‘A goodbye letter’: Inside an NYC woman’s search for her late best friend’s note
CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN (PIX11) – In November, Zettie Shapey’s best friend Caroline Meister sent her a letter from California.
And it was a really good one, Meister promised over the phone; it was really long and she’d put cool things in the envelope.
“We hadn’t written letters to each other in a while, so I was really excited,” Shapey told PIX11 News on Wednesday.
But the letter never made it to Shapey’s place in Crown Heights. In March, her best friend unexpectedly died.
Now, Shapey is doing everything she can to find that small piece of her friend of over 15 years.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye,” Shapey said. “I feel so hungry to touch any more scraps of her and have any more pieces of her back.”
The letter was sent from a monastery in Carmel Valley, California, where Meister was living at the time. Meister went for a hike on March 18 and was reported missing. Four days later, she was found dead at the base of a waterfall.
Shapey is hoping for a miracle to find the letter, addressed to her place on Saint Marks Avenue near Nostrand Avenue. She submitted a claim via USPS, reached out to the monastery and solicited neighbors to check their mail piles. A stranger in California even checked the post office near the monastery with Shapey on speakerphone.
Now, she plans to put up fliers and contact the USPS Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta.
“In the face of such a sudden death and traumatic death, it feels like the closest I can get to a goodbye letter,” Shapey said.
And knowing Meister, she likely wasn’t exaggerating about how special the letter was. Meister was a talented artist with a knack for writing, great handwriting, and a curious mind. Their friend group had never really taken to smartphones, so they found creative ways to keep in touch.
Shapey and Meister became fast friends in high school. They’d grown up two blocks apart in an Illinois suburb, and Shapey was inspired by her friends’ ability to cut through the noise.
“I didn’t know that a person could just choose how to be,” she said. “We grew up in an Illinois suburb and there were really specific, unspoken ways of how one should be, and she just chose to be herself in spite of it all.”
Meister lived many different lives before she died. She studied waste disposal systems for a semester, once apprenticed with a cabinet maker, was a creek steward, ran programming for high school girls, and spent years in the Buddhist monastery. She most recently had plans to go back to school, which would have helped the two friends keep better contact.
“Caroline was this deeply seeking person, very fascinated with being alive,” Shapey said. “That was who I was going to grow old with … I really built my life with her and around her and was really excited to grow old together.”
The letter’s recovery, while tricky, feels totally within reach to Shapey, especially given how willing people are to help out.
“Crazy things are possible, impossible things are possible. People really want to help other people,” she said.
If you have any information about the missing letter, please contact helpfindmymissingletter@gmail.com.
Emily Rahhal is a digital reporter from Los Angeles who has covered New York City since 2023. She joined PIX11 in 2024. See more of her work here and follow her on Twitter here.
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