The Secret of My Death | This American Life | Episode 646

Key Takeaway

When a relationship feels strained, do not wait for the “right” moment to send a small message of care. Nadia Bowers recognized that her sister’s ordinary text may have carried a need for connection, but delayed replying to hold onto anger—and it became their last exchange. Today, choose one person you love, especially someone struggling, and send a direct note: “I love you. I’m here. Do you want to talk?” You cannot control their choices, but timely warmth can reduce isolation and regret.

Episode Overview

This episode examines the incomplete evidence people inherit after a death: a sister tries to understand her sibling’s overdose, a comedian wakes from a coma after friends have publicly mourned him, and a veteran attends a stranger’s funeral and discovers a hidden suicide. Across the stories, people confront grief, guilt, stigma, and the gap between the stories we tell about someone and the private struggles they carried.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Secret of My Death | This American Life | Episode 646 from This American Life. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeded in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisameanlife.org. Graham grew up in a working-class town north of England. And when he was 11 or 12, his family moved into one of the first houses in a new development that was being built. It was kind of hitting the jackpot for him at that age because all around everywhere were homes under construction, which I remember this from construction sites in our neighborhood when I was a kid was so incredibly fun.

This became my new playground. This is Graham. So I would, you know, climb on the scaffolding, do a bit of kind of amateur gymnastics, but also build stuff. And the big thing amongst us kids was lighting fires. And you know, there was tar paper was one thing that burnt very nicely. There's actually all kinds of trouble to get into. Bricks and boards to play with and wet concrete to write in. They'd find food the workers left and cigarettes which they would smoke. I once found a porn magazine.

And one day Graham was there alone and he had this great idea. He put together a little makeshift seessaw or as he calls it a teeter totter with a plank of wood balanced on a brick at the center. He put another brick on one end of the plank and his idea was to drop something really heavy, really, really heavy onto the other end of the plank from a great height to find out just how far he could send that brick catapulting into space. So to accomplish this, he set up his teeter totter by some scaffolding.

So I climbed up on the scaffolding and I carried up this kind of massive piece of curbing stone. I'm guessing around 25. So you are how high up? Probably at the sort of second floor window level. Um so what 15 ft 12 ft. He carefully tries to line up the stone directly above the near end of the seessaw below down on the ground and then he dropped the stone. It it landed perfectly. I really had lined this up pretty well. And the brick launched and the following few moments are probably the most vivid memory I have of my childhood.

I was obviously watching to see what the brick would do because that was the experiment really to to sort of follow that in its in its journey. But the brick, it didn't move at all like he thought. He thought it was going to arc into the air like a rocket. Instead, it just seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. I now have an image in my head of this brick just getting larger and larger as it headed right towards my face. I I even remember very vividly that the brick had uh the construction of the brick had three circular holes in it and I can still picture them now as they headed towards me in a kind of slow motion way.

Yes, very much so. I feel like that memory is minutes when obviously it was just not even a second. So I I believe instinctively jerked my head back as this brick came directly towards my face and I have a very clear memory of the kind of sound and the wind and even I believe the brick as it flew past me flicked my fringe. The fringe of your hair. Yeah. And it it sort of whistled as it went. Uh even when I throw my dog's ball now, which has a little whistle device in it, that memory comes back to me.

This moment was stunning, like nothing like this had ever happened to him. And I remember having to sit down for actually quite a few minutes to recover. I really felt like, you know, probably for the first time that, you know, I was inches away from death. I remember walking home in some state of shock afterwards. You know, I used to wonder if if the brick had actually hit me and killed me, you know, and you know, maybe I'd fallen off the scaffolding or something. I used to wonder, you know, whether the the crime scene investigators came to look, would what would they make of the whole setup?

Would they even understand what had happened? You know, right? like you got hit by a brick like where did it come from? Yeah. You know this this dead child who laying in a building site and you know there was the teeter totter there but I I even had this sort of vision of what if my body fell forward and you know destroyed the little structure that I'd made down there and how did I get hit under the chin with a brick and where's the brick? You know what the forensics would have made of the whole setup.

That's the thing, right? Your own death, that is not bad enough on its own. There's the whole question of the forensics afterwards, what people will make of it. It's weird to think that they'll stare at the scene of your death, look at the objects scattered around you, and get it all wrong and get you wrong. That's the bigger thing, right? The bigger question after you're gone isn't just how it happened, but you. your motives, your state of mind, what to make of you, and your whole life, your good qualities, your bad ones.

Today in our program, we have three stories of people who embark on this kind of forensics for beginners, trying to understand somebody's death, bumbling their way through whatever scraps of evidence they can get their hands on. Old text messages, handwritten notes, stuff that frankly seems so puny compared to the task at hand. From WBZ Chicago to this American life, I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us. Just American Life. Today's show is a rerun. So, we begin today with a woman whose sister has died and she has questions.

The woman's name is Nadia Bowers, and she wrote this to somebody who she thinks might be of help. Here's Nadia. Dear dealer. Hey, man. What's up? I'm saying man because that's my guess as to what you are. All the people blowing up my sister's phone, offering and seeking drugs were men. Brian, Jerry, Eric, and my personal favorite, baby Jesus. I can make a graph charting the meeting of particular men with misfortune for my sister. It's a safe bet you're just another data point, one among many, part of a pattern, but distinguished because you're the last data point.

You're the one who killed her. And dealer, it just seemed like the right title for you since I don't know your name. We can be informal here, right? You don't have to call me Miss or Mrs. Definitely don't call me ma'am. My sister called me Nod. My sister Sasha, who I believe you knew. What did you call her? I hope you didn't call her Sash because that's what a lot of people who loved her called her. And I find it hard to believe that you loved her.

Did you know her well enough to care for her, or did you hardly know her? When we were little, we sometimes called one another after the food we give our cats. She was Tender Viddle and I was chef's blend. Did you even call her by her name? Or was it Lady? Or maybe you had a nickname for her, like purple, the color of her car, the one she was found in. Keeping with our informal tone, I won't call you mister. I'll just call you my man because that is what you are.

You are mine, man. The one I want to talk to, the one I am seeking, the only one who knows some very important things about how my sister died. You are quite possibly the last person who saw her alive. And I'm a little jealous. As for me, you don't have to call me by my name. You can just call me the sister. I think about you all the time, almost every day. I feel like I deserve to know you, like I deserve to have at least 5 minutes of your time, 5 minutes alone with you.

This is me tying you to a chair so we can think about some things together. Are you still alive? I feel like you are and I'm angry about that. But then if I learned who you were and that you were dead, I might be angry about that, too. I think about hurting you. And when I imagine the violence I could commit, it alarms me. It's important to me that you know some things. I want you to see who you messed with, know who you destroyed. Sasha was a validictorian of her high school class.

She studied psychology at Yale. She was bold. I was her apprentice. She gave me my taste in music. Riding around in her Ford Escort, she slip in a cassette explaining the difference between Funkadelic and Parliament. One of my most prized possessions is a cassette tape where we taped ourselves on mushrooms sitting in my room. I was a senior in high school. She was home from college for Christmas vacation. What are you laughing at? Nothing. That's Sasha asking me what I'm laughing at. Nothing, I tell her.

We stared as my grandmother's watercolors on my wall started to blur. Oh my god. It's like, you know what it looks like right now? No. It looks like it's like from like all these different planes, like these different We burned Nog Champa incense and cracked ourselves up about things we called social experiments. These were basically fantasies about ways we could be completely inappropriate in situations where certain contained behavior was expected, like the public library. I GOT UP LIKE the library and like pulled on the bookshelf shelves just like that's me screaming scream like ran out or something like what are you doing?

What are you reading about? When I listen to the tape I hear a self assured Sasha. She's in control. I'm her little sister overjoyed to have her full attention trying to impress her with my wisdom and also be her court jester. Sasha tells me a story about this horse she knew that she called a total [ __ ] A total snot. Not safe to have around people. And then this girl from the Special Olympics showed up in the barn and threw her arms around the horse's neck.

And the horse stayed calm. It was like right on her shoulder and everybody was like waiting for her to just like take a bite out of this chick and it was like she knew. She just like sat there. Did she bite people? Yes. Oh yeah. That's why it was so cool that she did that. Right. Are you an idiot? That is so I bet you did kind of know though that this wasn't the right time to be an [ __ ] Is there ever a good time?

No, I didn't mean that. Is there ever a good time to be an [ __ ] I'm asking her. Okay, I'm trying to tell my happy I've done the math and as of March 11th, 2018 at 6:49 p.m. I have lived longer than my sister. I have walked the earth more seconds than my big sister who was born 2 and 1/2 years before me. This does not make sense. You have knocked the universe off course. My husband would say, "Take it easy, Encyclopedia Brown." as he watched me walk around with her phone, trying to reconstruct her last days, reading texts, listening to messages, making notes, trying to figure out who you are, my man.

I was hoping to finally understand the part of her life that she refused to share with me at the end. It infuriated me that she kept getting texts after she died, like this one from Brian. Hey, any of the shirts around? My hand shaking, I responded, "You should [ __ ] off. This is Sasha's sister, and she died. Go get your drug somewhere else, you piece of [ __ ] or this one from Frankie. Any news? Got sleepies. When there was no response, he wrote, "Must be dead." I wrote back to Frankie.

Actually, she is dead. [ __ ] off. This is her sister. You'll have to [ __ ] get your drug somewhere else. So, my man, are you one of the guys she talked to and texted with on her last day? Are you the ex-boyfriend who kept harassing her? The one who introduced her to Oxycontton? That guy? Are you the friend who told me how sorry he was that Sasha died and that it was a hot day and maybe her windows were rolled up and she suffocated during a nap in her car?

Are you one of those friends I ran into who didn't have the decency to show up for her memorial? One of those people. Were you feeling guilty about something? Here's something that's been eating at me for a while. I read that you actually don't mind when people die from something you were selling because it tells the hardcore users that the high is really powerful. The high of heroin mixed with fentinyl. Fentinyl, which is up to a 100 times more potent than morphine, 100 times more potent than the drug given to my father when he was dying from cancer.

So a death from this stuff is like a calling card. Is that true? Did my sister's obituary bring in business for you? I have a friend who's a Jehovah's Witness, and she told me that in the resurrection, I'll be able to hold my sister like I used to and speak to her like nothing happened. I like this idea, but I can't get myself to believe it. Her body was burned, cremated at 1,800°. I don't like picturing that, but I do. Aside from my own body, hers was probably the other female body I knew the best, lean, taut, muscular.

She rode horses. She was fearless, always wanting to ride the ones that were trouble. She could lose her saddle and gallop at a flat run like a wild woman, gripping the horse's mane with her hand. Her leg muscles were iron cables. She used to put me in the vice, a move inspired by our love of the WWF wrestlers. She would wrap her brrawy legs around me and squeeze until I almost couldn't breathe. My mother always called Sasha the daughter with a bleeding heart. At one point when she was working in New Haven, you would walk down the street with her and she knew all the homeless people by name.

If you were driving with her, she would jerk the car to the side of the road, get out, leaving the car door swinging open, and call to the man or woman to see if they were okay, if they needed anything. That was her life's work. She was actually a clinical social worker with two master's degrees in social work and public health. For the last 5 or so years of her life, she had trouble keeping jobs. She had trouble committing to anything. the daughter with a bleeding heart.

Her autopsy report says that her heart weighed 360 g. When I had to identify her body, the edges of the sheet she lay on were pink from her watered down blood. The watered down blood of her compassionate bleeding heart. They should have cleaned up better, cleaned her up better, though I caught myself thinking how perfect her eyebrows were. How old are you? Were you my sister's age? Younger? Did you know she was 44? Maybe that seems old to you, but it's not. She looked older since she started using.

But before before, my man, she was gorgeous, sexy. She probably met you at your place with a Taco Bell parking lot in her filthy car, baseball cap, picked at skin, too much eyeliner. So maybe you could never imagine that, but she was. Ask anyone who knew her. Ask the multitude of men who knew her. Ask the ones I would like to line up against a wall execution style and actually execute. Ask her first mind [ __ ] of a boyfriend at age 14 and the obsessive one that followed in high school.

Ask the professors, married men, random men, apparent friends, the one who first gave her crack, the Noxy Cotton. Ask her coach who slept with the young women on his team and pulled her into a cokefueled party scene while she was still a teenager. He denies all this today. I find myself fixated on the men. They circle her memory like these loser deadbeat ghosts or something. How dare they have the nerve to be alive. A year after Sasha died, after visiting her grave on a summer day, I drove through the center of our hometown.

By the town green, there was a cluster of boys and girls, not yet high school age. The boys were on their BMXs doing tricks, riding down a little hill. The girls were all clumped together, watching these young peacocks strut their stuff, knowing their job was to sit there and be impressed. They were nearly silent, whispering among themselves why the boys were having all the fun. I drove by them and shocked myself by rolling down the window and yelling, "Girls, get a backbone. They are not that cool." I worried what my sister's death was doing to me.

What was your day like today? Your day is a dealer. There's so much heroin and fentinyl on the streets these days. I'm pretty sure you're crushing it, as the kids say. On the radio, I heard the chief medical examiner for Connecticut actually get choked up about how they need to build new buildings just to keep up with all the dead bodies from overdoses. A grown man who sees dead bodies for a living cried, "You, my man, are powerful." "Is that how you feel?" A few days before she died, Sasha sent me a silly text.

There had been an incident about a week and a half before at my mother's house where she had been hosting a cookout for friends. Sasha showed up in bad shape, slurring her words, fighting off drowsiness. I forbade her to use some combination charcoal gas grill because I thought she was going to blow us all up. There was a fight. She felt wrongly accused and was crying a lot. I tried to get her to talk to me about what was really going on and that went nowhere.

My mom confronted her with some hard evidence, a text I saw ding onto her phone. Sasha did this thing when she knew she was caught. She would stare hard into your eyes while she sized you up. What did you know for sure? What could she convince you of? What could she get away with admitting without completely throwing herself under the bus? Eventually, she just sort of faded away into the next room, trying to clear the table, but knocking things over instead. I was still holding a grudge about it, but I was happy to get her innocuous text, asking if I remember the drawing in our middle school French books, and went with the word Febla, meaning weak.

It looked like a man with no bones making a face like he had just eaten something distastefully bland. Growing up, my sister delighted in imitating the man, Febla, and making me crack up. She did it so often, it was such a staple in our repertoire that I thought it was odd that she would even have to ask if I remembered. But this was our pattern. There would be an incident, then after things subsided, she would reach out and we would both be happy to not have to deal with a larger issue.

But each time I knew I was being roped into denial, I was less willing this time, and I held out on writing her back. I wanted to punish her a little more, show her I wasn't a pushover. But this thought came to me strongly. You don't want that to be the last text she ever sends you. Read the subtext. She may need you, and you need to let her know that you love her. I never texted Sasha back. I waited too long. After she died, I looked at the texts in her phone from the night of that cookout, the night we fought about whether she was on drugs.

She wrote a friend, "How do I not hate my sister? My family truly hates me. I don't want to talk anymore. Her friend wrote back, "Damn, Nadia the [ __ ] narc." Seeing the word hate in association with me knocked the wind out of me. I wanted to yell at her, "No, you've got it all wrong. I'm the one who loves you, not those people." But by the time I read that, she was already dead. On July 31st, 2015, the day she died, she had just seen her drug counselor.

After our dad died and her addiction blossomed, he became the father figure in her life. She was working in his garden. Toward the end of her life, she created gardens for people just because she loved it. Gave her a place to put her anxiety, her manic tendencies. He called to her saying he had to go and was she okay? She waved him on. I'm fine. I'm fine. This was maybe 3:30 p.m. I'm glad that she saw her counselor that day. They loved one another very much.

At 4:00, she has a 47 second outgoing call to Allan. At 402, there is an incoming call from Allan for 54 seconds. At 4:08, she calls Gary for 1 minute. Then Gary calls her back at 420 and they talk for 42 seconds. At 427, she calls Gary again, and they talk for 41 seconds. At 4:39, she has an outgoing call to Tim for 1 second. At 4:40, she has a call out to Jerry for 1 minute. Are you Alan? Gary, Tim, Jerry, were you the last one to talk to her?

Did you see her, too? Were you with her? Both her windows were rolled down. Had someone been in her passenger seat? Were you with her when she died and you got scared and ran? Tell me, what were her last moments like? What was she saying before? Did you watch her die? My mother worries that she wanted to die, but I don't think so. How long have you been cutting heroin with fentinel? I don't think Sasha saw it coming. You sucker punch people, you know. She had meetings coming up written in her daybook about possible work.

She was trying. In an email reconnecting with a beloved former colleague 2 days before she died, she said, "Hi, surprise, surprise. Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Lol." Her autopsy says 6:54 p.m. is the time of death. Sometime between 4:40 and 654, Sasha inhaled the drugs that killed her. She hated needles. She was found in her car in the parking lot of a seafood restaurant off I95. The detective on the scene happened to be an old high school friend. He told me that he thought she had probably used, felt sleepy, and needed to pull over.

The restaurant is on the water. I was happy that maybe she was seeing water in those last moments. There's an offtrack bedding place next to the restaurant with galloping horses painted on it. two stories high. Maybe she saw the horses. I just wonder if she knew what was happening or did she really just think she was going to take a little nap. I don't want her to have known what was happening. I don't want her to have been scared. If I'm going to be honest here, am I going to be honest here?

Maybe I don't want to believe that you deserve my empathy. I don't want to look you in the eye because you may not look much different than my sister. You may be like her, someone who can't be around their family that much anymore because pretending is so hard. Seeing Sasha trying to dry the wine glasses we used for Thanksgiving while she nodded out, pretending that she still had one foot in our world was one of the most heartbreaking things I have seen. You may look like that.

You may be sick, needing to get high just to maintain some equilibrium. You may have been her friend. I may have even met you. You may have called her Saj. You may have loved her. God help you if you loved her. To be fair, my sister dealt too. As I was writing this to you, my husband offered me a gentle reminder of this fact. It was mainly so she could use. There's longhand addition and subtraction in the back of her daybook with people's initials. How much they owed or paid her, how much she owed and paid in return.

It's chump change. Really? written a few times as me free. Drugs were her pay. This was not high rolling dealing. This was survival. When my husband reminded me that my sister was dealing too, I quickly defended her. Yeah, but she never killed anyone. He said again gently. You don't know that. I was stunned. It's true. I didn't know that. And the fact is she could have killed someone. My worst fear when she was alive was that she would be driving around high and kill someone. The idea of her killing someone kept me up at night.

I often thought about having her followed. So curious I was about what her days were like where she would go. I was once driving to visit her and my mother, thinking about how I could spy on her when there was a traffic slowdown in I95 a few exits away from our hometown. On the radio they said there was an accident up ahead. My mind went to my sister. Had she caused it? I pulled up in the traffic jam right behind a purple car. I gasped. It was Sasha.

Here was my chance to play detective. She moved to the right lane and the middle one I was in began to pull forward. I was at risk of being seen, so I decided to not try to hide. I pulled up next to her, ready to make a stupid face and stare at her until she felt my presence. To my horror, she looked half asleep. Her head was back, her eyes at half masked. I couldn't believe she was able to drive a car. My heart started racing and I pulled in behind her as if that might shield other cars from her.

I followed her all the way home to her house, trying to steer her car with my body like a bowling ball headed for the gutter. She was still living in her own place with an ex-boyfriend turned best buddy, not yet evicted and forced to live with my mother during the last year of her life. I pulled into her street and watched her drive into her driveway. I wanted to follow her in, barge into the apartment that she never let me enter, but I froze. because I didn't know what I'd do once I was inside.

Deliver some Jonavarc Oprah Hulk Hogan speech like she'd go for that. So, I did nothing. I told myself she's going to an outpatient clinic. She has a therapist, a drug counselor, all these professionals helping her. But unfortunately, she also had you. And here's the thing, my man. I need you, too. I know that. I know what I'm doing here. Because of you, I get to say, "If it weren't for that guy, because of you, I don't have to blame her. Because of you, I can nod my head when people tell me there's nothing I could have done." But I don't know if that's true.

I did try. My family tried. Interventions, honesty, confrontation, rejection, love. She once told my parents that out of anyone in the world, she cared most about what I thought of her. I ache at the possibility that if anyone in the world could have saved her, it was me. But to save her, I would have had to go to her, live with her, make it my life. I would have had to physically remove her from her life and stand guard at the door holding a shotgun. I would have had to somehow wrestle her denial, get her to finally go to her knees and raise the white flag.

But I got engaged. I got pregnant. Today, whenever I tell someone about my violent feelings towards you, they inevitably say, "Well, if it wasn't him, it would have been someone else. If it wasn't him, it would have been some other guy." But my question is, why did it have to be anyone at all? Why should my comfort be that there would have been another one? That all we can expect from life is a game of whack-a-ole, but with shitty people. I can't accept that because you know what, man?

It was you. And yeah, I'm raging at you so I don't have to rage at myself or my sister to save myself from falling into a sad heap on the ground. So yeah, I'm using you. I don't care. None of this is fair, my man. So [ __ ] you. [ __ ] you because you're still here and there will never be another her. [ __ ] you because I will always think about you. You are my dealer now, man. You dealt me a life without Sasha.

Because of you, I'm going to have to do this alone. And I'll never let you forget that. Yours forever. The sister, Nadia Bowers. We first broadcast this story years ago, and since then, Nadia has expanded the story into a full book, a memoir that's called Dear Dealer. As I say these words to you, it is just days away from its publication day. The book and the audio book can be ordered online right now. Coming up, the problem with having a Facebook account after you're dead that you have never ever ever thought about.

That's in a minute. Chicago public radio program continues. Is this American life? Myra glass. Today's program, the secret of my death. stories of people who die and the stuff about them that is hidden and the stuff about them that is uncovered after their deaths by people on a mission to figure them out. Today's show first aired a couple years ago. We've arrived at act two of our program act two comto my is that is that act title too obscure? I was hoping it would be a kind of a play on momento my which is you know like a moment of awareness of one's own death but even I know maybe that's too obscure.

Um, but anyway, a lot of the story happens in the comment section of Facebook. So, you know, comment my Anyway, Stephanie Fu explains. After someone you love dies, suddenly even their most annoying traits in retrospect seem endearing. Blake Birkhart's friend was this guy Dave Maher. They were both comedians in Chicago, met in their 20s in the comedy scene. Blake was drawn to Dave because he was this extroverted weirdo, loud and absurd. He was also a problem drinker and constantly high. He even had a bit about being so stoned he couldn't order food at the movies and he had this laugh.

I remember that kind of bugging me like he he would just start talking real fast and be like he it's hard to do in a freshman but he' be like, "Come on, Blakey boy. Come on." and he'd like grab me and like shake my shoulders and stuff if he was excited about just the dumbest thing like a new a new joke he wrote or Dave saw himself as this in-your-face brutally honest iconoclast but Blake says thinking about it now he can't really remember any actual instances of Dave being much of a rebel he just remembers Dave as being disarmingly nice to me it was almost a little bit annoying how kind he was because it you know made me look bad in comparison and we were always together.

But um yeah, he was he would go up to people that he had only met once or twice and say like, "Hey, how's it going? How are you today?" And like you could tell he really meant it. On stage, you could often hear this earnestness in Dave's comedy, this almost childlike excitement about ridiculous stuff. you. I heard a song played on church bells recently, you guys. And it just it was like, you know, when you just hear something, you're like, "Oh, like like something like shifts inside you, you know?" And I heard this song and I just want to do my best to replicate it to see if it affects you guys in the same way.

Okay, cool. Bing bong bing bong bing. That's a recording of a set Dave did on October 10th, 2014. 12 days later, Blake got a call that said Dave was in a coma. It was sudden. Dave had been a diabetic and somehow his blood sugar had gotten so high that his body shut down. His kidneys were failing. Blake visited him in the hospital. It was jarring. Then, after 3 weeks of doctors trying to jumpst start Dave's body, they told his family it was probably best to take him off life support.

They invited his friends to the hospital to say goodbye. When I found out he, you know, wasn't going to be coming out of the coma and and was going to be taken off life support, I just said, I I can't go. there's no way I can I can see him like that knowing that I'll never be able to talk to him again. So instead, I went to my house where at the time I was living with four other comedians and all friends with Dave and I said, "I'm going to go home and everyone should just come over tonight after you go see Dave." We just made a whole night out of it and just kind of made a basically a wake for Dave and um just kind of waited for the news of him officially passing.

How many people came? Oh, it was at least 50 60 people. Oh wow, that's a lot. Everyone knew Dave was going to be taken off life support that night and finally a Facebook post confirmed it. Rest in peace, Dave Maher. Then his 1700 Facebook friends began to post eulogies of him to his Facebook wall. Thoughts and prayers, "I had a gigantic crush on Dave." One admitted. Another said, "Let's all be the most Dave Maher versions of ourselves." Blake's post kept it simple. I wrote, "I love you, dude." Had you ever told Dave I love you to his face?

I don't know. I don't I don't think so. When you're faced with actually losing them, you kind of you realize it more. Unfortunately, that's how it works. So, two weeks later on Thanksgiving Day, there was a post on Dave's Facebook page from Dave. Oh, man. It was this it was it's so hard to explain. This is Dave Maher. Spoiler alert, you're alive. I'm Yeah, spoiler alert, I'm here. His friends all whipped out their phones in the middle of their Thanksgiving dinners and started shouting enjoy on his Facebook page.

People are saying like, "No one celebrates Thanksgiving the way Dave celebrates Thanksgiving." Uh, Dave turned Thanksgiving into Easter. It turned out Dave's parents never did wind up taking him off life support. They transferred him to another hospital instead. And a couple days later, his dad walked into his room and started talking to him like he had countless times since he'd fallen into the coma. And at some point, perhaps I recognized his voice. My eyes popped open and I was still intubated at this point. So, I had a whole mess of tubes like sticking out of my face and attempted to scream, but because I was intubated, it came out silently, but I just mouthed the words, "What the fuck?" [sighs] Dave had been in the coma for a month.

He's a type 1 diabetic who had just done an awful job caring for himself. He hadn't paid much attention to what he was eating, drank too much, and he had no way of monitoring his blood sugar because he sold all his test strips for weed money. So, he had no idea his blood sugar was skyrocketing, eventually sending him into a coma. The last thing he remembered was puking into a bucket and figuring he must have food poisoning. And then after a month, he woke up in a hospital bed, completely bewildered by the entire situation.

But the upshot of all that was that he was in this weird situation that some of us fantasize about. That Tom Sawyer thing of being at your own funeral, where you get to hear all the things people say about you. You get to finally find out how you're seen, what people will remember about you. Dave didn't get a chance to look at Facebook for a while. He was still recovering. His hands wouldn't stop shaking, so he couldn't even use his phone. It took another month or so for him to be discharged from the hospital.

And that's when he finally decided to read through all of the eulogies people had left on his page, about a hundred of them. It was New Year's Day after the ball dropped and everyone went to sleep. He was recuperating at his parents house, so he went down to their basement and sat alone at the little kitchen island scrolling for hours. You know, it got to be 2 and 3 and 3:30 a.m. and I'm just there at this island reading these things from my laptop. One of the first things he spotted right in the middle of all the I misuse was a post from his brother trying to quash the whole thing written the day after Dave supposedly died.

I think my family was honestly like pretty upset reading uh some of these things like to friends of David. There seems to be some confusion and unofficial word on David's passing. At the time of this posting Dave Maher is still with us. Until you hear official word that David has passed, please out of respect for him and our family, refrain from posting about David in the past tense. It got 70 likes, three comments. But the Facebook algorithm had buried it. It was overshadowed by all of the comments coming in facilitating the dead Dave narrative.

Some of those got twice as many likes. And reading these comments was sort of like you'd imagine. People brought up a lot of memories, things he did, some of which he didn't even remember. funny stories and he got to see what this life he bumbled through actually looked like from the outside. There's pretty good ones in here. Yeah, this one I had forgotten existed. I Okay, so this woman writes, "Deep into the late night hour of a crazy, sexy, cool party, I found Dave pounding on a closet door." Uh, and then she transcribes this conversation where she says,"What are you doing, Dave?" And I say, "I got to go to the bathroom." And she says, "That's a closet." And I say, "No, it's not.

It's the bathroom and there are people in there. There are people in there and they need to get out." And then she says, I show Dave that it is indeed a closet. And then the last line is me saying, "Just let me knock on the door for a little and then I'll walk away so that people don't know what I did." And that's great, man. That's so funny. [gasps and laughter] A bunch of posts perplexed him just cuz they were so random. There was one from an ex-girlfriend who is appreciative of the fact that he broke up with her inside his car because it was cold outside.

One woman said he was a great storyteller and also quote unreasonably sweaty. Why? Yeah, absurd, right? Like what? Like it's so easy not to include that sentence. But as Dave kept scrolling past the funny memories, of course, things got heavier. Many of his friends had been devastated, and they took to Facebook as a form of therapy, pouring their hearts out about their loss. Dozens painted Dave as a devoted friend, the kind of guy who was there with hugs and advice and beer whenever you needed him.

And then he got to this one post from a friend that just gutted him. Hey, dude. Pretty sure Kit took this photo right before I told you I was going to leave her party in order to go to bed early and then you made fun of me for doing that. I guess I never thought about this before, but you were totally my best friend in college. Even though you were a senior when I was a freshman, you insisted on treating me and everyone as equals, even though we weren't.

Dude, you really made me feel so effing cool. My dumb smile in this photo is 100% genuine because I was so happy to be with you all the time. It wasn't just me who felt that way. Whenever we went to CVS or Walgreens, every employee recognized you and said, "Hello. We've even eaten at Chipotle for free because you have it going on, dude. Thanks for telling me not to be so hard on myself and then laughing about how funny that sounded coming from you. Thanks for all the rides home.

Thanks for being my best friend. It looks like it's finally your turn to turn in early. You earned it. I'll talk to you later. Duffer. That is so sweet. Yeah. Yeah. It's It's just really sweet. It's really um um I don't know. It's like so many of these things I like didn't remember. Like I don't remember things that way. I don't remember employees at Walgreens all knowing my name. I remember like shoplifting from Walgreens and spending the night in the in jail. Like that's how I remember this stuff.

This was the main thought Dave had going through his eulogies. Even though everyone was being so nice, he thought they're all wrong. I know that people don't really talk [ __ ] about someone when they've died, but it just it's just really tough to like square the image that I have of myself with the way other people talked about me when they thought I was dead. And that's why reading his own eulogies, it actually made him feel awful. He felt overwhelmed by the complete disconnect between the guy he thought he was and the guy everyone else was talking about.

He thought that he was at core a bad person, that he took his depression out on people, that he could be insensitive, self-centered. I put myself in this coma. it was my carelessness, my recklessness, um, that got me to this place in the first place. And like, on the one hand, while it's moving to hear that everyone at this wake at Blake's house was so miserable to feel like I had gone, I made these people miserable. That totally makes sense. You were like, "You guys, you're not like acknowledging how [ __ ] up it was that I did this stupid thing to you, right?" And that's why it was like, it was very different the experience with my family because my family was pretty aware that and and they had been hurt by, you know, in terms of the traditional wreckage that an alcoholic or an addict leaves in their wake.

My family suffered a lot of that. And so they weren't affusive when I came back. They were very aware of the ways in which I contributed to this situation. So now that everyone was saying he was this wonderful nice guy, it actually made him feel guilty. Even now, years later, it's a burden. Witnessing your own funeral, it actually kind of sucked. Maybe it wouldn't if you stayed dead. The problem is if you have to keep on living, but you know who this didn't suck for? Dave's friend, Blake.

Have you ever found his laugh annoying since then? No. Now it's now it's like music to my to my ears. That's so crazy. Blake got to watch his loved one come back to life. That's really the thing worth fantasizing about. He gets excited just thinking about the day Dave woke up. Yeah. Just to relive that moment again and again, I would be priceless cuz that that's the happiest I think I've ever felt. I think it just makes me a little happier to be around him every time.

It's just like I'm just a little happier around him than I could be around any other friend because I know what it's like to also lose the same person. Dave and Blake both got second chances to love and to be loved. Turns out one's a lot easier than the other. Stephanie Vu, she used to be a producer at our show. She is the author of a book about complex PTSD called What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. The Living Dave Maher. These days, host of the podcast This is your afterlife.

Act three, funeral for a stranger. So, this last story is about a guy who goes to a funeral for somebody who does not know it all and has to piece together all the stuff you would want to know in that kind of situation. And the guy who did this uh wrote us an email at the radio show. There was no subject heading in this email. The very first line was a link to an obituary for another guy named Eddie Fani. Eddie had died a few weeks before.

He was young when he died, only 35. The email began, "Dear this American life, I'm attaching a quick document that I created Friday documenting some of the thoughts and emotions I had following the funeral of a Navy Seal. The whole experience was more of an odyssey than I had bargained for. This caught the eye of a producer here on our show, Dana Chibvis. Here she is." The email was signed by a retired officer in the Navy, a guy I'm going to call Charlie. It's not his real name.

The document he'd attached to the email was an essay. It was four pages long. He'd written it quickly after Eddie Ferlani's funeral. Eddie was a stranger to him, but there was something about the whole experience that seemed to kind of haunt him that led him to write an essay. Something deeply emotional. I couldn't tell what it was, so I gave him a call. So, why did you write us? I knew you were going to ask this question. Um, do you write radio shows a lot? I I don't.

And I think I wrote you guys one time prior because and that's the only reason why I even knew how to contact you. Okay, so maybe Charlie writes radio shows more than most people. I asked him to tell me the story of Eddie Ferlani's funeral. The story begins with a random text message from a friend of Charlie's, a guy named Mark. He and Charlie went to the Naval Academy together. After graduation, Charlie went on to become a naval aviator. He flew medevac helicopters in Iraq in 2007.

his friend Mark joined the Navy Seals, the Navy Special Operations Forces. What was the text that you got from Mark? So, uh, actually it started with, uh, good morning. Said I said, good morning. How's, uh, how's Liam, your son? And, uh, his next text says, hey, I got a job for you. And, uh, that's where my response came back. Does involve explosives. Uh, and he says, attend the service of a frogman in my absence. Frogman is a nickname for a Navy Seal. Eddie Ferlani and Mark had been Navy Seals together.

The funeral was going to be in San Diego and Mark, who lives in Florida, couldn't make it. So, he asked Charlie, who lives nearby, to go in his place. That was the moment where it was like that moment of decision where it's like, well, do I really want to go to a funeral of somebody I don't know in his absence? And, you know, if it was anybody but Mark, I probably would have would have made an excuse. So, did you sit there for like a minute or two before you wrote him back thinking of excuses not to go?

I would be lying if I said no. I I I did think of a few excuses not to go because, you know, funerals aren't one of those things that people like attending to begin with and let alone the funeral of somebody that you don't know, which technically seems a little rude because just doesn't seem appropriate. But Charlie wrote Mark back said, "Send me the details and I'll do it." And then in the swirl of his own life and work and family, he kind of forgot about it.

2 weeks later, he woke up and realized it was the morning of Eddie Ferlani's funeral. He put on a nice pair of jeans, some nice shoes, and a dark button-down shirt. He thought he'd go to the service during his lunch break, catch the eulogy, and then scoot out of there, get back to work. He realized he didn't have any of the details about the service, and he also didn't know anything about Eddie for Lonnie. So, he did some googling and found a Facebook memorial that Mark had set up and a GoFundMe page asking for donations to help support Eddie's family.

It mentioned that he had passed suddenly. In the essay Charlie sent us, he writes, "There are pictures of his three children and a smiling face of Eddie and SEAL training, submerged in mud and smiling and giving a thumbs up with green fatigues on. The date of his passing was listed and I started googling different military tragedies. Being alumni from a military academy means that rarely is there a military accident where someone I know isn't involved or affected. Found unusual that I could find no reporting on anything." You know, at the time I I I told myself that he was a a Navy Seal that uh had, you know, died in the line of duty.

He had, you know, if it was a major firefight or or a conflict, there would be, you know, there would be yellow ribbons. There would be parades. There would be flags everywhere. There would be people weeping in the streets if it if he had died in combat. So, you knew it wasn't that. You knew it wasn't a battlefield death, but maybe it was I I I I didn't you get that little um bug in the back of your head because I'm like, "Okay, well, how did he die?" Like, "Was it a car accident?" The internet didn't shed any light on the mystery surrounding Eddie's death.

But anyway, it was the day of the funeral, so Charlie would probably find out what happened there. It's a weird thing being a proxy at a funeral. It reminds me of being a plus one at a wedding, only miserable. You don't know the person who died or their family, so it's hard to have any feelings about it. Like the fact that Eddie Fani was gone, it hadn't changed the course of Charlie's life at all. Just the course of his lunch break, really. Charlie gets to the chapel late because Mark texted at the last minute and asked him to pick up some flowers for the family.

corages for Eddie Fani's daughter and widow. As soon as he drives into the parking lot, he notices a woman sitting on the sidewalk dressed in black, attending to a little boy who's having a total meltdown over his pants and how he doesn't want to be wearing them. Charlie recognizes the boy from pictures as Eddie Ferlani's son. When Charlie walks into the chapel, the service has already started and he's carrying those flowers. So, one of the funeral directors intercepts him and asks him if he's the flower delivery guy.

Charlie tries to explain awkwardly and in whisper talk because again the service has already started that no he's there for the service but no he doesn't actually know the deceased and no he doesn't know the family either he's just there for a guy in Florida like as a standin the funeral director lets him by and Charlie finally squeezes into the back row of mourners. The pews were all were all full and the walls um especially the back of the walls were lined with uh men in three-piece suits that were you know 6'4 athletic belt wearing sunglasses.

I mean you're clearly Navy Seals. People were giving eulogies. In his essay, Charlie writes that it felt odd to hear about the achievements of a stranger stories from his friends. The men on the back wall with him were stillfaced, betrayed no emotion until Eddie Ferlani's daughter, a seven-year-old named Zelma, broke down in tears. The little girl was um you know, sobbing, you know, in that sort of deep heartbroken deep heartbroken sub. Yeah. Yeah. And her um her stepmother, you know, was kind of bent over and escorting her out through the door.

And she is just sobbing uh sobbing. And [gasps] again, you can imagine all these 6 foot plus, you know, 300 lb athletic Navy Seals. And [gasps] it was uh everybody just looked so helpless. Like it was like there isn't anything these guys can't take on and win. And here's this little girl sobbing. Um you know, right behind us and there's nothing anybody could do. There was a part of your essay that that really struck me um and I'm just going to read. Um, you wrote, "The military trains you to separate the emotion from the mission.

Eddie's oldest girl, Zelma, was old enough to understand what was happening, but not military enough to know not to show it." Did you want Zelma to be a little more military in that moment? [snorts] [sighs] I don't know what to say of that because that little girl, you know, wailing out there in the hallway. Um, you know, that that that again set off a cascade of grief that everybody there had to kind of stuff away. Charlie stuffed the grief away with an old military trick. He focused on accomplishing the mission to deliver the flowers Mark had sent him with.

As stupid and I feel so embarrassed to even admit this, but I mean that's what I clung to is like I need to give her the flowers. Like I cl I clung to that idea [snorts] that my mission is to give her the flowers. Luckily, a voice in Charlie's head, his wife's voice, he says, told him that delivering the flowers then was a really bad idea. So he stayed put. It made him deeply uncomfortable. all these feelings for a stranger. He wasn't being military enough. You lose a degree of empathy in the military because empathy is not a not a it's not a advantageous skill to have in most especially combat arm fields.

Empathy is not a useful emotion to have. And [gasps] the fact that I'm sniffling and carrying up is generally, you know, thought as weak. Like I said, you you your your your empathy your empathy centers [snorts] tend to be uh atrophied. Well, I mean, I think you could also see it as proof that your empathy centers haven't atrophied, that they're actually quite present. They just come out at the wrong times and with odd things, which is I guess. Although [snorts] I think some people would argue that a funeral is the exact right time for it to come out.

Oh, they're present. Yeah, I know they're there. [snorts] The service finally ended. The chaplain asked everyone not to talk to the family, just proceed outside to the flag presentation. But Charlie ignored these instructions and walked up to Eddie Ferani's widow, eager to give her the flowers to accomplish his mission at last. When he told her he was there on behalf of his friend Mark, she brightened and gave him a hug. She told him Mark was the whole reason they'd had a service there in San Diego.

He'd arranged everything. Charlie got back in his car and called Mark to give him a report. And then Mark said something strange. He told Charlie he was relieved to hear there had been so many people at the service. It hit hit me and it hit me almost like a touching a light socket. He said, "I'm glad people showed up. I was worried nobody was going to be there." And I and and and you get that kind of like sinking feeling that you've missed something important. And the next thing he told me was is you know because because of how he killed himself and and uh [sighs and gasps] Eddie had disappeared from home three and a half weeks earlier.

He'd been missing for about a week before his body was found under a bridge. He had a backpack filled with pictures of his family and his service record. In his essay, Charlie writes about that moment after the funeral when he was in his car talking to Mark and he finally understood how Eddie had died. It all came together in my mind suddenly. No mention of cause of death, no news stories of training accidents, no mention of the end of his life at the eulogy. The monster that hides in the dark, the one that you don't mention unless you summon his attention.

How did that change things for you to understand that Eddie had committed suicide? I I got lightheaded. Honestly, I had a physical [snorts] I had a physical reaction, you know. I just cuz there was nothing about it. I mean none there were no articles on it. The chaplain's invocation didn't talk. Nobody said anything about it. [snorts] Both Mark and Eddie's widow, as I found out this morning when I talked to her, they were terrified because they expected to show up to an empty chapel. They expected no one to come.

In fact, the Navy chaplain had mentioned at the start of the service that Eddie had killed himself, but Charlie arrived late and missed it. And Charlie had misunderstood Mark's worry that no one would show up. Mark told me he was worried about that, but not because Eddie killed himself. It was more like it all happened so suddenly and he wasn't sure people would be able to come. The morning before our interview, Charlie called Eddie's widow to make sure it was okay with her that he talked to me.

And during that conversation, he learned something about Zelma's breakdown in the chapel. The reason why she wanted to leave is cuz she was ashamed. She felt that she felt ashamed that everybody knew her father had killed himself and that, you know, they felt that she was a a bad person. And I was I was horrified to hear that. I mean of all the uh [snorts] you know of all the things for her to think that she was somehow this pariah for her father passing away that everybody in that memorial service was there to support her and she was I don't know it was just horri I was horrified to hear that [snorts] and that she wanted to Evil.

Eddie left the military in 2012, the same year as Charlie. Charlie says, "When you go back to civilian life, you get a job. You've got your family and friends, but you miss having a greater mission. Your your sense of purpose is gone. It's you have to evolve. But when I heard what Eddie did and I I I understood what he was thinking in that moment. I I guess I'm trying to explain in a basic layman terms without knowing, you know, myself. But I, you know, maybe I I I I can put myself in a few of their shoes, you know, with about what?

Uh being able to put yourself in their shoes. I mean, can c can you talk about that? Are you up for it? Up for talking about that? [sighs] Sorry, I've been kind of dreading this. You want to take a little break? [sighs] No, I can keep going. I I I'd like to say I'm brave enough to take that subject on, but I I don't I don't think uh I don't think I can do that. Right. That's fine. That's fine. Charlie's had his own bouts with suicidal thoughts.

They brought his career in the Navy to an end. He told me about it when the microphones were off. He said it was okay to talk about here. I asked him if in retrospect the thing that got him about Eddie's funeral, the reason he felt compelled to write the essay, was that it could have been his own funeral. But he said no, that's not it. And then he explained why he wrote the essay. He said he knew from his time doing medevac flights that the mere sound of a helicopter approaching can improve the vital signs of a person on the verge of death.

He said I wrote you because I wanted to be the sound of a helicopter to someone. Dana Chibvis we wanted to share the phone number for the national suicide prevention hotline. That number is 800273 talk. 800273 talk. That guy Charlie who wrote that essay asked us to say that he dedicates his essay to a guy who helped him, a Marine who died in Iraq. Major Richard Ganon II. Dying. I don't [singing] want nobody to all my friends. [music and singing] World program is produced today by Mickey Meek.

People who put this episode of our show together includes Elena Baker, Ben Calhoun, Dana Chv, Sean Cole, Whitney Dangerfield, Hillary Elkins, Stephanie Fu, David Kenbal, Alvin Melis, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Robin Semian, Alyssa Ship, Lily Sullivan, Christopher Sutala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Woo. Senior producer for today's show is Brian Reed. Managing editor for today's show is Susan Burton. Production on today's program from Ryan Rury and Ruby Schwarz. Special thanks today to Judy Melanick, Wesley Lowry, Melissa Franklin, and David Morren. Thanks also to our This American Life partners, these listeners who help make it possible for us to keep making our show with their donations.

In return, they get all kinds of perks, including ad free listening, early access to tickets to this live show that we're going to be doing in LA in October. Bonus episodes. Our most recent bonus episode is unlike any of the dozens of bonus episodes that we've made and that you get as a life partner. It goes behind the scenes to tell the story of one of the most difficult episodes we've ever produced. This cursed episode is one that you might not think would be so hard to make.

Anyway, to listen and more importantly to help us fund our show, join at this americanlife.org/lifeep partners. The link is also in the show notes. Thanks as always to Bram's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia. You know, I know it's been a week since Labor Day, but Tori is still reminiscing about how much fun he had. I remember like shoplifting from Walgreens and spending the night in jail. I'm her glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life. Next week on the podcast of This American Life, when Courtney was a teenager, her mom got remarried and asked Courtney to say a little something at the wedding.

And well, Courtney thought the marriage was a terrible idea. Her mom noticed. I would have liked to have heard how wonderful I was instead of how terrible I was at my wedding. 30 years later, Courtney and her mom finally try to talk it out. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.