It has been nearly two years since Colorado resident Joseph Torrez died at the age of 41 of a neurological disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
His widow Julie Van Stone and son Rowan remember him as a hardworking man who loved his family. But Rowan never got a chance to say goodbye to his father.
“He was a very nice person, a very good person and a very good dad,” said Rowan.
Before Torrez died, he joined the Navy and got two masters degrees. While travelling between Colorado and Boston where he was studying, Torrez would send postcards to Rowan from every state he drove through.
“Hello from Pennsylvania! I love you and I miss you so much. See you soon. Love, Daddy.”
“I vaguely remember him saying, ‘I sent five or six,’ and I only got three or four in the mail, but I never thought anything of it,” Van Stone told KUSA.
On Saturday, Rowan finally received one of the postcards that had gone missing.
Dated June 10, 2007, it reads: “Hello from Pennsylvania! I love you and I miss you so much. See you soon. Love, Daddy.”
“I don’t know how. It just happens sometimes, I guess,” said Rowan. “This is a keepsake.”
Van Stone is unsure why it took almost eight years for a postcard to get delivered, but believes there is a reason for everything.
“I feel like that was the final goodbye that he didn’t get to say,” she said.
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