Late return to sender

May 18--On a First Tennessee check, Margaret Hayes wrote out "$26.76" and in the pay-to-the-order section she scribbled "American General Life and Accident Insurance Co." After her 79-year-old grandmother signed it, she sealed it in an envelope and mailed it to the company's postal box.

The letter never arrived, and the U.S. Postal Service returned it to the sender -- 25 years after it was mailed.

Hayes, a 67-year-old mother of two, said in the late 1980s, she helped her grandmother fill out paper work and keep up with bills. The check that came back was the December 1989 payment for her grandmother's life insurance policy.

"It's crazy. I didn't even know they didn't get it," she said. "I wrote this out two decades ago."

It is difficult to know why a letter would be held up for 25 years, said David Walton, corporate communicator for the USPS.

"We have a Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta where undeliverable and non-returnable mail and loose-in-the-mail items are sent in hopes of reuniting them with senders or receivers," Walton said. "In 2011, the center received 53.4 million pieces of mail the Postal Service couldn't successfully handle using normal methods."

The address was printed on the letter, but the address is no longer used by the company.

"A lady at the post office told me that it was probably stuck in a machine, but that every piece of mail that is not able to be mailed must be returned to sender no matter how long ago it happened," Hayes said.

Hayes, now retired, works part time as a crosswalk guard. She has stuck with the same insurer. Although the payout has increased, the way she pays her premiums has not.

"I am computer illiterate, so I still mail all my checks," Hayes said.

The U.S. Postal Service has only lost one other letter of hers.

"I sent a credit card payment about five years ago which never made it to Juniper," Hayes said. She laughed. "I guess my children will get it twenty years from now."

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