Dumb Bitch
Have you ever walked into a dark room, stepped in something sticky, and turned on the lights only to find out that you were standing in the blood and brains of another person because they decided to fellate the business end of a rifle and blow their head off? Ever gone to the bathroom only to find someone white as a ghost, in a tub of still warm pink water, with gashes running diagonally across both wrists? Maybe you’ve walked into a room to see someone swinging from the ceiling on a rope, or even a belt, with their neck swollen and purple and every vessel in their eyeballs blown the fuck out. How about walking in on a good old-fashioned, romantic, intentional overdose -- the deceased lying peacefully on top of the covers, clutching a prescription bottle and a "goodbye cruel world" note scrawled on perfumed stationary? Ever done that?
No?
Me neither.
What I have found is my mother- in-law inside the garage, in the driver’s seat of her car, with the motor still running, with a knee-high tied around her neck and rosary beads in her right hand, deader than a motherfucker.
Dumb bitch.
And you thought YOU had it bad.
My mother-in-law was a life long drug addict, narcotic painkillers being her drug of choice. Whoever said that there is no such thing as an old junkie was full of shit, because my mother-in-law was almost 60 when she decided to end it all. And had she not been such a fucking puss I bet that bitch had at least another 20 years in her, if not more. If you don’t count that whole carbon-monoxide/inability to breathe thing, the drugs are essentially what killed her in the end. Not because she took so many pills that she never woke up (although I can’t imagine she didn’t get good and high before she walked into that garage), but because she spent so much money on them that she couldn’t pay her mortgage, lost the family house, and she just couldn’t live with the shame.
When I talk about the family house and the shame that went along with losing it, you have to understand that this was a house that five generations of that family grew up in. It was a house that my old man’s great-great-grandfather built with his own hands for his daughter; right next to the one he built for himself and his wife. This was the same house where anyone still breathing spent every Christmas. It was the house that was in the backdrop of every picture I had ever seen hanging on the walls, refrigerators, and mantels belonging to everyone in the entire family. From the day they were built, nobody ever lived in either of those two houses unless they bore the family name or were fucking someone who did.
To make matters worse, this was also the same house that the rest of the family warned my mother-in-law not to buy when their mother passed away. They knew she wasn’t capable of keeping it together, not just because she was strung out, but because she had a LONG history of fucking shit up -- in fact, I don’t know that she ever accomplished anything that didn’t end in a jail sentence, probation, or her skipping town for an extended period of time. Her brother, who lived next door in the other family house, offered to buy the house and rent it to her, but, of course, she wasn’t having that. She took her split of the inheritance from the house, used it as a down payment, and got some shyster in the guise of a loan officer to give her a loan with some astronomical interest rate. Chances are she could have at least afforded it, since her husband was an OTR driver who worked almost 80 hours a week, and they also had a fairly hefty inheritance from his mother’s estate in the bank.
Fast-forward through the next several months which included her being convicted of credit card fraud, the embarrassment of her nodding off while we were visiting her son in rehab, and me walking in her house and finding her so fucked up that she was face down in a bowl of clam chowder. During that time she managed to drain a bank account that had started off with over 60 grand in it 6 months earlier. When I tell people about this, they ask me how in the fuck she got away with blowing all of that money without her husband finding out. I tell them that it wasn’t all that hard, actually. He's the kind of guy who blindly handed his check over every week and assumed that everything was all right as long as the lights were on, the water was hot, and there was beer in the fridge. Imagine his shock when he woke up for work one morning to a note that started with “If you are reading this, I am already dead”.
Turns out my mother in law not only blew all of their money on drugs and left him and their 15-year-old son in a world of debt, but she also decided to kill herself on the same day that the bank was scheduled to come and take the house. So now they were homeless on top of everything else. The people from the bank actually showed up in the middle of us all finding out what happened from the cops (talk about a shitty day at work!), and being the good samaritans (or squeamish pussies) that they were, they gave us an extra three days to clear the house out before they threw my father and brother-in-law out. None of that seemed to matter as the police began escorting us two at a time into the garage to take a final look at her, though.
Now, I have seen a lot of dead bodies in my lifetime, A LOT. Most of them at work, where who they were and how they died was inconsequential to me, except for the curiosity factor. Other than that, I had only seen people that I knew at lay outs, where they were dressed in their Sunday finest, looking stiff, overly made up, and definitely not alive, but peaceful nonetheless. What I saw in that garage was far from peaceful. She had the driver's side seat reclined, her head was laid over the head rest so that you could see the nylon she had tied around her neck (it wasn't until later that I learned what it was - it looked like she had slit her own throat to me), her mouth was open in a silent scream, and her eyes were wide open and staring straight ahead, and she was still clutching her mother's rosary. She looked terrified and like she had been in a lot of pain. Beside me, I felt my old man crumple to the floor of the garage and vaguely heard his screams as I began walking away. I kept walking, too -- I walked and walked until my feet hurt, and of all places, I ended up at a church.
I hadn’t been to a church in years, and I’m not even going to say “I DON’T GO TO CHURCH, BUT I AM A VERY SPIRITUAL PERSON”, because I’m not -- I think Jesus was pretty cool, but I’m still not so sure about God.
Anyhow, I managed to stumble into the chapel and throw myself onto the steps in front of the altar. I began sobbing and howling for what seemed like hours, but in reality, was probably more like 10 minutes. When I finally managed to look up, I realized I had wandered into the middle of what looked like a quilting bee for a bunch of little old ladies. They didn’t look shocked or scared, only concerned. In fact, they didn’t even say a word to me, and for that I was grateful, because at that point the only thing that I was thinking was “THAT FUCKING DUMB BITCH!” and even in my semi-psychotic state, I knew that wasn’t the kind of thing you say to a bunch of old ladies, much less in the middle of church. They just helped me up, wiped my face, gave me something cool to drink, and took turns hugging me. It was the one simple act of kindness that stands out in my mind above any other act of kindness I’ve ever received.
One of the women gave me a ride back to the house, where, thankfully, no one had even realized that I had been gone. I arrived just in time to see the coroner carrying my mother in law's body away in a plastic bag, and I’ll be damned if I’ve ever been able to forgive that bitch since then.
I blame her for her husband and son having to live with us for 3 months because they had nowhere else to go and no money left to do anything with. I blame her for going out like a chump so that her husband’s life insurance wouldn’t cover the cremation. I blame her for us having to eat spaghetti and lunchmeat for a month because we had to pay for her cremation out of our own pockets. I blame her for the pain of watching my old man dig a hole in the ground; so that he could bury her ashes underneath the tree that she and her brother and sisters had planted in the backyard with their grandpa when they were children. I blame her for the crack in his voice when he threw a handful of dirt into the hole and whispered “Now she never has to leave” before he fell to his knees and sobbed for the second time in a week. I blame her for the weeklong depression he suffers when he takes her final letter to him out every year on the anniversary of her death, and I blame her for my inability to take away his pain and the pain of my helplessness.
I will never forgive her for any of that.
Ever.
So when I hear people bitching about how their in-laws won’t watch their children, how their sister-in-law is an uppity bitch, or how their mother-in-law makes snide comments about their cooking, I just roll my eyes. You motherfuckers have it great, and you don’t even realize it. It’s definitely a dubious honor, but in-law suicide trumps all. Normally I’m all about winning, but this is the one “victory” I could have definitely gone my whole life without ever having tasted the spoils of.
Dumb bitch.
by
Crouching Stoner
