I am back after a exhausting and emotionally overwhelming visit. Mother has double pneumonia and was hospitilized pending treatment. She was perfectly coherent when we arrived (it was a 570 mile journey) but we couldn’t talk to her because all she would do is cough.

Early Weds morning, the phone rings at 1:21 and the nurse tells me they are having problems with my mother. They had to move her from one room because her roommate was developing an infection and it was after that move that mother became confused and combative. My prim and proper mother who keeps an immaculate home went into a rage and threw a pan of urine at the nurse! She tried to upend the bed table, threw her water and pitcher on the floor and so they called to see if I might come down and help out.

In a move, I will always live to regret. I asked the nurse if I should bring my father, and she said she would rather I came alone. So I woke up Mike and we rushed to the hospital to see what was going on.

What happened that night will forever be imprinted on my heart. Even after my father arrived (I sent Mike back to fetch him) after I couldn’t convince my mother that the nurses weren’t trying to kill her, and the holes in the walls weren’t from bullets but rather from someone taking down a peg board. But that night, I found what it was like to venture one toehold into hell and I watched two people do battle in a hateful, hurtful way- and no, I was not spared any of the pain as plenty was dealt in my direction as well.

Mother was out of her head and my first thought was what the H* kind of drugs are they giving her? But as the night wore on into morning and the battle continued, I watched two people who I have known for a very long time that they don’t love each other- confirm that very fact.

We left spent and breathless with mother still in a chair, refusing to go to bed, and lamenting the fact that I didn’t go to the truck and give her a bowl of dog pee so she could have ammunition. I kept telling her that we left the dog at home but she didn’t believe me and kept insisting I was “in on it” and they had brainwashed me. She kept talking about a certain movie- 76 men? And that the whole staff was out to kill her. The oxygen they supplied her with was discarded on the bed hissing away, because she was convinced it was a noose and they were going to hang her. It was all very sad and scary.

When we got back to the house, Mike very carefully blocked my father’s car in the garage with our truck. He isn’t supposed to drive, he surrendered his license awhile back and he has trouble seeing and hearing. But he wanted to go to mother’s side and wouldn’t allow either of us to drive him. The fights that night between us were incomprehensible. He was yelling and screaming, and just as my mother had, he said things to me that were hurtful and hateful. He didn’t want us to drive him, by golly he was going to drive there. At one time he went out of the house fully dressed with jacket and cap and vanished. Mike wanted to jump in the truck and go drive to the hospital as he thought he might walk the entire way! But I stopped him. I had a feeling he was hiding in the back of the property waiting for us to do just that so he could jump in the car and go to mother. He wasn’t on the road anywhere as I hunted with a flashlight and when we went inside to call 911 he appeared as I was on the phone and came back into the house.

So much happened that night and now that I am home, I wonder if it was all a bad dream. But Mike, who was right in the middle of it all tells me it did happen. In the morning after the fighting, I called the vet to find out the results of the tests on Dawson only to find out it is feline distemper. I knew then we had to go. That coupled with the fight and the 64 years of hatred I saw between my parents in that little room, and the fact that two bad storms were advancing, I knew I had to get the heck out of Dodge. I woke poor Mike up at 2:30 in the afternoon where he was sleeping in a recliner and we were packed and ready for travel in 15 minutes.

We got home at 1:00 a.m. this morning only to find to our great sorrow: Hailey, Lazarus, and Aitumn showing full effects of distemper. They met the angels at 8:00 a.m. With the exception of the two youngest adults in the house, the rest of the clowder is free of the URI that plagued them when we left. Mudslide and Chilkoot might still have a chance to live and I moved them down into the bedroom.

It has been a really sad time both here and with my parents. My heart was shattered many times over during that long combat period and the one-on-one with my mother showed her true hatred of me. I just had to get out of there. My father wouldn’t let me tell my sister who arrives tomorrow what happened. He said because he doesn’t want to worry her, but I know better. I have been the keeper of secrets in this family for a long time. He doesn’t want anyone to know what happened, and because it was me in the room during the battle he can always just say I have an over-active imagination and made the whole thing up.

But it has been on my heart since I got home and I had to put the hurt somewhere. It was so overwhelming that even when I laid the kittens to rest in the forest, I couldn’t cry for them. I had already shed all my tears on the long ride home.