Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  Signs lined the course for the last mile: 1/2 MILE TO GO, 1/4 MILE TO GO, 200 YARDS TO GO. Approaching the end, I straightened my posture and put on a burst of speed, which, in my case, meant going from jogging incredibly slowly to jogging slightly less incredibly slowly. Up ahead, I saw Martha and the kids. They’d made it! I practically flew (hobbled) across the finish line in two hours and seven minutes, which is only a bit less than mediocre. Somebody put a medal around my neck, and I circled back to my family, where I received hugs and congratulations and the expected “you smell” from my daughter. Then I sat down and put my head between my legs, because if I didn’t, I was going to throw up.

  Afterward, as I stood in the shower at home peeling protective Band-Aids from my nipples, I found myself wondering at my curious lack of elation. I’d done it, but having done it, I didn’t experience any particular pride of accomplishment. Sure, finishing felt better than not finishing, but I’d expected something more. It felt like that same emptiness I’d had throughout my training, the feeling there was something out there, something just out of reach, something that could answer some question I didn’t know how to ask.

  Matt called a couple weeks later to ask if I wanted to sign up with him for the following year’s New York City Marathon. I gave it some thought. I no longer doubted that I could do it. With enough time and training, I could run twenty-six point two miles. But after mulling it over, I turned him down. Running, for all its merits—merits that I could not then and cannot now identify by name—did not seem to be giving me that ephemeral something I’d been seeking. It provided no answers beyond that to the question: “Should I eat three bowls of Froot Loops before running?” (Answer: no.) Maybe I would keep running or maybe I wouldn’t, but to subject myself to further months of training for the opportunity to run through the city’s five boroughs didn’t seem worth it, especially considering the fact that I usually do what I can to avoid traveling those boroughs even by car.

  I still run. Not often. I keep meaning to get back into a routine with it, but somehow it doesn’t happen. Probably because I don’t want it to. But I still think about those ultramarathoners out there in the mountains somewhere, running through the night, their vision narrowed to wedges of headlamp light as they trudge through fifty, seventy-five, a hundred miles. I think about the physical and emotional vicissitudes they must endure, and some not insignificant part of me wants to be out there with them, to know what they know, to strip away every thought, to undo everything that I am until I am no more than a body moving through space. I think about them a lot and I wonder what they learn out there and I wonder if they are different when they return. And when I am done thinking about them, I take a nap, because fuck that.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A bad seed

  Mom describes her younger sister as a “real piece of work,” which she does not mean as a compliment. Her name was Ilene. Although she sometimes called herself Susan. And sometimes Kelly.

  Ilene/Susan/Kelly stumbled through trouble for the whole of her life, wheedling and lying her way into and out of jobs, homes, relationships. She had seven—SEVEN—husbands and, toward the end, several female lovers. While doing research for this book, I found a few mentions of her in newspapers, the only positive one being a brief notice of promotion, in 1985, to national sales manager for a company that sold two-way radios, antennas, and something called “battery conditioners.” Three years later, there is a bankruptcy declaration in the amount of $130,000, followed several months after that by a sheriff’s sale of her condominium in Oklahoma. Then nothing until 1997, when she was arrested in South Florida on two counts of assault and battery. A court date was set, but I don’t believe the trial ever happened. In December of that year, she killed herself. She was fifty-one.

  “I think she was born a bad seed,” says Mom. I’m not sure I believe that children are born “bad,” but it is certainly true that Ilene found trouble from an early age. Ilene ran with the bad crowd, listened to the bad music. Smoked the bad stuff. Did the bad things. Had there been a nearby Jewish motorcycle gang, she no doubt would have joined. Once, while Mom was helping her own mother move, she found some documents shoved into the back of a drawer. The papers mandated a court-ordered abortion for Ilene, who was twelve or thirteen at the time. Needless to say, Grandma and Ilene did not get along. “I guess it was like pure hatred. My mother really hated her. She would never admit that, but she did.”

  Ilene got engaged young, to a local boy, then jilted him for her first husband, a sailor who moved next door to live with his mother. She fell for the snappy naval uniform and the promise of adventure at far-flung naval bases. Within months of meeting, they married.

  Their brief union produced a son, Shawn, born a few years before me. I have no photos of Shawn, and the only mental image I have of him comes from a pencil drawing Sailor Boy made that used to hang on Grandma’s wall. It’s a good drawing. It shows Grandpa, bald and heavy, seated on a living room chair, battleship tattoo visible on his forearm. He’s jiggling a newborn on his knee, my brother Eric. Shawn, not yet three, stands to his side, looking up at Grandpa, a stuffed animal hanging from his hand. The drawing was made the same year Shawn died. He suffocated to death in a plastic bag at home.

  Ilene and the sailor divorced. After a couple years, she married again. She and her new husband adopted a baby boy. I ask, but Mom doesn’t know where the baby came from. “She might have handed five bucks to somebody in a parking lot for all I know,” she says. For a short while the family seemed happy enough, but soon after the boy turned two, Ilene left, leaving the baby in his father’s care. This would be a pattern throughout her life, a frenetic wanderlust that upended untold lives. The father raised the son and, understandably, cut off all contact with Ilene’s side of the family. Mom says she has been trying to find her adopted nephew for years without success.

  About ten years after that, while “on the lam from creditors,” according to my mother, Ilene found herself in Oklahoma, where she met a cowboy. Their marriage, her fifth or sixth, produced another son. When the boy was still a toddler, she left them, too. The cowboy remarried, then abandoned his new wife, leaving his son in the care of a stepmother who seems to have been the first person in the boy’s life who wanted and loved him.

  Every once in a while, Ilene would drop back into her son’s life, materializing from space to reconnect with him for a few days or weeks before disappearing again, sometimes for years. Then, when he was eleven or twelve, she somehow wrested custody of her son from the stepmother. Ilene took the boy down to Florida and tried to play mother. One day after school, he walked in on Ilene unconscious. She’d attempted suicide, leaving her body for her middle-school-age son to find. This was the first suicide attempt that I know of, but it would obviously not be the last.

  The boy headed back north. He moved back in with his stepmother and, no surprise, began dabbling with drugs, which led to addiction, which led to him becoming unruly and violent. She kicked him out of the house and he drifted, sometimes homeless, to Los Angeles, where he cleaned himself up. That’s where Martha and I met him. He’d been clean for a while, and he struck us both as such a lovely, friendly guy. We hung out with him a few times, but we haven’t seen him since we moved back to the East Coast fifteen years ago. I spy on him from Facebook from time and time, though, and in the photos he posts he seems healthy and happy. He’s married to a man who looks weirdly like him, and he seems to have regular employment and a good life. Thank God the trail of destruction his mother caused seems to have ended.

  I only met Aunt Ilene the few times she visited New Jersey. All adults intimidated me when I was a kid, but I remember feeling a different kind of unease around Ilene. Wariness, maybe. There was something glamorous about her, in an Amy Winehouse sort of way. She looked a bit like my mom, but skinnier, with most of her weight seeming to come from her hair and lip gloss. In my mind’s eye, she is forever peering down at me through cat-lidded eyes, cigarette dangling from her fin
gers, making some disdainful, probably sexual remark I don’t understand.

  Ilene left no suicide note, but Mom has a theory about what drove to her to it, a theory she is reluctant to share. After some coaxing, she does. Mom’s theory is this: As Ilene’s first marriage to the sailor unraveled, she became involved with a cop. The relationship was hot and heavy, and Ilene fell deep, being, as she was, a sucker for a man in uniform. As things progressed between them, the cop made it clear to Ilene that he loved her but didn’t want kids. Shortly after, Shawn suffocated to death at home. The investigating officer was Ilene’s boyfriend, who ruled the death an accident.

  Mom’s theory connects those pieces into something sinister. Maybe they fit together or maybe they don’t. Maybe guilt over Shawn’s death, accidental or otherwise, eventually led my aunt, decades after the fact, to end her life in a ratty South Florida condo. Nobody knows.

  Maybe it’s better if we don’t.

  A couple years ago, Mom handed me a slim folder containing Shawn’s birth and death certificates. “This is all I have from Shawn,” she explained. “I just want somebody to have it and think of him once in a while.”

  I’ve tried to do that, to occasionally offer up a little thought to the ether, not so different from the way I hit “like” on strangers’ Instagram photos—just a gesture, a small something to connect when there is no other way.

  My aunt’s suicide has stuck with me in ways that the deaths of other, closer family members have not. I don’t know why. Maybe because killing oneself seems like such a wild and unbound act. Why do some people choose to end their suffering while others, like my mom, choose to endure? Is it merely a question of feeling like you have something to live for? Or can it be flipped: Do some people feel like they have something to die for? Did my aunt feel death a more attractive option than continuing to live? What did she hope to find in death that she could not in life? The obvious answer is peace, but I wonder if that is the full answer. I suspect a fuller answer might have something to do with the desire to erase your whole being, to call a mulligan on your entire existence. To never have been.

  When my aunt killed herself, I don’t remember feeling horrified or sickened. I don’t know what the name is for the emotion I felt, but the closest I can come is wonder, not unlike the feeling I got the first time I stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon. It wasn’t so much that I thought I might jump, but that I could, and moreover, that jumping would be pretty easy.

  I have certainly considered suicide. I think that’s a normal thing to do. It would be hard to crawl through life’s various shit piles without at least forming an opinion on the subject. My opinion is simple: Suicide seems like a reasonable solution to the intractable problem of life. I certainly don’t plan on ending myself, but if life ever becomes too painful or awful or wearying, I remain open to the possibility. I mean, why not? We can’t control all the circumstances of our lives, but we have it within us to control our deaths, and I see no reason to relinquish that option.

  I have given little thought to how I would kill myself. Shooting myself in the head is out. Guns scare me and leave a mess. Hanging myself is also out because hanging somebody is a precise craft; screw it up and you’re left dangling there choking and shitting your pants for long, embarrassing minutes. Throwing myself off a bridge: no. Japanese-style seppuku? Nope. I do not own a sword and none of my cooking knives are sterile. Ilene did it with pills and most likely I would do the same. Just lie down in my bed and swallow about a hundred pills of something. It doesn’t matter what—a hundred of anything will almost certainly have the desired effect. Yes, overdosing seems like the best way for me to go, plus it has the added benefit that I will die doing what I love—taking pills.

  To be extra clear: I don’t plan on ever killing myself. For that matter, I don’t plan on ever dying. But I also know that circumstances change, people change, minds change. Illness can rob the joy from life, and, as I said, Mom has already told me that if things get too bad for her, she has made what she euphemistically calls “arrangements.” I don’t blame her. What’s better: to slip into a deep and final sleep at the time and location of one’s choosing, or to expire a little later in a strange and antiseptic room lashed to machines?

  Mom says she doesn’t know if Ilene really meant to kill herself that day or not. She thinks maybe her sister was looking for attention, maybe trying to purge whatever demons she’d been lugging around across the years. To my knowledge, there was no funeral. No memorial service. Nothing to mark her life other than reams of unpaid bills and two boys left behind, and another already dead.

  At various times while running through the wilds of Connecticut, I have seen all of our native animals: rabbits skittering across the trail, raccoons and possum and deer playing statue between the trees, hoping I have not caught sight of them, and every once in a while, an orange blur of fox disappearing into the bushes. In the springtime we have loud singing frogs looking for mates. The soprano peepers, tenor greens, baritone bullfrogs. We have field mice and snakes and Elijah said he saw a bobcat once. The other day, Martha and I were walking beside a pond. “What’s this?” she said.

  She bent down and picked up a hunk of bone, the skull of some small animal. We turned it over in our hands, peering into holes that used to hold eyes. It still had its sharp, meat-eating teeth. We discussed what it could have been. A raccoon, maybe, or an unlucky house cat. A tuft of gray fur hung from what used to be its chin. We put the skull back and kept walking, and that night I had bad dreams. When I woke up, it was still dark. I wrapped my arms around Martha. Everybody else was still asleep and soon I fell back to sleep, too.

  Chapter Twenty

  See the merry widow

  Martha and I both know I’m going to die before her, owing to my bad genes and her hearty Norwegian constitution. Plus, women live longer than men and righties live longer than lefties like myself. It’s almost certain, therefore, that she will have many years of merry widowhood after I pass, years I already resent. “Look, there’s the merry widow in her Paris flat!” “Look, there’s the merry widow on a river cruise with her new beau, the haberdasher!” Ugh. The very thought of Martha’s “post-me” life fills me with jealousy, which is no doubt activating the stress hormone cortisol, which, in turn, is almost certainly hastening the heart attack that will eventually kill me.

  When one is married and financially solvent, it is best to have a will. I knew this but for years had put off the act of drafting one. It was just one of those unpleasant tasks I’d delayed, like the colonoscopy and every household chore Martha has ever asked me to perform. Every once in a while, Martha would say, “You know, we really should get our wills done,” to which I would respond, “Absolutely,” and then another year would go by where neither of us did anything about it.

  After children come into the picture, wills take on even greater importance because, in addition to all the financial stuff, they dictate who will raise the kids if both parents should die. This question provoked much conflict between us. Should it be one of our brothers? Close friends? Parents? Who did we trust to give our kids as close an approximation as possible to the childhood we would have given them had we not gone down in that zeppelin disaster? After much bickering, we decided, in the event of our simultaneous deaths, to simply release the children into the wild in the hopes that a pride of lions would find them and raise them as their own.

  Martha finally got fed up with my yessing her to death about getting a will and demanded we take action. Now. Yes, dear. Maybe we didn’t even need a lawyer. There are websites that will draw up a will for you. I think Amazon even includes a will if you order their Prime service. But we felt uncertain about how simple or complicated the process would be, so we went with an actual living person. We asked around for a competent local lawyer, got a name, and made an appointment. The guy practiced out of an old Victorian town house that looked more like a funeral home than a law office, which I guess was appropriate, since we were there to talk about
(my) death.

  The lawyer sat us down at a big lawyerly-looking conference table in a big lawyerly-looking conference room, and offered us small lawyerly Dixie cups of water. He explained the process of drafting a will, which mostly entailed a series of decisions that would determine the distribution of our worldly goods, along with our choice for who would raise the kids. Interestingly, our lawyer advised us not to tell our designees that we had selected them for the job, which seemed like kind of a shitty thing to do to someone. Imagine getting a call saying your loved ones just died and—congratulations!—you’re going to raise their kids. His reasoning was that, if we believe they are the right people for the job, they will do what’s best by us. Telling them might only provoke arguments for a situation that is almost certainly never going to transpire.

  It all seemed straightforward until he asked if we wanted to also create “living wills,” which dictate what we would like done or not done in the event that either of us becomes incapacitated. This seems like a smart thing to do. Again, it’s pretty straightforward: I tell the lawyer that Martha should make all of my medical decisions as my proxy. When it comes time for her to appoint me as her proxy, she hesitates.

  “What’s the problem?” I ask.

  “I think you’ll pull the plug.”

  Say what?

  She tells the lawyer that she’s afraid I will pull the plug on her at the earliest opportunity. I don’t even know how to respond to this. Does she really think I’ll just flip the switch off at the first sign of trouble? Like she breaks her arm and I’m like, “Better put her down.”