[Ed. note: Read the first part of this long story here.]

Fast-forward to just a couple years ago. Nearly three decades had passed since the Great Dirt-Pile Fracas. The Crazy Lady was now living alone after losing a second husband and seeing her kids move away — far away, in a couple of cases. Both she and my father had mellowed somewhat, enough to speak to one another occasionally with some degree of civility, although both of them still tried to keep their distance. But even with such limited contact, it started becoming obvious that something strange was happening to The Crazy Lady. She was becoming… well, nice. Sickeningly sweet, in fact. If she saw my mother out in the front yard, she’d cross the street to complement her on her roses. If Dad was trying to repair that decrepit old whiteboard fence across the front of the pasture just well enough to get through one more summer, she’d come ask him if he wanted a cool drink.

This behavior was… unsettling. It was extremely out of character for her, and it put my parents on guard. They thought at first it must surely be some kind of Trojan horse gambit that would inevitably lead to another fight. But no, The Crazy Lady continued to be nice and no attack ever came. Someone — Dad, perhaps, who has learned a great deal more compassion than he used to have — suggested that maybe she was lonely, or that having her children all run as far away as they could get had taught her a lesson. All too soon, however, we started to see other symptoms. And we recognized them for what they were.

A few years earlier, we’d watched another elderly neighbor succumb to the creeping dissolution of Alzheimer’s Disease, seen her personality change and ultimately crumble into dust before our horrified eyes, and now The Crazy Lady was acting the exact same way. Before long, she was obviously becoming unusually forgetful, and she seemed to be losing track of time, too. (Every time she spoke to me, for example, she asked how long it would be until I graduated from high school. Apparently, she didn’t notice the gray in my beard.) And then she started coming to my father for help because she’d locked herself out of her house, and, oh, by the way, as long as he was over there, would he mind trying to figure out why her car wouldn’t start? (That would be because she’d wrecked it years before, and it hadn’t moved from her driveway since.)

She began bolting from the house if she noticed someone walking down the street, and pinning the poor slob down in a conversation about nothing. Most people, being basically decent and courteous, would try to talk with her for a while before gradually realizing that she wasn’t quite all there and then struggling to politely extricate themselves and get away. It would’ve been funny if it weren’t so sad.

Several times, she set out walking, headed for Utah County to the south, and was brought home by police officers who’d picked her up miles away from home. They explained to my father that, even though it was obvious her mind was impaired, they weren’t empowered to take her to any kind of care facility. That was a decision for her children to make. And when Dad tracked them down and told them what was going on, they weren’t yet prepared to make it.

I’m not proud to admit this, but I did what I could to avoid The Crazy Lady, just as I had when I was little. She made me incredibly nervous. Earlier this summer, she came across the street while I was doing some yardwork out in front and ended up “helping” me all afternoon. Her help consisted of gathering small twigs together and asking me every 90 seconds if I had a box to put them in.

My father, on the other hand, surprised me. He, too, cringed if he saw her crossing the street or if he was over at the pasture and realized he’d been detected, but he always greeted her — the woman who had been his mortal enemy for years, the woman with whom he’d once stood nose-to-nose in front of a cop and shouted at the top of his lungs — with a friendly smile. He’d follow her back to her house and help her inside and never let her know that he’d used a key given to him by her daughter to open the door. He always told her the door had just been stuck.

She’s not The Crazy Lady anymore. She doesn’t seem to have any memory of the feud, or all the screaming, or all the threats. She doesn’t remember throwing garbage over our fence into the pasture, or having my dad throw it right back. She doesn’t remember playing petty games with the irrigation water, or recall my dad turning her in to the city council as a nuisance because of the way her goats smelled. She’s a different kind of Crazy Lady now, a sweetly confused old woman with skin tough and leathery from years of working under a hot sun, who believes my father’s ’56 Chevy Nomad is her first husband’s station wagon and that I am a high-school senior with my whole life ahead of me. My parents and I have all had trouble wrapping our minds around this change of paradigm, but Dad has done the best with it, I think.

A couple of weeks ago, The Crazy Lady looked to be in especially bad shape. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on for days, and she didn’t appear to have bathed recently. Not long after, I noticed one of her children at the house, loading a La-Z-Boy recliner into the back of a minivan. I wondered at the time if the kids had finally made their decision, but I was preoccupied with my own business and didn’t spend too much time thining about it. A few days later, Mom and Dad got a phone call from The Crazy Lady’s oldest daughter, informing them that she’d been placed in a nursing home, and thanking them — my dad, in particular — for their patience and kindness over the past year or so.

I never would’ve have wished this fate on anyone, not even my father’s mortal enemy, but it’s hard to know how to feel about this development. I spent so many years fearing and disliking The Crazy Lady that it’s hard to now see her as an object of pity. It’s like the sudden deflation that came with learning that Darth Vader, the scariest creature in the galaxy, was just a crippled old man.

And there’s something else, too… The Crazy Lady is the last of the neighbors from my childhood. To the north, Mac, the nice old town doctor’s widow who lived next door to us, who knitted me Christmas stockings when I was little and who was the other victim of Alzheimer’s I mentioned, has been gone for years; Mr. Stephensen, the grandfather of my old buddy Kurt and who claimed to have known Butch Cassidy as a boy, has been gone for years longer; and both of their houses were bulldozed a decade ago. To the south, Jack and Rae are both long dead, too.

I don’t expect to ever see The Crazy Lady again, certainly not alive. And when she’s gone, a big part of the town I knew growing up will go with her. There isn’t much of that town left, these days…