Feeling of Impending Doom:
aka Why I Will Never Own A Gun
by Michael P. Moran
“D o you suffer?” Normally when I’m naked in the locker room no one addresses me. It’s as if the removal of clothes issues a protective cone of silence. A stranger had penetrated my cone. This was a new experience.
Back in high school, the showers traumatized me. I entered that vast tiled room of a dozen nozzles and no curtains and showered following two muddy football practices. Each time I girded my loins with sweat-and-mud-soaked boxer shorts. Some of the upperclassmen, confident and completely nude, would hop up on the benches and parade down the plank like haughty gymnasts. If you turned too quickly you might catch from your quarterback a scrotal slap across the nose or a gorgon’s wink from an outside linebacker’s grundle.
It wasn’t until well past college that I felt comfortable enough to shower at the gym. Something about the YMCA locker room invited fraternity. A sense of place, of community. These men, many of them with melanoma scars older than me, would see each other daily for their free morning coffee and necessary heart stimulations; these men, conscious of their bodies’ failings, set their minds toward life. Shoeless, sockless, pantless, they discussed the Afghan place where they ate the previous night or the next 12 holes of golf they intended to complete that afternoon.
On one summer morning while I was stripping down, this curious stranger eyed my constant glucose monitor (CGM) stuck to my abdomen, nodded at it, and asked, “Do you suffer?” No American ever asked me about my medical history with such astute phrasing. His accent placed his upbringing across the pond. I knew what he meant, confirmed that I was a diabetic, discussed how my mother diagnosed me when I was seven years old, and explained the technology behind my nifty CGM. I descended to the weight room with that question in mind—Do I suffer? Occasionally.
I love my life, even with its passing George-Bailey-at-the-bridge moments. I harbor few regrets. No doubts about the continents not visited, the people I’ve not met, the relationships never formed. At the feast of life I savor satisfaction, from the first cheese chunk sliced off the block during kitchen preparations to the last blueberry adrift in the juices of its devoured mates. I’ve found ways to love the crumb as much as I love the bread. Summer days I wake with a kiss from my wife who brews the first pot of coffee before she showers for work. With that first cup creamed and Stevia-sweetened, I prepare the pancakes or eggs or pizza bagel that my child wants for breakfast, and while I cook, they and I speak of plot points J. K. Rowling could have pursued, or sing improvised Broadway show tunes. After I drop them off at summer camp for the day I swipe my card at the gym, slide on my 10-dollar wraparound headphones, and disappear for an hour into the Korpiklaani Pandora station, with advertisements keeping me company. Showered and slightly sore, I pack a salad, drive to a North Shore town, purchase a coffee, and walk and think and read and write and eat in any number of combinations, all of them right. With the day having much length left, I pick up my daughter from camp, return home to cook dinner, and welcome my wife home with a kiss on her lips and a glass of cabernet in my hand. Then, by the fire pit, decaf earl grey in my mug, wife and daughter to either side, The Great British Bake Off streaming on the laptop, I carve and sand magic wands out of our fallen oak branches.
But that’s the summer. September through June, I massage my steering wheel and release controlled exhales that some stunted wonder in me hopes will transform into a massive coffee-tainted finger of God with the power to annihilate the red sea of brake lights clogging my daily commute on standstill expressways and expect-delays parkways. Those days I hear the siren call of the working class. It urges me to cut across three lanes of traffic for the nearest exit ramp and haul ass back home. Sometimes that tempting call suggests I drive beyond my exit completely and drive and drive and drive—Race the sun west, man!—until my Accord chokes on its last drop of gas and sputters to an ignoble death somewhere in the depths of Pennsylvania’s rectangular nothingness. Here, I’d proclaim, is where my life begins!
And occasionally the siren song is true to its mother tongue. Sometimes, when I’m eye to eye with myself in the five-inch square mirror in my office and I’m sliding the tie’s knot ever closer to my swallow bulge, I wonder if I’d be better off walking in my pajamas down the block to the main road with a cup of coffee in my hand and taking a sip before a speeding landscape truck sends me cartwheeling high in the pink morning sky. Honestly, whether the “accident” breaks my favorite mug, my femur, my ribs, or my skull, I was broken before the truck even hit me. That’s broken-spirited me, not suicidal me. That’s the sulking, I-don’t-like- this-version-of-my-life me. Some weeknights after 10 p.m. when I’m grading papers, this feeling, straight-faced and encouraging, directs my eyes to the metal garbage pail, then to the waterproof matches on the kitchen counter, then to the papers, then to the pail, then to the matches, papers, pail, matches, papers pail matches, paperspailmatches. “Should I…should I set my students’ essays on fire?” Well, when you say it out loud, it just sounds silly.
No, these are not suicidal thoughts. Destructive thoughts they are, though. They’re the product of a creative mind yoked and lurching to break either the harness that constrains or the driver who whips. I’m alternating between gas and brake on an hour’s commute when I’d rather be alternating between electric and hand sander and keeping track of neither minutes nor hours. I’m grading essays when I’d rather be writing them. I’m washing from my hands high-school germs when I’d rather be stained fingertips to biceps in typewriter ink, sawdust, and paint.
That’s my life, right now, and to that I acquiesce. When I half consider impaling my Honda’s engine with a Scottish claymore or keeping my foot on the gas when 10 miles of cars ahead of me have their lives on pause in traffic, I recognize I don’t want to perform the work I’m obligated to do. Some folks simply phone out sick that day and wait for the feeling to pass.
These thoughts, though unpleasant, I manage. In my earlier years of teaching, a mentor told me no one is ever truly happy at work. I countered, saying artists and performers seemed genuinely enthusiastic, excited to arrive each day, thrilled to see a project through to completion, satisfied to reflect each evening on their daily exertions. “Nah,” she said, “everyone hates work. You work so that you can afford the life you want, your real life, outside of work.” But it was on one of those jaunts through life outside of work nearly a decade ago that an ideation weaseled its way perilously close to action.
While our picky petite mutt Maxie was contemplating having herself a squat, I spied our landlord’s rusted basketball hoop, and an idea ancient and familiar, alluring and confident, spoke up and terrified me: “With her leash, from that hoop, hang yourself.”
I didn’t want to, though. Worse lives were being lived. The day, as it went, provided no reason. My noon lunch of a salad topped with hummus was nourishing and forgettable. At work I taught. At least one student walked away pocketing a single insight nugget (and that, another colleague told me, is the reason you return at 7 a.m. the next morning).
That particular day, lit by indirect sunlight, was at its height of suburban mediocrity— with a single hand wrapped in a King Kullen plastic shopping bag, I prepared myself to scoop dog shit from our street. When it came to her bowel movements, Maxie was particular. At our old apartment in Wantagh, the landlords marked off a small dog run just beyond their yard, a rectangle comprised of timber and wood chips and garbage pails, a place Maxie deemed unsuitable for her business.
But as I spun Maxie in circles, trying to mimic her own natural spiral that ended with her rear paws marching to her front, her spine arched, her eyes set on me to guarantee her safety during this vulnerable moment, my head pivoted and demanded I look. Look.
“Look how easy it would be. Unleash the dog. She doesn’t need to see this. Lob the swivel bolt snap through the hoop and drop it through the leash handle. Pull tight. Open the bolt snap and feed the leash through. Give yourself enough of an opening to fit your head. Your feet will stay on the ground. It’s okay. Walk forward until the leash cuts into your neck. Then go limp.”
Suicide is not the answer, but it is quite persistent, like that kid in your fifth grade class who always had some asinine comment to make, and though the teacher multiple times a day told him, “No, Grimsley, that’s not it,” he fired his arm in the air and launched himself half out of his desk with machine-gun-fired OOHs and AAHs and MISS MISS MISS. You know he’s wrong, but you can’t ignore the fuck. And what if, just what if on this rare occasion he’s formulated the correct answer?
“Grimsely, you were saying?”
“You’ll sleep before you die. Slight pain. Less discomfort. Then sleep. Then nothing.” I know this song, I thought as I held Maxie’s leash limply in my bagged hand.
I heard it in my grandmother’s kitchen when I was a kid. Siblings and parents and grandmother sat in the living room watching Jeopardy! one summer evening while I stood in the kitchen squinting down into the glint from the knife drawer.
Alex Trebek’s voice narrated the suggestion: “Two wrists. The Daily Double. This exit from the world of the living requires long, deep slices from a steak knife that will open your life’s ebb to the elements and, if done correctly, will ensure your family won’t hear it because the process, if you don’t whimper, will be so silent, so quick.”
What is the answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking?
That evening in my grandmother’s kitchen, I lifted one steak knife from the drawer and pressed the teeth into the naturally perforated flesh where arm met hand. The bracelet line. How many years did my flesh creases promise me? I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to feel this anymore, this overwhelming sadness, this fear of some ethereal wrong waiting to take shape and drag me to a yet unimagined hell.
“Hun, did you get your juice?” my mother called from the living room. Juice. Diabetes. Low sugars. I’m dropping! I set the knife in its slot and poured a double of orange juice. My heart kicked at my ribs like a protagonist trapped in a submerged car trying to break the windshield. Juice leaked from my lips and tears from my eyes. What was I going to do with that knife?
Maxie, at a leash length from her excremental swirl, stood staring at me as if I were a stranger. My body wavered like a white flag in a mild breeze. I know this feeling, I thought, but I didn’t yet know the term—IMPENDING DOOM.
A FEELING OF IMPENDING DOOM. Those were the words I wanted to share with my new general practitioner at a recent physical.
“How are you doing?” she asked me. I indicated my swollen stomach and the pain in my ribs.
“That’s a pulled muscle. Should take three to four weeks to heal. But you, with the diabetes, with the myasthenia, could take twice as long.”
I exhaled through my nose and sucked my teeth and scrambled in my thoughts from anger to despair to indignation. Fuck you, diabetes, for complicating everything, for making the already difficult stuff like healing even harder.
“So, how are you?” she repeated. “Not, you know, with the insulin and the physical difficulties, and the diabetes. How are you? Really, how are you?”
That’s the problem with having a terminal illness like diabetes—even when you keep everything down (your sugars, your weight, your cholesterol) and you’re in overall good health, you’re operating at a baseline of sick. Daily you inflict harm on yourself. Daily you pierce your skin with sterile objects and witness drops of yourself leak out. Even if the syringe or lancet tips miss a nerve, they still leave a mark. At times, I fidget with those metaphorical splinters accumulated with chronic illness, those minor wounds that embed reminders I’m not well, and there they stay and swell and redden: a tender part of me, tender to the touch and the mention. Oh, to lop off such an irritant! If I could isolate my disease to a single digit, I’d gladly make turkey drawings short one tiny feather; to my right hand, I’d learn to split wood lefty; to an entire leg, I’d propel myself through the world on crutches and count myself saved for having rid myself of this disease. And to my new life sans a limb, I’d adapt, perhaps eventually settling into a predictable life pattern.
As a diabetic, you have your insulin routines, but nothing about being a diabetic is habitual—living becomes a conscious act. What are my sugars? How many carbs will I consume at this meal? At what time will I have my next meal? How much insulin should I inject to cover this meal and see me through to the next? Every choice is made toward life, toward seeing the next hour and, with successful managing, another day. Misjudge the dosage or the carb count, underestimate how much exercise you did that day, fail to account for that little virus bubbling in your gut, and you could wake up on a stretcher. I’ve joked with friends and colleagues that if you ever find me unconscious with two empty packages of Starburst jelly beans in my lap, do not resuscitate. I’ve made my choice.
I joke about suicide because I think about suicide. My diabetic episodes have granted the thought elbow space at my brain’s bar. Suicidal thoughts have rubbed elbow marks on the wood polish. They have visited enough and spoken loud enough and lingered after closing long enough for me to know I should never own a gun.
People pretend their mental states are set as the concrete slabs in their basements. They ignore the growing fissures, paint over them with Drylok but don’t treat them, and risk dooming the whole house. Consider the veterans and police officers, trained and trusted with their firearms, who perform a disservice to themselves with their service weapons. Our mental state is a state of being, a temporary position, a thing that changes with experience and time. A responsible person may purchase a handgun at age 26, but in time, due to anger or injury or alcohol or drug use or paranoia or Alzheimer’s or dementia or concussions from flag football on Saturday mornings, that person may become unstable and, when in possession of a weapon, a threat to self and others.
Granted, because of my CGM I am no longer startled by low sugars as if they were a crocodile lunging out of the marsh of poor life choices. Now, when I see that arrow turning downward or when the alarm buzzes me awake at night, I’m prepared with a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice (forgive my boast, but I can chug a single-serve bottle in three seconds). And while I’m in control 99.99% of the time, I’m well aware that at any moment of any day or night I can slip away from consciousness without losing consciousness, and that’s when I become a threat to more than just myself.
My instinct, however, is to fight death off, as I did one night in my early twenties. I drove, though I shouldn’t have, with impending doom riding shotgun to a familiar dive bar frequented by my fellow restaurant staffers. When I entered the bar my nostrils flared, my chest expanded with deep breaths yanked from the stratosphere, and I clenched two fists at my hips, ready to swing at something.
“What do you want, Mike? A drink?” Jen, the bartender, asked.
Nothing, I thought. I want nothing but for this feeling to stop. I made fish faces at her, unable to remember what I wanted, what that word, DRINK, meant at all. My eyes were watering; my throat was closing; my heart was accelerating.
“Oh shit, what’s happening bro? I haven’t seen you since—”A hand squeezed my shoulder and turned me for a greeting, but his blue eyes aglow with warmth and friendship and drink recoiled when met by eyes strange, cold, and deadly. I didn’t blink. I didn’t breathe. Hello, devil. Here was the source of all my fear and dread and if, perhaps, I fractured his grin, if I gouged out those glowing eyes, if I repeatedly pumped my fist through his face I could break his hold on me. He saw me standing at the bar, but when he looked in my distant eyes, he knew I was long gone, so he backed away as if he had just crossed paths with a mountain lion with its hackles up.
Something bad’s going to happen, something bad’s going to happen, I thought in retreat to my car, oblivious to the bad something already happening inside me. Luckily I didn’t bump shoulders with a hotheaded tough guy entering the bar or get questioned by shadowed figures behind a squad car’s spotlight. I was a suspicious-looking individual in the parking lot roaming car to car, trying the key in one lock and then another, muttering incoherencies into my shirt. If a cop stopped me, efforts to detain me would have escalated into violence. It’s easy to mistake a diabetic suffering hypoglycemia for a drunk prick resisting arrest. The police are trained to deal with diabetics, but in the moment an officer, rightfully fearing for his life, might drop me with 50,000 volts or a scattered grouping of 9mm shots to the torso.
My house was a two-minute drive from the bar. I remember only the red light and shifting into park in the driveway. Of course that feeling of impending doom walked with me up the unlit path to the house, and it possessed the living room where my mother was asleep on the couch. A show she was watching had ended, and the TV glowed blue in the darkness. Something’s here, I thought. Something’s going to get me. Something’s wrong, I thought.
“No,” that feeling of impending doom corrected, “it’s not that something is wrong, it’s that nothing is right.”
I inched my back against the wall and slithered along. The woman on the couch was snoring. The darkness and the blue light and the snoring—it all added up to her fault, she’s doing this to me, she’s making this happen, so I should probably…I tripped over the vacuum.
She snapped upright the way only a sleeping mother could. She scanned the room and leapt to her feet when she spotted me lurking in the corner behind the couch.
“Michael, are you all right? Do you need something? Do you need juice?”
Juice? Juice. JUICE! Fuck, I’m going down!
Drink, drink up, silly boy, with your referential mania, interpreting the ordinary as some demonic plot against you. Drink up that orange juice, you lucky bastard, and don’t murder your mother. Tonight.
“Tonight,” I said. Maxie tilted her head to make sense of why we were still standing outside watching poop cool. I had to speak or else the words would get lost. “What will my girlfriend think tonight if she returns from work and finds me hanging from this hoop? She knows I hate basketball. I don’t want to die, Maxie.” She wagged her tail, more at her name than my will to live. “I’m DYING!” Maxie lowered her muzzle to her front paws and pounced forward toward the gate. She was excited for me. She was also excited to get a treat. We both stumbled up the steps to the apartment. Turns out when you and death are giving Eskimo kisses, you tend to ignore serving size recommendations. I spilled Maxie’s cookies onto the kitchen tile, poured and downed a pint of apple juice, emptied half a carton of raisins into my mouth, unwrapped and swallowed four fun-size Hershey bars. I ate like Eric Carle’s Saturday caterpillar, just without the hunger, ate until my sugars pulled back the yoke on their kamikaze descent and climbed to those nauseating sweet highs. I wanted to vomit myself to sleep, but I was alive.
Behind the privacy of the YMCA’s single-stall shower curtain, the water washed the sweat from my skin as I shifted flip-flop to flip-flop. My fingers traced the adhesive keeping my CGM close to my flesh. Until someone much smarter than I either jump-starts my lazy pancreas or gathers a clump of stem cells to grow me a new one, I’m stuck with this disease. My sickness unto death. Do I suffer? Not as much. But if suffering means living, I hope to suffer for a very long time.
Michael P. Moran has been a type 1 diabetic for over thirty years. He lives on Long Island with his sharp-witted wife, curious child, and ravenous basset hound. His creative nonfiction works were published in The Chaffin Journal, Miracle Monocle, Emerald City, and The Bookends Review. He can be reached on Instagram @mikesgotaremington.