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Life without him was not worth living.  After he left me, the house was eerily silent.   Loneliness echoed in the empty halls.  The last thing I remembered was the paramedics forcing me to vomit and taking me to the emergency hospital.  I was terrified and kept asking them, “Am I going to die?” one of the EMTs told me, “You are stable now. We’ll be at the hospital soon and the doctors will talk to you”.

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After the Emergency Hospital, I was transported to the Nevada City Mental Hospital for a 5150 - 72-hour hold.  It was not the first trip to the hospital. Suffering from chronic depression was hard.  I couldn’t deal with change and the stressful end of relationships.

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On the long ride to the hospital, I looked outside the window at the trees passing by. Where was I? I realized I was leaving my children’s homes far behind and felt utterly alone.  

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The paramedic was a joker. He kept telling me stupid jokes to cheer me up but I must have looked sad and at the end of the ride, he held my hand and seriously told me, “You are going to be alright.”  It was a genuine act of kindness.

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The hospital was a gloomy sterile place, like the ones before. I felt apathetic and deeply depressed.  My children were tired of all my suicide attempts and they had reached the end, this time was the last straw.  They refused to come and visit or offer me help.  I didn’t have a job or home so my future was bleak.  

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All I could do was lie in bed or sit alone in the community/dining hall. I cried inconsolably all the time. I dreaded going to bed because I suffered from insomnia.  

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The first day I was alone in the bedroom but on the second day, a patient joined me in the middle of the night.  At 3:30 am, we had a clock on the wall, I felt her sitting on my bed and smelled her rotten breath.  I was afraid to open my eyes.  I hoped she would return to her bed, but she didn’t.

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“Get ready”, she said,  "the Grim Reaper is coming tonight to take us away.” I opened my eyes and I will never forget what I saw.  Her eyes looked dead, like a shark’s eyes.  Her skin was dark gray and her hair was a few greasy strands on her bald head.  The worst thing was to feel her cold and clammy hands on mine.  She was dead!  Or so it seemed.  I told myself it was an irrational thought and I should pinch myself to wake up, but nope! She was still there.

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“The beyond awaits and we can’t be late, ‘they’ wouldn't like it.”   Her eyes were unnaturally wide-open and seemed ready to fall.

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“Don’t be afraid,” she said.  “Demons won’t hurt you, at least not in the beginning.  You will have a chance to make your case to Beelzebub, The Prince of Darkness.”   I could not believe what I was hearing or seeing.  This crazy woman looked like something out of a horror movie. Her clothes, if you can call them that; were torn, wet, and muddy … like she just got out of a swamp.  Her smell was rotten.  When I was little a dying dog had crawled under our house and it took us a long time to find him. The smell of death was horrible, like nothing I had smelled before. She smelled like that.

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“Hold on to my hand and stay close to me, you don’t want to get lost in the afterlife.” She said with a horrible whisper that made my skin crawl.  After that, I passed out.

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I woke up at noon when the orderly came by.  “Wake up, Mrs. Brenner, you missed breakfast and if you don’t hurry you will miss lunch.”  

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I felt relieved and almost happy to realize it had been a horrible nightmare.   The next bed was clean and made.  Thank God!

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But when I looked down, I saw a slimy handprint on my arm and muddy footprints from her bed to mine.

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