Cremating a 450-pound body

I think I am a nice person. I feel life screws me over enough to make me a nice person. Deep down, though, I know there’s a part of me that even I don’t even like.

You see, the 450-pound body in question belonged to my mother-in-law. I have a morbid fascination about how long it took to reduce her to the capacity of an urn, or even if she required one that was extra large. I also know it’s a very good idea that we (or any of her children) did not attend the funeral, or that urn’s contents would have been spilled by someone booting (not me, even) it just to give her in death what she was too heavy to in life.

The woman married or lived with men who drew guns on her children. She made her daughter dress her like a queen, holding out her cellulite leg, one by one, so that her daughter could help her with her underwear. She forced her children to work and took their paycheck. Their father never did pinpoint their exact location; she moved some 30 times before my husband’s 18th birthday. If their father did find them, she returned their gifts to sender. For punishment, she sat on her very thin children, beating their face while they found themselves pinned and immobile.

And this is what they tell me. There is so much more that is never spoken. I don’t want to hear it. Maybe I never will, and that will mean they’ve successfully repressed it.

I forgave her long ago with the stipulation that I’d never lay eyes on her again. She lived with us for six months. Immediately upon her arrival, she called around to every church food pantry and learned the bus route. She brought her food home and stashed it in a corner of our apartment.

Nice? Taking care of herself? Not a burden?

I found a 10-pound wrapped package of rotten hamburger in my trash one day. I said that it wasn’t nice of her church to give out rotten food. It turned out it was perfectly fresh upon her bringing it home. You see, rather than chance us eating it, she let it rot. She once brought home two sheet cakes of spice cake leftover from a church function. We knew better than to ask; she ate it within 24 hours. I used some spaghetti one night. It looked just like the kind I bought. She put it in the cabinet so as to catch me when I used some of her food and threw a tantrum.

Stud didn’t want her there. I didn’t want her there. She said she had nowhere else to go. She repaid our generosity by letting me wash my baby’s bottles right after I got home from having my uterus cleaned out, stole money, ran up $300 in phone charges, and tried to use our credit card. I worked swings and Stud worked nights, so we were generally there to keep watch over our baby, but the few times we asked her to keep an eye on him, I found him soiled and his skin red from neglect.

Only one time in our long marriage have I threatened Stud with leaving. She left the next day.

Is this diatribe to justify my interest in my question? Does it illustrate how far I have to be pushed before becoming a callused bitch? Why don’t I look up on the Internet to calculate the time?

Maybe I’m afraid to admit it. Maybe once I know how long it took to burn her, it really means there is a side to me so dark and twisted that it needs an exorcism, although she claims she lost the demons while she stayed with us.

She's my stalker, and I invited her back.

I’ve allowed a stalker back into my life.

Sad, I know.

It started in 1984. She was my first friend in a new state. I didn’t like the way she treated me, but, then again, I didn’t have anyone else. She was a "church" friend, too, which is why my mother would rather me hang out with her than my "school" friends, who somehow understood the golden rule a little better.

She lied about everything, even little things, like being forced to take apart her flute when she misbehaved in band. I told her to show me. "Oh, we’re too busy."

She picked on my weight nearly constantly. She wasn't so much thinner, but so obsessed with her looks.

The time came for her family to move. I bawled and bawled. We missed each other so much that my family and hers conspired to send me down to where her father was training, in Florida, and we could go to all the theme parks.

By the end of that trip, I never cried when I had to go home. By the end of that trip, I went back and hated the thought of their family making one last stop in my town. It was over. The way she treated me just made me beyond angry. Just a bunch of little kid stuff, but it revolved around all the lies she’d told over the years, and me targeting each one.

By 1987, when it came time for us to move, coincidence would have it that I would be going to her school just as she was leaving, cross country. Phew. Dad couldn’t have timed a transfer more perfectly. I had long ago stopped reading the letters she sent (she was a Nordstrom model, she was on the cheerleading squad, she danced) and, of course, when I got there, none of those things had ever transpired.

I heard from her right after I got married. I left those friends behind (they told me at one point that she had informed them before she left of what a rotten person I was). Again, typical kid stuff, but she found me right after I got back here, was 5 months pregnant, left my husband’s family behind (I really like them), and my friends. She called, and I unloaded. I confronted her about every last lie. She denied them all.

It’s been nearly 17 years since I last spoke to her. Over the years, she has had her mother contact my mother in an attempt to get me to talk to her.

She found me. Like I said, it’s been 17 years. Maybe it’s time to let go. She found me registered online for our high school, which we never attended simultaneously, but she figured I’d be listed there somewhere.

Rolling eyes.

I e-mailed her. She doesn’t know my last name. She barely knows the area. Her life is splendiferous and she did have a few pics to prove it. She has two children, and they are very, very cute. We spoke in IM for about three hours before she wanted to know why I was so mad at her the last time we spoke.

Did I mention the paranoia? No, guess not. She thinks her nasty friends told me that dirty lie because they wanted to ruin her. Nobody in "the group" as she kept calling it remembered her fondly, and it was the quietest person, the devout Christian, the most trustworthy of "the group" that finally told me a year later about her accusations.

I know these things that she denied, but didn't tell her. She obviously remembers things quite differently than I do.

So, I did enjoy talking to her. She’s still obsessing about me, and two male figures, one guy she had a really, really big crush on in junior high, and the other guy, who she really, really cried over when she moved away from in high school. The last time we spoke, nearly 17 years ago, she was trying to find this guy. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, and I told her so.
It was a good chat, but I’m not telling her my last name or my location. She might already know it if her mother and mine have been talking. I long ago told my mother not to give out my information to the woman’s mother, but it has been 17 years. Maybe she has changed.

Maybe she hasn’t. I’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to give her my phone #, tho. It’s convenient that I work nights, because Stud is already sleeping, and the phone may or may not be hooked up to a dictation tank somewhere. IMs are really, really nifty things.

It's terrible, but I still have to question where she, indeed lives! Isn't that awful? Why the hell am I doing this? Obviously, I have an anger problem to be wary like this, but is 17 years enough to let the water flow under the bridge?

I am an idiot. I go from one head-banging situation to the next. I'll kick myself and feel stupid later.

And we smelled like pork rinds.

I’m the bad one of the bunch. Really.

My family is full of traditional values. They’re all God-fearing folk. I’m the only one who doesn’t attend church. I cuss like a sailor and smoke way too much (Chantix will be on the agenda when the insurance changes). Tonight, though, I did something rather unusual. I proved that to someone else. I helped a child see how marvelous my family really, really is.

I took Boo with me to my family dinner. We’re not white on purpose, understand, but my mom’s ancestry comes from farming communities in a free state where farmers did their own stuff and didn’t own people outright to get it done. Our family is proud to know the locations of, and have toured, several houses used by the Underground Railroad. If you ever get a chance to visit a house like this, do it! Some of their hiding places are very, very creative - an author’s dream! I went down a staircase once that, as a child, I had trouble squeezing through, but it was made to look like part of the wall and not really detectable as something between the walls when passing the bookcase in front of the narrow stairs. But, I digress.

I had no worries about whether Boo would be welcome. Granny called me several times to make sure it was okay. She had every right to be a little nervous, but I knew better. I never even brought it up how he’d be accepted. I told her that he was going to a farm and had room to run around and lots of stuff to do while I got to talk with my family, and he needed a new experience. When Boo is introduced to a new environment, he tends to get a little antsy and bouncy.

Not tonight, my friends. Not tonight. I was so thrilled with his behavior. He was SO confident about my family (he’s well acquainted with my mother and sisters), he walked right in the door. I introduced him and he said an enthusiastic "hello" to one and all, and found the cat. He played with the cat for a while, hung close to me, discovered we served the food out in the garage and that’s where he went.

It might’ve been the Flaming Hot Cheetos he consumed (despite my warnings of a lot of impending food) on the 50-minute drive down, but he ate very little but, then again, he was excited. He listened in on family conversations. He saw a movie (only one time) and explained every nuance and all the history behind that movie, and held my cousins’ rapt attention, many of whom had seen the movie but didn’t know all the backstories. He and Junior put together a hover copter my aunt and uncle bought my boys for Christmas, and played with the cat, and played with the dog.

My family is awesome. Boo had a very, very good time, especially when we ended the evening (and you never, ever do this first) by going out to the piggery. Man. Even the smell was worth it to him; he could tell we were getting close. They built a new barn for the little ones, and it just goes on and on, one good stall on both sides of a walkway, the barn 100 yards in length.

He hopped over the fence on the pen and watched the piglets scatter. His eyes...OMG, his eyes. They were just SO big! Sunny jumped in along with him, and they walked through one of the groups of 25. Of course, they all ran, but he wanted to know how you picked up a piglet.
I told him it was quite similar to picking up the same size dog or cat. Pick it up around its middle and bring it to your chest quickly.

I forgot one thing. I forgot just one tiny detail.

I forgot to tell him that they squeal.

The piglet squealed and Boo hollered, but put the little guy down gently.

"Forgot something," I said. "They squeal at anything."

He wasn’t going to try it again, though. Don’t blame him, either. It’s a horrible sound, and makes you think you’re hurting them, but that’s just the way they react to just about anything.

Eventually, I, too, climbed in the pen. After over a decade of being out there (I go to visit family now, because I’m a grownup, right?), I can still catch a piglet right around the middle and hold onto its squirming, squealing body, put it to my chest, and calm it down so that a child who’s never seen a pig before can touch its little nose.

It was enough. On the way out, I showed him how bright the stars shine out in the country, where there aren’t so many lights to block the way. He knew the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and Pegasus. I took some pictures of the sky as well as him with the pigs. I don’t know how the sky will look, but the stars will come out in the photos. They’re in Boo’s eyes.

Then, we had to leave. One accepts persona not gratis status as soon as you visit the pigs. Nobody says anything, there isn’t a rude leaving, it’s an announcement that you’re going to the pig house and everyone expects that you will be leaving soon so they don’t have to put up with the smell. Dude, however, had to tolerate us all the way home. Poor guy. He stayed behind to play with his new hover copter while we went out.

Boo decided on the way home that, as the smell diminished, we now only smelled like pork rinds. I took him by his home; I told Granny I got him all smelly; I’d clean up. She got him new clothes and I waved goodbye.

One of my biggest kicks in life is watching a child, any child, do something new, to see the wonderful look they get to introduce themselves to a new facet of life. I did that tonight. I don’t care if I smelled like pork rinds.