A Message, a Sailor … and the Woman Who Still Loves Him
Message in a bottle. Today I learned it is not so easy to retrieve a message from a bottle. Having found 
one floating in a cove off the Mystic River and Fisher’s Island Sound, I arrived home to discover a typical needle-nosed pliers is too short to retrieve a message from the bottle safeguarding it. A longer, specialty pliers are too fat to traverse the length of the bottle’s neck.
I thought about breaking the bottle (I was busy, this was beginning to interfere with my day) but that felt like a violation of the rules of fair play. A rough-edged file and slender screw-driver stoked hopes, but nothing doing. In the end, a scissors grasping the message sideways, taking care to catch rather than cut, did the trick. For some reason, rough handling of the message or the bottle just felt off-limits.
Quickly, I realized it was a very private message from a woman to a man she loved. To
o young, he had been lost at sea. Due to a local memorial not far from my find, I realized a sister or fiancé (per the obituary) had sent a message of love and loss to her beloved on his 28th birthday. In grief, without any other way, she poured out her heart and tossed her message out to sea.
As there was a blank piece of paper inside with the full sheet of a letter, I simply wrote: Found by a kayaker 8/1/17 [location redacted]. This young man died at sea aboard [ship redacted]. This letter is from his sister or his fiancé. Letter returned to sea. Please do the same should you find it.
Who knows? One day, God willing, her message will find him.
Next time I enter Fisher’s Island Sound, I will toss the bottle – with its message of love – back into the waves. I will watch, with a prayer, as it bobs on its way. Godspeed.
Thanks….wow! That is so nice and very touching. I think that what you opted to do was quite nice and very appropriate. Hope anyone finding it in the future will have the character to do the same thing.