Massachusetts Woman ‘Shocked’ When Her Message in a Bottle Note to Her Late Father Is Found in France

One Saturday morning in early January, Jodi Thomas began receiving a flurry of phone calls from an unknown number in France.

“New year, new scams,” Thomas, 55, recalls to PEOPLE. “I had a ton of calls on January 6th. At first I dismissed them, but then I received a message from one of the numbers saying: ‘The letter you wrote was found in France. Would you be interested in talking to us?’”

Someone found her note in a bottle — a note she wrote to her late father, who was a pilot boat captain — that she stuffed into a bottle and threw into the ocean on August 19, 2022, while on a fishing boat in the waters off Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Halfway around the world, on a beach in Montalivet, France, history teacher Jean Rouchard was walking along the shore when he discovered Thomas’ treasure.

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After bringing it home to his wife, the couple debated whether to reach out to her, Thomas says, before they finally got in touch.

A Massachusetts woman was driving when the first picture of her bottle arrived on her phone.

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“I was shocked,” she says. “That was really mine, that was the truth.”

Thomas adds: “I had to stop, I was shaking with incredible nerves of disbelief.”

Jodi Thomas throws a “skull-shaped” bottle containing a message to her late father from the shores of Provincetown, Massachusetts in November 2021.

Jodi T

Still, she says, she was also overcome with gratitude to Rouchard — who found her through an online memorial to her father — for reaching out.

“There must be a reason he found his way to you,” Thomas says she told him in a later call.

Just over two years ago, Thomas lost her beloved father, Tommy, who had been battling heart problems for years.

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On the morning of his memorial day, November 23, 2021, between the buoys of Butler’s Flat in New Bedford Harbor, she dropped her first message in a bottle to honor his memory.

“It was a morning when listening to our shared love for the legendary artist James Taylor and the line in the song ‘Boatman’ just hit my heart. ‘Jodi, do it!’ So I took a random piece of paper and started writing,” she recalls to PEOPLE.

“I hadn’t planned this, so the pre-requested bottle wasn’t available, which is why I used a skull-shaped vodka bite bottle, because when he had a cocktail or two in his youth, it was always vodka-based. Sea breeze. I put the message in, along with some sand from the shore, and later that morning, my message was released into the bitter cold from the bow of my dad’s boat.”

The bottle sank to the bottom of the ocean, Thomas now recalls, something of a metaphor for her loss.

“He was the core of a beautiful man,” she says. “My first memory is amazement. He stood tall and strong with a majestic presence. He was handsome. His smile made you smile too. He was a hard worker and always wanted the best.”

French history professor Jean Rouchard found Jodi Thomas’ second bottle in January.

Jodi T

When she was a little girl, she would go to work with her father on Sundays, where he would supply the local fishing boats with clean water before their sea voyages.

“I remember watching in awe as he quickly and courageously jumped from ship to ship,” says Thomas.

She adds: “He would help anyone he knew who needed something, and he didn’t expect anything in return. It was just his way. Work, whether on a fishing boat, a water boat or his pilot boat, was in him. He once told me: ‘There is nothing better than catching the sunrise behind this wheel and looking at the sea’.”

Now, left with memories of her father, she hopes to create new ones for him.

Soon after Rouchard found the bottle, he brought it into his classroom to share with his students, giving them a geography lesson about the “mirror cities” of Provincetown and Montalivet, separated by 3,349 miles but also connected by a bond he forged. with a daughter who lost her father.

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Rouchard has already invited Thomas, an educator herself, to visit, and she says she is saving up for the trip, which is “now No. 1 on the list”.

Through her grief, and now through her new friend in France, she has learned more than a few life lessons.

“Losing my father was the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” says Thomas, a breast cancer survivor. “We all take it for granted that time is just time. We all find time for the things we love, but what are those things? Can we live without these things? Things mean different things to different people. The only thing we all need to find time for is love, because without it we have nothing.”

“So we should all believe that our lives can change in seconds,” she adds. “It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true.”

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education