Mother--not a chirpy post

Apologies.  I have posted, and then edited, and then posted, and then edited this again. 

My mother is ill.  She has been ill, physically and /or mentally, my whole life.  My understanding is that she has been and is nursing some secret grief and guilt of hers into a host of psychological and physical issues, many of which allow her a retreat into prescription medications.   "Secret" is key: I know nothing substantiate-able about my mother.  Not even her maiden name.  I surmise that she was born in Germany shortly before WWII and that her father was in some way a terrible person (though that may or may not entail the terribleness of Nazi history).

These last decades she has been very very ill on the physical side especially, with spinal surgeries, MRSA after a hip replacement, and now an undiagnosable infection that seems, perhaps, to be emanating from her liver.  She lives a continent away.  My father, her full-time nurse, is almost 80 and past his best years for cleaning explosive diaorrhea out of carpets.

She is in hospital, in ICU, for her third day today.   My father responded "absolutely NOT" when I said I could come.

The cloud over my days is concern for my father, and, a more  more dark and dense cloud, my desire that my relationship with my children be stronger than my mother's is with me.  I feel terrible for the distance, literal and figurative, between myself and my mother, and know how devastating it would/will be if this is how things are when I am old and ailing and my children are off having lives of their own.