involving a decades-old love letter discovery that also caught widespread attention.

“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 arrival in a different light. “This was, to me, almost a postcard from heaven,” he said.