MDF IV
Zeke and I spoke a few times when he was in San Diego with his mom. He seemed much better, much calmer and more relaxed. He still wasn’t quite right, you could tell something was off, but he was clearly recovering. I asked him if he knew whether or not he was still having delusions, and he said he wasn’t sure. His mom didn’t know quite what to do. I was texting with her, and she told me that she brought him to the family psychologist.
My dad is a psychiatrist, and he thought it sounded like Zeke was working too hard for too long, and somehow snapped, had some kind of event, that made him break with reality. He thought that Zeke had a temporary chemical imbalance, that needed a combination of long term therapy and some medications in the short run that could help put his chemistry back in order. When I mentioned this to Zeke’s mom, she was very adversarial at first, not liking the sound of psychiatric drugs. But I assured her that this was not a case of covering up depression with medicine, Zeke probably had a legitimate chemical imbalance that might take years to rectify on its own, but could be corrected in weeks with medicine.
I told her that the family psychologist might not be a great idea, since he was planning to come back to the Bay Area, and what he really needed now was a psychiatrist to prescribe him medicine to balance him out. When I spoke with Zeke several days later he told me that he had gone to a psychiatrist but had stopped taking the medicine. I asked his mom about it, and she said that she had given him the medicine at first, but then he started binge drinking, and she thought it was dangerous to give him the medicine, it was fatal if taken with alcohol.
I had one person running the store, but the hours were erratic and I wasn’t sure she was doing any good, so I started interviewing more florists. It was a hard sell, since I didn’t know how long their tenure would be; as soon as Zeke returned they would be out of a job. I was also working with Chris our marketing guy, coming up with a plan to be carried out when Zeke returned. I spoke with Zeke one day, and told him about the plans Chris and I had when he came back. I never pushed Zeke to return, I always said things like, ‘whenever you’re ready’, ‘take your time’, etc.
A couple days later Zeke texted me that he was coming back up to the Bay Area. Our talk had enthused him and he wanted to come back up. When I found out I was skeptical, but his mom said that it was what Zeke wanted to do. I told her that it was premature, and that as long as he was not under psychiatric supervision, he could not come back to work. So even if he came back up to SF, he wouldn’t have his job, and I couldn’t pay him. But he came up anyway.
The day he came up I had the best interview I had, with a florist named Anna. She seemed perfect. She was currently working full time, and was looking for something new. The problem was I didn’t know what I was offering her exactly, because once Zeke came back, I couldn’t afford to have her on any more. She wanted the job, but given the situation it was impossible for her to take it, she couldn’t afford to be out of work. So we left it up in the air.
Zeke flew back up to the Bay Area. The next day he wanted to meet me at the store, to retrieve a cord for his computer he left there. We spoke for a while, and much of our conversation was contentious. There was definitely something not right about him, but most of the time he seemed fine, so it was hard to look at it that way. When I got to the store it was closed, even though it was supposed to still be open. There was a note from the girl who was working the store that she had to leave early, and that her father was sick, and she was also quitting as he needed her full time care. So now I didn’t have a florist to open the next day.
Zeke met me at the store. When he looked at the flower inventory in the cooler (which was actually a jewler’s safe from early last century), he was disheartened immediately. He was shocked at how bad our inventory looked. “These buckets are all supposed to be full” I remember him saying as he looked at the display in the cooler, which admittingly did look a little worn & tired, even though I had bought flowers from the market that morning.
Zeke and I talked for about an hour I think. I told him some of the marketing initiatives that I was discussing with Chris, one of them being an opening party, as we had never had a grand opening. I told him we would have a wine & cheese opening and advertise locally with door hangers. When I mentioned the wine, he started arguing with me about how irresponsible it was to give out wine to ‘strangers’. Not strangers, but neighbors I said, and its what every gallery does on Thursdays in most of the Bay Area cities, had he not heard of first Thursday?
But he went on and on about how irresponsible it was, and what kind of partnership did we have if I didn’t listen to him. The kind of partnership where I didn’t tell him what to do when it came to flowers and he didn’t tell me how to run marketing I told him. But he wasn’t arguing logically or rationally, he wasn’t right, something was off. We left off not in great shape, he was really concerned after looking in the cooler and our conversation about marketing.
On the walk back home I texted Zeke’s mom that he wasn’t right, and wasn’t going to come back to work any time soon. His mom texted back that she agreed, and was going to find a psychiatrist in the Bay Area that could see him. When I got home I told my girlfriend that I was going to call the florist Ana and offer her a job, as I couldn’t wait for Zeke to come back. I would tell Ana that she could have the job indefinitely, even if Zeke was ready to come back.
The next day, Zeke’s mom texted me a few times, frustrated that the psychiatrists on her list didn’t have any openings. She would tell me that she tried 3 of 19, 6 of 19, 12 of 19, and finally told me that none of the psychiatrists on the list had any openings. She also asked if I had spoken to him, it seems his phone had been off all day. I hadn’t been able to reach him either that day, and she was clearly worried.
The next morning I received a text from Zeke’s mom, telling me that Zeke had killed himself the day before, and she was coming up to get his stuff.
