A grieving mother whose daughter died about two years ago was given a bit of comfort from the debris of Superstorm Sandy — a message in a bottle written by the girl at age 10.
The bottle had drifted onto a beach on Long Island. Workers discovered it during cleanup and contacted Mimi Fery, of New York. Inside, written by her daughter Sidonie, was the note: “Be excellent to yourself dude!”
Ms. Fery told The Associated Press she burst into tears. The message was a quote from her daughter’s favorite movie, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” she said.
“I was just sobbing when I heard they had found it,” she said. “These are very, very kind people.”
She said the message has a deeper meaning, too, based on the teasing her daughter suffered post-Sept. 11, 2001, at the hands of school children who regarded her Persian heritage with suspicion.
“[The message] makes so much sense,” Ms. Fery said, in AP. “She had to deal with a lot of things. But she stood her ground.”
Ms. Fery described her daughter as artistic and free-spirited, a “vivacious young woman” who had been attending a boarding school in Switzerland in 2010 when she fell from a cliff to her death, at the age of 18, AP reported.
The bottle washed ashore Patchogue, only a couple miles from where Sidonie threw the bottle a decade ago, AP reported. Ms. Fery is headed back to the beach this weekend to personally thank the workers and to attend a small ceremony in her daughter’s honor.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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