A Memory in a Bottle

A message in a bottle seems like a thing of fantasy, romance. But, people still give it a shot, tuck a note into a bottle, toss it into the waiting waters, and cling to the hope that their message will one day arrive at the shore and be delivered to someone they love. Every once in a while, the message makes it into the right hands

What could be more profound after the loss of a loved one than reading these words? Here are two stories of just such a fate.

My name is Josh Baker. I’m 10. f you find this, put it on the news. The date is 4/16/95.

Josh Baker scrolled this note in his ten-year-old handwriting in 1995 and dug into his mother’s kitchen cabinets, dumped the contents of a vanilla extract bottle, and tucked the note inside. He tossed the bottle into Central Wisconsin’s White Lake and forgot about it. His mother remembers the time, when Josh and his classmates were studying time capsules.

When Josh was eighteen, he went into the Marines. After house-to-house fighting in Fallujah, he returned home safely. But, a few months later, at age twenty, he was killed in a car accident. The death hit hard, not only for his friends and family, but for the town of just under 400 people; everyone had known him and his family, and they were devastated.

About a year after Josh’s death, thirteen-year-old Steve Lieder found the bottle in a pile of debris washed up on the shore of White Lake.

“When the message came … that was Josh saying ‘Snap out of it, Mom. I’m here. I’m okay,” Josh’s mom, Maggie Holbrook, told CBS about the event. “The message surfaced at just the right time,” she said

Dear Wife, I am writing this note on this boat and dropping it into the sea just to see if it will reach you…

In 1999, Steve Gowan caught an old bottle in his fishing nets in the River Thames in southern England. It contained two notes from Private Thomas Hughes, the first asking whoever found the bottle to pass the second onto Hughes’s wife, Elizabeth. They were dated September 9, 1914.

The letter for Elizabeth was a simple note from the Private, telling his wife that she was in his thoughts as he headed to France to fight in (what is now named) World War I. Hughes died in battle two days later and never saw Elizabeth, or their two-year-old daughter Emily, again.

Gowan decided that he would pass the letter on, though he realized that Elizabeth had likely passed away years before. With some research, he found out that Emily was still alive and living in Auckland, New Zealand, now 86 years old. She had no memories of her father, and the message helped to fill the void that had existed in her life.

“I think he would be very proud it had been delivered. He was a very caring man,” Emily told BBC News.