646: The Secret of My Death

Let's listen to Josh Reddick's new walk-up song. Whether you love it or you hate it, walk-up music has become a huge part of major league baseball. The need to secure and the attention of the fans is relentless. I thought am I hearing things?

I mean, I realize everybody's singing along. Listen to NPR's through line in the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeapted in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version,

you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.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 and 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 tall paper. It was one thing that but very nicely. There's actually all kinds of trouble getting to,

bricks and boards to play with, and what concrete to write in. They find food, the workers left, and cigarettes, which they would smoke. And once I found a porn magazine, and one day Graham was there alone, and he had this great idea. He put together a little makeshift seesaw,

or this he calls it a teeter toddler.

“But the plank of wood balanced on a brick at the center.”

He put another brick on one end of the plank. And this idea was to drop something really heavy. Really, really heavy. Under 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 toddler 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 pounds. So you are how high up.

Probably at the sort of second floor window level.

So walk 15 feet, 12 feet. He carefully tries to line up the stone directly above the near end of the seesaw. Below down on the ground. And then he dropped the stone. 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 sort of follow that in its journey. But the brick, it didn't move without looking 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. It headed right towards my face. I even remember very vividly that the brick had the construction of the brick had three

so it get a 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 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 you're here. Yeah, and it sort of whistled as it went, even when I throw my dog's ball now, which has a little whistled 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 and some stayed a shock afterwards.

You know, I used to wonder if the brick had actually hit me and killed me, you know, and, you know, maybe I'd fall it off the scaffolding or something. I used to wonder, you know, whether the crime scene investigators came to look, 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 dead child who laying in a building site.

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 senior 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 I 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 and 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,

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. WBZ Chicago to the American Life, I'm Eric Glass, stay with us. On NPR's Wildcard podcast, Actors Julian Anderson says she's looking forward to getting old.

There is part of me that has always slightly fantasized about being in a home.

Watch or listen to that wildcard conversation on the NPR app, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I replayed out here from Science Friday, each episode we give you surprising facts. There's a whole phenomenon of the most visiting eyes of mammals, expert insights. It doesn't take a lot of brain to run a lion, actually.

And we tackled the big questions. How is this going to affect the future? From space to climate to tech to medicine, get a new view on the world around you. That science Friday wherever you get your podcasts. Just American Life, today's show is a rerun, act one.

So we begin today with a woman whose sister is 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, or 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, I just seem 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 myths or misses. Definitely don't call me maim. My sister called me Nad, my sister Sasha. Why believe you knew?

“What did you call her? I hope you didn't call her Sasha, 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? Where did you hardly know her? When we were little, we sometimes called one another after the food we gave our cats. She was tender-vital, 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 my 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 live, 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 five minutes of your time, five minutes alone with you. This is me tying you to a chair, so we can think about some things together. I 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.

destroyed. Sasha was a valedictorian over high school class. She studied psychology at Yale.

“She was bold. I was her apprentice. She gave me my taste in music, writing around in her”

four desk court. She slipped 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 mushroom, sitting in my room. I was a senior in high school. She was home from college for Christmas vacation. 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! It's like you! It's like you! It's like you! It's like you! It's like all these different planes!

We burned Nag 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. That's me screaming.

“When I listened to the tape, I hear a self-assured Sasha. She's in control. I'm a 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 as she called a total bitch. 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. That time was so cool that she did that. "Might!"

I just eventually did kind of know that this wasn't the right time to be an asshole. Is there ever a good time yet? No, I didn't. Is there ever a good time to be an asshole? I'm asking her. I've done the math and as of March 11th, 2018, at 649 p.m. I have lived longer than my sister. I've walked the earth more seconds than my big sister who was born two and a half years before me.

This does not make sense. You have knocked the universe off course. My husband would say, "Take it easy and cyclopathy around as you watch 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 text after she died. Like this one from Brian. Hey, any of the shirts around?

“My hand shaking, I responded. You should fuck off. This is Sasha's sister and she died.”

Who got your drugs somewhere else? Your piece of shit. 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. Fuck off. This is her sister. You'll have to fucking get your drugs 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 Oxie Cotton? 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 an app 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? Are 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 he was selling because it tells a hardcore users that the high is really powerful.

The high of heroin makes with fentanyl. Fentanyl, which is up to 100 times more potent than more of them. 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've a friend as 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,

hers was probably the other female body I knew the best. Lean, taught, muscular. She wrote 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 horses main 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 brawny legs around me and squeeze until I almost couldn't breathe.

My mother always called Sasha the daughter with a bleeding heart. The 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 masters degrees in social work and public health. But the last five 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 grams. When I had to identify her body, the edges of the sheet she lay on were pink from her water down blood. The water 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 and a filthy car, baseball cap, picked at skin, too much eyeliner.

So maybe you could never imagine that. But she was. As getting one who knew her,

asked the multitude of men who knew her. As the ones I would like to line up against a wall execution style and actually execute. As her first mind-fuck of a boyfriend at age 14, the obsess of one that followed in high school. As the professors married men, random men, apparent friends, the one of first-gay were crack, the noxie cotton. As her coach who slept with a young woman on his team and pulled her into a coke-fueled party scene while she

“was still a teenager, he denies all this today. I find myself fixated on the men. They circle”

a memory like these loser deadbeat ghosts or something. How dare they have a 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 BMX's doing tricks, riding down a little hill. The girls were all clumped together, watching these young peacocks threaten their stuff, knowing their job was to sit there

and be impressed. They were nearly silent, whispering among themselves by 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 fentanyl on the streets these days, and 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 ride. 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 bed 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 it 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 dig 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 faded away into the next room, trying to clear the table,

innocuous text, asking if I remember the drawing in our middle school French books and went

with a word febla, meaning weak. It looked like a man with no bones making a face like he had just eaten something distastefully blind. Growing up, my sister delighted in imitating the man febla. You're making me crack up. She did it so often and 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 text 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, not a other fucking knark." 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 31, 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 pm. I'm glad that she saw her counselor that day. They loved one another very much.

A four o'clock, she has a 47 second outgoing call to Allen. F-42, there is an incoming call from

Allen for 54 seconds. A four o'clock, she calls Gary for one 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 439, she has an outgoing call to Tim for one second. At 440, she has a call out to Jerry for one minute. Are you Allen, 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 fentanyl? I don't think Sasha saw it coming. You suck her 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 two days before she died, she said, "Hi, surprise, surprise, rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." LOL. Her autopsy says 654 p.m. as the time of death. Some time between 440 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 of I-95. 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, I 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 off-track 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 no

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 drive 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,

even met you. You may have called her Sasha. 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 long-hand addition and subtraction in the back of our daybook with people's initials, how much they owed or paid her, how much she owed and paid and returned. 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 slowed down in 1995, 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 cost 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 in 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 mast. 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 you never let me enter.

But I froze. Because I didn't know what I'd do once I was inside. Delivered some Joan of Arc, Oprah, Hulk Hogan's beach, 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 I 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 ached 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-mole, 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 fuck you.

Fuck you, because you're still here and there will never be another her.

Fuck you, because I will always think about you. You are my dealer now, man. You don't be 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. Not to get powers. We first broadcast the story years ago, and since then, Nadiya has expanded

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 your dad,

that you have never ever ever thought about. That's in a minute.

Chicago Bubble Radio. One of our program continues.

“Is this American life in my request? 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 there are a couple of years ago. We've arrived at a two of our program act, too. Comento Mori. Is that, is that tactile to obscure? I was hoping it would be a kind of a play on Momento Mori, which is, you know, like, a moment of awareness of one's own death. But even

I know, maybe that's do obscure. But anyway, a lot of this story happens in the comments section of Facebook, so, you know, Comento Mori. Anyway, Seventy Fool, explains. After someone you love guys, suddenly even their most annoying traits in retrospect, seem endearing. Blake Burke Hart's friend was his guy Dave Mori. 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, you couldn't order food in the movies. And he had this laugh.

“I remember that kind of bugging me like he would just start talking real fast.”

It's hard to do an impression for you to be like, "Come on, Blakey boy, woohoo, come on!" And he'd like grabbed me and like shake my shoulders and stuff if he was excited about just the dumbest thing like a new joke he wrote. 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 yeah, he would go up to people that he had

only met once or twice and say, "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. If you, I heard a song played on church bells recently you guys and it just, it was like, you know what he's just and you're like, oh, like, something like shifts inside you, you know? And I heard this song and I just wanted to do my best to replicate it to see a bit effects you guys in the scene, okay? That's a recording of a set Dave did on October 10, 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 three weeks of doctors trying to jumpstart 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 was going to be

taken off my support. I just said 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 to night after you go see Dave. We just made a whole night out of it and just kind of made a basically awake for Dave and 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 Mar. Then his 1700 Facebook friends began to post ulogies of him to his Facebook wall. That's in prayers. I had a gigantic crush on Dave one admitted. Another said, let's all be the most Dave Mar versions of ourselves. Blake's post kept it simple. Everyone, 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.

it works. So two weeks later, I'm Thanksgiving Day. There was a post on Dave's Facebook page.

“From Dave. Oh, man. It was, it was, it's so hard to explain.”

This is Dave Mar. Spoiler alert. You're alive. I, yeah, spoiler. I'm here. His friends all whipped out their phones in the middle of the Thanksgiving dinner and started shouting in joy on his Facebook page. People are saying like, no one celebrates Thanksgiving. The way Dave

celebrates Thanksgiving, 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. In 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 mouth the words, what the fuck? Dave had been in the coma for a month. He's a type one 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 trips 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 walked 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 Saw your thing of being at your own funeral. We get to hear all the things people

“say about you. You get to finally find out how you're seeing 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

Ulegies 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 in 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 two and three and three thirty 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 that I misused 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 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 Mars still with us. Until you hear a 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 to 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 bummed through actually looked like from the outside. There's pretty good ones in here. This one I had forgotten existed. 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. 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. A bunch of posts perplexed them just because they were so random. There was one from an ex-girlfriend who is appreciative of the fact that he broke up with her

And also, quote, "unreasonably sweaty." Why? Yeah, absurd, right? Like it's so easy.

“Not to include that sentence. But his 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 got it 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 as to me. Yeah. Yeah, it's just really sweet. It's really 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. It 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 eulages. Even though everyone was being so nice, he thought they're all wrong. I know that people don't really talk shit about someone when they've died, but 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 eulages, 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 that got me to this place in the first place. And like on the one hand while it's moving to here 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 fucked up it was that I did this stupid thing to you.

“Right and that's why it was like it's very different the experience with my family because my family”

was pretty aware that and they had been hurt by 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 effusive 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. When missing your own funeral it actually kind of stopped

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

Blake got to watch his loved one come back to life. That's really the thing with fantasizing about he gets excited just thinking about the day Dave woke up. Yeah just to relive that moment again and

“again it would be priceless because that's the happiest I think I've ever felt.”

I think it just makes me a little happier to be around and 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 Phil she used to be a producer at our show. She is the author of a book about complex PTSD called what my bones know. I'm at more of healing from complex trauma. The living Dave Mar, these days, how's the podcast this is your afterlife? X3, funeral for a stranger. So this last story is about a guy who goes through a funeral for somebody he does not know it all

and has to piece together all the stuff you would want to know in that kind of situation. The guy who did this wrote us an email at the radio show. There was no subject hitting in the scene. The very first line was a link to an obituary for another guy named Eddie Ferganney.

Eddie had died a few weeks before. He was young when he died, only 35. The email began,

dear to 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 in our show, Dana Chivas. 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 detached to the email was an essay. It was four pages long. He didn't admit quickly after Eddie Ferganney'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. Do you write radio shows a lot?”

I don't. 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 Ferganney'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 actually, it started with a good morning, so I said good morning. How is the housing in your son? And the next text says, "Hey, I got a job for you." And that's where my response came back, doesn't involve explosives. He says, "I tend to serve as a frogman in my absence."

Frogman is a nickname for a Navy SEAL. Eddie Ferganney and Mark have been Navy SEALs together. The funeral was going to be in San Diego and Mark who is 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 disation or it's like, "Well, do I really want to go to a funeral?" So many, I don't know in his absence. I don't know if it was anybody

but more. I probably would have made an excuse.

“So did you sit there for a minute or two before you run him back? Thinking of excuses, not to go?”

I would be lying if I said no. I did think of a few excuses, not to go because you know, funeral's aren't one of those things that people like attending to begin with and let it on 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 and 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.

(Music) Two weeks later he woke up and realized it was the morning of Eddie for Lonnie'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.

In the essay Charlie sent us, he writes, "There are pictures of his three children

“and a smiling face of Eddie in sealed 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 is an involved or affected. Found unusual that I could find no reporting on anything. You know, at the time I told myself that he was a Navy seal that had died in the line of duty.

You know, if it was a major firefighter or a conflict, there would be

there would be yellow ribbons, there would be praise, there would be flags everywhere, there would be people weeping in the streets if he had died in combat. So you knew it wasn't that. You knew it

“wasn't a battlefield death. Well, I remember it wasn't that bad. I didn't, you get that little”

bug in the back of your head because I'm like, "Okay, well, how did he die?" I was a car accident. The internet didn't shed any light on the mysteries 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. Here 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 for Lonnie was gone, it hadn't changed the course of Charlie's life at all, just of 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, corsages for Eddie for Lonnie'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 for Lonnie'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 stand-in. The funeral director lets him buy and Charlie finally

squeezes into the back row of mourners. The pews were all, were all full and the walls, especially the back of the walls were fined with men and three pea suits that were six foot four athletic eight belt wearing sunglasses. I mean, you're clearly maybe seals. People were giving eulogies and 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 still

faced, betrayed no emotion. Until Eddie for Lonnie's daughter, a seven-year-old named Zelma, broke down in tears. The little girl was, you know, sobbing, you know, in that sort of deep heartbroken, deep heartbroken sob and her stepmother, you know, was kind of been over and escorting her out through the door and she is just sobbing and again, you can imagine all these six foot plus, you know, 300 pound athletic Navy seals and 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, you know, right behind us and nothing anybody could do. There was a part of your essay that really struck me, um, but 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?”

I don't know what to say about that because a little girl, you know, wailing out there on the hallway,

stuff away. Charlie stuffed the grief away with an old military trick. He focused on accomplishing the

mission to deliver the flower's market sent him with. It's stupid, and I feel so embarrassed even

“admit this, but I mean, that's what I clung to is like, I need to give her the flowers, like I”

clung to that idea that my mission is to give her the flowers. Luckily, a voice in Charlie's head, his voice 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 not a, it's not an advantageous skill to have at most, especially combat arm fields. Empathy is not

a useful emotion to have, and the fact that I'm snuffling and carrying up is generally you know, if that is weak. Like I said, your empathy, your empathy centers tend to be atrophied. Well, I mean, I think you could also see it as proof that your empathy centers have an atrophied that they're actually quite present. They just come out at the wrong times with odd things,

“which is, I guess, although I think some people would argue that a funeral is the exact right time for”

it to come out. Oh, they're present. Yeah, no, no, no. 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 for Lonnie'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 me and it hit me almost like a touching light socket. He said, I'm glad people showed up. I was really knowing it was going to be there. 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,

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, 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 ulogy. 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 got lightheaded. Honestly, I had a physical, had a physical reaction. And I just, because there was nothing. There was nothing about it. I mean, no, no articles on it. Chaplain's invocation in time, nobody said anything about it. Both Mark and Eddie's widow, as I found out this morning and 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 the conversation, he learned something about Zelma's breakdown in the chapel. The reason why she wanted to leave is because she was ashamed. She felt that she felt ashamed that everybody knew her father had killed himself. And that they felt that she

that she was somehow this prior for father passing away that everybody in that memorial service,

who's there to support her. And she was, I don't know, it's just horrified to hear that. And that she wanted to leave. 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 sense of purpose is gone. It's, you have to evolve. But what I heard what Eddie did”

and I, I understood what he, I understood what he was thinking in that moment. I guess I'm

trying to explain them basically in terms of myself. But I, you know, maybe I, I can put myself

in a few other shoes, you know, with, when you talk about what? Uh, being able to put yourself in their shoes. I mean, can, can you talk about that? Are you up for it? Up for talking about that? So I've been kind of dreading this. You want to take a little break? I, I can keep it when I, I, I like to say I'm brave enough to take that subject on, but I, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't think I can, I don't think I can do that.

Okay, I'll think I can do that. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine.

“Charlie's head is owned by us 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 Medivac 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 Chivas, we wanted to share the phone up for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline that number is 800, 273, talk, 800, 273, talk. Like I 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 made your Richard

Ganon the second. Well, our program is produced today by Niki Meek. People put this episode of our show together and includes Elna Baker, Ben Calhoun, and the Chivas Shanko with the Dangerfield Hill where Elkin's Stephanie Food David Kestinbaum, Alvin Meella, Sto Nelson, Maddie Raven, Robin Semon, it was a ship literally set up in Christores to talk on that Tierney, July, Whittaker, and Diane

Wu. Senior producer for today's show is Brian Reed, a managing editor for today's show, he's Susan Burton, production album today's program from Ryan Rummery and Ruby Schwartz, special thanks to day to Judy Meelenek, Wes Gaurry, Melissa Franklin, and David Moran. 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 and 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 an 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 cursive episode is one that you might not think will be so hard to make anyway to listen and more importantly to help us fund our show

join at this American life dot org slash life partners. That link is also in the show notes.

Thanks as always Joe Brookham's co-founder, Mr. Tory Malatia. You know, I know it's been a week

“since Labor Day, but to be is still reminiscing about how much fun he had. I remember like”

shoplifting from Walgreens and spending the night in jail. I'm here at glass. Back next week was more stories of this American life. Next week on the podcast of this American life, according to his a teenager, her mom got remarried

was a terrible idea. Her mom noticed. I would have liked to have heard how wonderful I was. Instead of out there, I would have had my wedding. 30 years later, Courtney and her mom finally tried to talk it out next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.