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.