A whole new meaning to snail mail. Last Saturday, March 7, a 10-year-old boy from Colorado named Rowan Torrez received a final postcard from his late father, Joseph Torrez, two years after his death. According to KUSA, Rowan and his mom Julie Van Stone were surprised to find the postcard in the mail written by Joseph, who died at age 41 from a rare brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob in March 2013.
Joseph, a Navy vet, attended MIT in Cambridge, Mass., to get two master’s degrees, and during his road trips back home to Colorado, would send a postcard from each state he stopped in. “I vaguely remember him saying, ‘Oh, I sent five or six [postcards]’ and I only got three or four in the mail. But I never thought anything of it,” Van Stone told the news outlet. “I feel like [this postcard] was the final goodbye that he didn’t get to say.”
The postcard, dated June 10, 2007, read: “Hello from Pennsylvania. I love you and I miss you so much. See you soon. Love, Daddy.”
“He adored [Rowan],” Van Stone told KUSA. “Every star he ever wished on and every wishbone he ever broke, he always wished for a son.”
Rowan will forever cherish the postcard. “It’s a keepsake,” he said. “He was a very nice person, a very good person and a very good dad.”
