Long Island Mom finds 12-year-old "Message in a bottle" from Daughter who passed Away

Aimee Herd : Jul 23, 2013
Frank Eltman – MyFoxNY.com

"She was crying, everybody was crying."

(Patchogue, NY)—When 10-year-old Sidonie Fery scribbled a note on a scrap of paper, rolling it up and inserting it into a bottle, and throwing it out into the waves, she could not have known it would be the last message her mother would ever receive from her. (Photo: MyFoxNY)

And who knows? If it wasn't for Superstorm Sandy stirring up and depositing debris on the Long Island beach, the bottle may never have turned up—or at least maybe not in the extraordinary way it did.

As post-Sandy workers sifted through the billions of washed up items and garbage on a Patchogue Park beach about 60 miles east of Manhattan, they came upon an ordinary green plastic ginger ale bottle; empty except for what appeared to be a scroll of sorts inside.

Opening it they read the message written 12 years before that said simply, "Be excellent to yourself, dude." (Photo: MyFoxNY)

The note had a phone number on it, so the workers called the number, leaving a voice mail.

Sidonie's "overjoyed" mother, Mimi, soon called back in tears, explaining to the workers why it meant so much, and set up a time to retrieve the bottle.

Sidonie, born on September 11th, was described by her mother as a "very artistic and vivacious young woman," who often wrote poetry and whose favorite movie was "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"—the girl's message in the bottle a quote from the film.

In 2010, Sidonie, then 18, died after falling from a cliff while at a boarding school in Switzerland. (Photo: MyFoxNY)

"I was just sobbing when I heard they had found it," Mimi Fery said. "These are very, very kind people."

Brian Waldron was one of the workers at the cleanup site when they found the bottle, he said, "I felt like her daughter was looking down from Heaven and wanted me to give her a call."