Left for Garbage

the lies about to be told about me and Seel. I was ready to sacrifice myself for those lies.
    I looked at the ot her photograph I brought along. It was one of Deeley. She had loved her Grandpa Ko Ko, and I loved her. That little girl had been my life, hands down.
    I kissed her sweet little face and swallowed the first pill dry. Then I opened a bottle of beer, drank, waited about two minutes, and took another.
    I wrote a letter that said I was sorry for everything.
    I noted the digits 10:45 on the clock that would be my last recollection of my time on earth. I opened another beer and downed more pills. Before I continued the process, I lit up my cell phone and sent out a group message that went:

    I liked being alone today and I want to remain alone. Thank you to all of those who’ve helped. My gratitude runs deep. Now I hope to see Deeley in heaven.

Margaret Brown
    (Mother of Denise Brown)

    I’ll tell you this: get a little trouble, you get a lot of trouble. Have a small problem? Keep telling yourself it’ll go away, you’ll handle it yourself, and maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones, and that’s exactly what will happen. But maybe not, maybe that tiny lump in your breast is just a cyst - women get those sometimes from drinking too much coffee - but maybe it’s something worse. Maybe it’s cancer and maybe it’s already crept deep into your lymph nodes and your bones, and no matter how much tissue you’re willing to have cut away to save your life to stick around for your family, if you’ve got one, no matter how much of yourself you are willing to mutilate to keep things going, it doesn’t matter. It’s cancer. It doesn’t care who you are or how much you love your husband and kids. It’s just cancer. It has a job to do, and that job is to kill you, to end you. No matter how hard you fight it with chemo and radiation, sometimes it still won’t go away.
    An enemy that won’t go away tires a person out. It wears you down and that’s when the enemy strikes hardest. That old cancer, which hasn’t gone anywhere while everything else happens, is right there waiting for your moment of weakness. When you get tired and beat down is when the diseas e raises up its head and says, ‘Hey, this lady is getting weaker and I think I better take advantage of it. I’m going to up my game on her and see what I can make of that.’
    Suddenly the cancer is all over you, it has spread through every inch of your body, but this time you aren’t up to being mutilated or poisoned anymore to fight back. This time it’s almost a relief , and that’s all she wrote, folks. Game over. You’re gone. The disease won and it wasn’t even personal. It was just the luck of the draw.
    You don’t understand my little analogy? You’re saying to yourself, “This woman’s trying to get our sympathy b y telling us she has cancer now? What is this crap? No one wants to hear about your imaginary diseases. Tell us about your daughter lady; tell us what it feels like to raise a child killer; tell us what it feels like to hear about the discovery of your decomposed granddaughter and to know it was your own kid who did it; tell us about that; tell us about your little dinner party the night you got the news.”
    Bu t, you see, I did just tell you, I just didn’t tell it the way you wanted to hear it. You want to hear it like that horrible woman Charlotte Hope tells it. You don’t want me to tell you what my life is really like. Every day, all I hear is, “Margaret, Margaret, Maggie Monster, how do you feel now? Are you glad you defended your daughter? Did you know Deeley’s dead, huh, Margaret, huh, did you? Hey, Maggie, how you doing now?”
    How am I doing? There’s a real insightful question. I’m doing just as good as if my whole body were filled up with cancer, that’s how I’m doing, thank you very much. I’m a strong woman but you think I haven’t heard every word that’s been said, about how Denise is the biggest liar since the world began, or that I’ve somehow missed seeing the pictures of my daughter spread out all over the news and the Internet while partying it up? Do you think I haven’t heard myself called an enabler and a liar too? Does anyone really think I’ve missed any of this? How could I miss it unless I dug a hole in the backyard where people say my daughter considered burying my granddaughter, and then jumped in the hole and pulled it in after me? And don’t think I haven’t thought about