Come to Redding—Where the Sun Is Always Shining and It’s a Good Place to Be Alive – Zach’s Story (Part 1)

Zachary had a lot to live for…he just didn’t know it. Unless he could find out what that was exactly, he had a plan—more like an exit strategy. In his mind, it was the only way. Because what waited for him on the Other Side was something he missed and desperately needed: his family. They were gone and he was left behind. And that had to be remedied.

The 54-year-old dark-skinned man with closely cropped hair, a “Soul Patch” goatee and somber, “seen-too-much” eyes, pushes his chair closer to the interviewer’s desk. As he does, he lays his arm down on the desktop, rolls up the sleeve on his red Buffalo plaid shirt, points to his wrist and says emphatically, “Look…look at this!”

Glancing down, the interviewer sees them—four haphazardly placed, healed-over knife cuts, ranging from 2″-3” in size. “That’s what I did,” the man says. “In my car that night in the parking lot of my storage unit. I was wanting to die…and waiting to die. And I almost succeeded.”

Zachary had it all worked out. What he was going to do, when he was going to do it and how it would play out—right down to the security guard who, he was certain, would find his body in the morning and report his death to the police. But as the saying goes, the best laid plans—and even the worst laid ones—often go astray.

Picture-Perfect Parents…and All the Rest

For Zach, as it is with most people who set about “unaliving” themselves, it was not so much that he wanted to leave this earth as much as he wanted to end the pain. And there was a lot of pain: a deep, festering sore that kept pressing on his soul after his family members kept dying on him.  The saga began with his older brother who killed himself when he was 19 and Zach was 14. It was Zach who found him sprawled out on the bed—lifeless from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “It was definitely the drugs,” says Zach. “Otherwise, he never would have done it…I know that with complete certainty,” says Zach.

His brother’s death was the first blight on an otherwise idyllic childhood.  Zach was adopted, as were his two brothers and sisters. But unlike many adoptees, Zach never once felt as though he didn’t belong. He never felt compelled to embark on a quest for his “real” parents so he could find himself and know his place in the world.  He knew who he was: He was a Monroe, through and through.

Zach grew up in the Bay Area, in a place called Belmont. Back then Belmont was a picture-perfect town where nothing much happened, and unlike its cosmopolitan neighbor to the north, its residents were perfectly content for it to remain that way. “I grew up on a third of an acre and my dad, a biologist, grew organic vegetables and raised chickens,” Zach recalls fondly. While the chickens were “fertilizing the heck out of the organic garden,” the humans in the neighborhood were equally as prolific. “By the time I was eight years old, the place was littered with families,” says Zach. I think there were 18 kids just on my block alone.”

It was the ’70s, an era unspoiled by the impending invasion of high tech, fast fortunes and unfettered wokeness.  For Zach, it was a white-picket childhood where every day was the fourth of July. “Nobody locked their doors,” says Zach. “Parents kind of parented other children. The elementary school was nearby, and no one worried about their children walking to and from there—or anywhere.”

The Day All the Nice Stuff Stopped

All was quiet on the home front as well. In June and Wally Cleaver Country, there was little room for arguing—unless it was disputing who had caught the most fish on one of the family’s many camping trips. In this tribe, the ethos was simple: Go outdoors and let nature nurture everyone. “My family was happiest outdoors,” says Zach. “So, we camped almost every weekend and for vacations. This is why I was already familiar with Redding. We had spent a lot of years fishing on the Feather River and on Eagle Lake.”

With such an enviable childhood, how did things go so wrong? “By the time I was 12, things start to unravel at home,” says Zach. “My older brother was sneaking out of the house, smoking weed and getting drunk. Not long after that, drugs became the thing. And that’s when all the nice stuff stopped. We still went out camping. We were still happiest outdoors. But at home, things were different.”

On that fateful day when his sibling’s life was snatched from him, Zach’s childhood officially ended. “My brother’s suicide radically altered the trajectory of my family,” says Zach. “And even though we tried to function as a family, we were severely wounded—all of us. What would’ve happened if we had gone that way instead of this way? I’ll never know. All I know is that my mother was never the same, and neither was I…or any of us, really.”

The Summer I Turned Pretty Bad

It was the summer between Zach’s freshmen and sophomore year when he began following in his brother’s footsteps. Zach was 14, still reeling from his brother’s death, when he and a buddy decided to raid his friend’s parents’ liquor cabinet. “We experimented and were drinking hard liquor straight out of the bottle,” says Zach. “Not surprisingly, we both got alcohol poisoning.”

By his sophomore year, Zach was towing the line, not drinking or partying; instead, basketball was his obsession. His Junior year, however, was the year of “party hardy” …perhaps more aptly termed, “restrained revelry.” He had at least learned something from his brother’s mistakes. “I didn’t do drugs, only a little bit of weed and alcohol,” says Zach. “And I didn’t sneak out at night.”Fortunately, it didn’t take long for Zach to become more future-minded. Eventually, he went to college, graduated and became an in-home physical therapist with a country-club clientele. Life was good; that is, until 2004 when his mom passed away and over a decade later, his dad also died.

Parents die. It’s the normal of cycle of life. But for those for whom loss has lingered from a young age, any level of grief can be soul crushing. The death of his brother as a teen; his sister at the age of 54; as well as a serious girlfriend at age 26—all of those losses created a hole in Zach’s heart…a hole that only got bigger after his parents died.  Their family had been tight—tighter than most.

A Guy Walks into A Bar and…

Zach had been with his father for the last 100 days of his life—taking care of him in the family home. After his death, Zach’s drinking spiraled out of control. He went back to work, but was barely functional. As fate would have it, he had a neighbor named Bill, who was 32 years sober.  He recognized the signs of alcoholism and persuaded Zach to go to an AA meeting with him. “It was crazy because in my head, I was thinking, I don’t want to go,” says Zach. “But instead, what came out of my mouth was, ‘Yes, I will go…I have to go!'”

Zach continued going to the meetings for 16 months. But it was hardly smooth sailing.  “During that time, I had three relapses,” says Zach.  “And in the meetings, I’m skeptical. I’m thinking, who in here is not drinking? Everybody in that room says they have 8 years, or 15 years, or 20 years sober and I’m going, ‘Yeah, right…I know you’re drinking during the holidays.’”

One night, when Zach was on his third relapse, he locked himself out of his apartment.  “I’m incredibly drunk, says Zach. “I’ve got six days worth of drinking a hundred proof vodka. And who do I come across, but Bill, my neighbor.”  Seeing his condition, Bill drove him to Kaiser. It was Zach’s fifth time being hospitalized after going on a binge. But this time, it’s deadly serious. The doctor warns Zach his pancreas is shot and he needs to stop drinking immediately. “The nurses are pleading with me, recalls Zach. “The social workers are pleading with me. But nothing connects until this male nurse walks into my room.”

It sounds like a set-up for a joke. “A guy walks into a bar and…” Only in Zach’s version, there’s a different punch line. “A guy walks into a bar, then walks out three sheets to the wind. He ends up in the hospital and another guy walks into his hospital room and tells him, ‘Bill sent me.’”

Zach knows what “Bill sent me” means.  It was the “secret handshake” used by AA members referring to the organization’s founder, “Bill W”.  The nurse, who Zach surmises must also be a member of AA, then pulls up a chair by Zach’s bed and starts to share his own journey of addiction. “He talks for an hour,” says Zach. “And I thought, well this is different.  What nurse does that? And it was weird because he was my nurse only for that day…I never saw him again. Maybe he wasn’t even human.”

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Whether this messenger on a mission was a courier sent from above in the guise of  a nurse, or very much human, one thing’s for certain: God is good at getting our attention…using whatever means necessary to alter the trajectory of our lives in ways we could never anticipate. And Zach was no exception… Read how God dramatically altered Zach Monroe’s life in Part 2 of the story, “Come to Redding, Where the Sun ‘s Always Shining and It’s a Good Place Be Alive. “ (To be posted on August 12)