While visiting Dad in Olympia, we spent our nights at the Sunshine House, a homey hotel situated beneath towering evergreens and adjacent to the hospital. The building had just one floor and two wings. Mom’s room was in the opposite wing from the one I shared with Kate when she was there.

On the fifth night I dreamt I was running, fifty yards in front of a screaming freight train. The train came out of nowhere, though I sensed its massive weight, its power, my whole life. No one could stop it, not even my dad, who, though I couldn’t see him, was nearby. My legs were heavy, tired, like moving through mud. I couldn’t get my body to pivot toward jumping off the tracks, to avoid the inevitable. Stuck on the tracks, the train sounded its horn, and I mustered the strength to move my legs in a forward direction, forestalling impact. My heart pounded. The train screeched its brakes, and I stumbled off the tracks. I looked back at the train and saw my dad as a child, round face, thin lips, serious eyes, staring out of a small window of a passing cargo car. I looked again and the child was my mom, same lips and somber eyes, but clearly Mom.

A knock at 2 a.m. startled me awake.

Mom stood hunched over her walker, looking frazzled, gray hair going in all directions, her pen and pad of paper in hand. She demanded, “What is the doctor’s name?”

“Wha… what doctor?”

“The doctor from today. The doctor wearing the plaid shirt.” She was flipping through the small spiral notebook Kate had bought for her. The flood of information at the hospital had Mom jotting words down on various pieces of paper and then losing them. She covered the notebook pages in handwriting I could never read; blue pen scribbles and cursive smudges shaped into a sort of illegible mind map.

“I don’t know, Mom,” I said, wanting to crawl back into bed. “Let’s go back to sleep and figure it out in the morning.”

 After convincing Mom that the question about which doctor was wearing plaid could wait until the next day, I walked her back to her room, helped her into bed, and positioned her walker within reach. As I lay in bed that night, a queasy, uneasy feeling kept my body rigid and my chest tight.

Was it schizophrenia that barreled down the tracks, always there, indomitable? Its power dominated not just Mom, but Dad and the rest of the family too. Mom and her illness were one to me—they were the foreboding, out of control train.