I called Cubby today & talked to him on the phone. I\u2019ve been trying to work up the courage to do that ever since his wife died on Easter Sunday morning. I sent him a text that morning but every time since when I thought I had a few minutes to call him I found a way to not do it.<\/p>\n
I called him earlier in the year when Ronata took a turn for the worse. I had to leave a message and I almost couldn\u2019t get any coherent words out. He\u2019d been struggling with her being seriously ill since her stroke in 2010 & the thought of another death close to me knotted me up completely.<\/p>\n
Cubby told me he had to quit his job at the union because he was basically going crazy. He had thought it would be better for him to go back to work but it wasn\u2019t. Now he\u2019s on partial disability while he tries to make sense of his life. He\u2019s in therapy as I am. I told him about the Bereavement Support Group that Kaiser sponsors that has been very helpful to me. He said he would check out their East Bay schedule.<\/p>\n
For those who don\u2019t know, the night Zach was killed I was mixing audio for a show at the Herbst and had turned my phone off. Jeremy was frantically trying to reach me and all he could think of was that he had Cubby\u2019s phone number from 3 1\/2 years ago when he came out to work out of the hall for a couple of weeks during the busy season. Cubby called Stacey, who was stage managing that night & got her to have me turn my phone on. Cubby\u00a0told me to call Jeremy immediately. I knew it was bad but I thought something had happened to Rosalie. Never in a million years would I have guessed what actually did happen.<\/p>\n
After I talked to Jeremy and started putting the show stuff in order so I could leave – in a daze, thank you Stacey & Smitty – \u00a0I talked to Cubby again about some other jobs I had scheduled for the next two days.. He told me very forcefully that I needed to get with my family and not worry \u2013 indeed, not to even think about \u2013 any work issues. He said over and over, \u2018Whatever you need, I\u2019ll be there for you.\u2019 And I knew he wasn\u2019t bullshitting because he doesn\u2019t bullshit. He stuck with me on the phone as I was driving to Teresa\u2019s.<\/p>\n
So we\u2019re talking today about grief and how it manifests \u2013 mostly crying jags. I told him I had been pretty good for several weeks but yesterday out of nowhere I started sobbing and couldn\u2019t stop for about ten minutes. He said yeah that\u2019s weird, the same thing happened to him about the same time.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot more to the story of that awful night but for now all I want to do is say I talked to Cubby today & I didn\u2019t start bawling. I guess that\u2019s good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I called Cubby today & talked to him on the phone. I\u2019ve been trying to work up the courage to do that ever since his wife died on Easter Sunday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,4],"tags":[25,26,27,339,28,6],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-zach-stories","tag-cubby","tag-grief","tag-jeremy","tag-stacey-c","tag-that-awful-night","tag-zach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":739,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thezachproject.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}