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Nadia Bowers was pregnant when she got the news in July 2015 that her older sister, Sasha, had been found unresponsive in her car in the parking lot of a restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut. Later, she learned that Sasha, who had struggled with addiction for years, died of a fentanyl overdose. Bowers’ grief soon turned to pursuit. She experienced a powerful drive to find the dealer, the stranger who had dealt Sasha her final blow.
Bowers details this quest in her new memoir Dear Dealer, writing that she felt she needed to take action because “there’s a murderer on the loose.”
The book is based on her 2018 This American Life segment, in which she read a series of letters she’d written to Sasha’s imagined drug dealer. When I spoke to Bowers, an actress married to fellow performer Corey Stoll, she said that writing those letters was like reaching out to “a twisted pen pal.” As a new mom, she didn’t want her baby to absorb the pain she was feeling. “I had all this anger, but it didn’t belong in the nursery,” Bowers said. So, she channeled it into letters, and into a yearslong quest to track down the dealer.
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I was drawn to Dear Dealer because I deeply related to Bowers’ transformation into, as she writes, “the most basic Nancy Drew” after her sister’s death. In the winter of 2021, my sister, Jackie, died from complications due to years of alcohol abuse. She was 40 years old, and she was found in a hotel in a small town in Colorado. I hated imagining her alone in some rundown room in her final days and hours. It probably wouldn’t have felt any less tragic if she’d died in her own apartment, surrounded by her things, but I still hate thinking of that hotel room. In my mind, it’s drab and lonely, the kind of place the down-and-out character in a movie stays when they’ve hit rock bottom.
In the wake of her death, I cursed Jackie for not calling me back, and not calling our dad back, that entire weekend. Why didn’t she answer? Why hadn’t I made plans to have her come visit me in Texas sooner? If we’d seen each other, maybe whatever events had led to her starting to drink again after a year of sobriety could have been avoided. As anyone who has lost someone to substance abuse issues knows, though, we can follow all the “what ifs,” but the trail always ends in the same spot. There isn’t anything we could have done to change the outcome. That fact doesn’t stop us from asking.
Once the all-consuming crash of the early days of loss started to settle, I needed to know who Jackie talked to or saw in her final days and hours. Did some depraved lunatic drug her? Were there clues that could help me piece together the story? And if I did piece it together, would it even matter? It wouldn’t bring her back. I called the police in Colorado. No response. I talked to a friend of Jackie’s who’d spoken to my sister that weekend. She told me Jackie had been talking to a long ago ex-boyfriend. I called him even though I couldn’t stand him. I was angry she’d reached out to this this guy, who’d treated her so terribly, and not her family who loved her. I had to channel my rage somehow, so following these breadcrumbs became an obsession. The ex-boyfriend gave me the number of a stranger. Jackie had cryptically sent this person’s number to him that weekend, telling him this was someone she’d been with in that hotel, in case he needed to call it.
My heart was pounding when I dialed the number. The stranger on the other end of the line had seen Jackie, but she didn’t know what happened. At least, that’s what she told me. My detective work didn’t lead to some grand revelation; it just posed more questions. In 2021, I had no idea that playing detective after these types of losses is much more common than I thought.
Heidi Jokipii, a Ph.D. student in health sciences at Finland’s Tampere University, wrote her master’s thesis on the grief and coping processes of siblings following a substance-related death. In her research, she specifically looked at this drive to put the puzzle pieces together.
“I was struck by the powerful need to understand what had happened,” Jokipii says. “Many siblings spent a great deal of time trying to make sense of the circumstances surrounding the death, searching for answers and wondering whether they could have done something differently. When questions remained unanswered, it often made the grieving process more difficult.”
In her 2018 book Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss, Stephanie Wittels-Wachs called this drive to know the “manic investigative phase.” Wittels-Wachs, CEO of Lemonada Media and creator, with Jessica Cordova Kramer, of the podcast Last Day, lost her brother, Harris, to an overdose in 2015. That loss has informed all her work since. Her memoir was “an emotional meltdown in real time,” but her most recent book, Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis, takes everything she’s learned through the podcast and distills it for readers who want to understand and explore all aspects of the epidemic. For Wittels-Wachs, trying to figure out what happened to Harris also became part of the grieving process.
“I had nowhere to put my love for him anymore,” she told me. “If you can’t actively have them in your life, how can you interact with them? You can investigate it; you can explore it. It keeps the relationship going.”
Siblings are often referred to as forgotten mourners or a “forgotten group.” The experience can be isolating, because typically the focus is on the grief of the parent or the spouse. People forget that siblings are often the people we’ve known the longest, the only other human we share so many memories and experiences with. When you lose a sibling, the shift in identity can be shocking.
Bowers said the idea to write letters to the dealer came pretty quickly after Sasha’s death. She figured she could publish an open letter in the New Haven Register, and maybe the shadowy figure who handed her sister the drugs that took her life would see it. Maybe they’d be consumed by guilt.
“There was this person out there that had changed my life and hers,” Bowers said. “I wanted to rattle their conscience. You don’t get to just walk away.”
Vanessa Shimer is senior coordinator of marketing and engagement at Shatterproof, an organization dedicated to removing the stigma of addiction and substance abuse–related deaths. Her brother, James, died in 2019 of a fentanyl overdose. She remembers the exact moment she got the call.
“That’s where my life stopped,” she said. “I’m not the same person anymore. I have a different brain and mindset. Everything changed in that moment.”
Shimer calls the experience of losing James “suffocating” and “isolating.” She found herself calling the police department, giving them details about the car the suspected dealer drove, and working her way backward to try to map out the timeline of James’ final hours.
“I almost put a movie together of what it looked like and who was there,” said Shimer. She contacted anyone he spoke to the entire week leading up to his death. She stalked suspected contacts online and found out where they lived. “I became obsessed,” said Shimer. “I probably still am, if I’m being honest.”
Eight years later, she still calls the police occasionally to see if there are any new updates, and if new technology might help them find the dealer. When she’s at the grocery store, she’ll be struck by a sudden realization that this person, this imagined killer, might be shopping in the next aisle. I don’t live in the same town my sister died in, but I do sometimes transport myself there, wondering what that woman who saw my sister in her last days is doing. Does she think of Jackie at all? Or is Jackie just