Oh, I have one BB! It might be sappy but remember, you asked for it!
It was on my birthday in December 1992 that I found out my mom had breast cancer. Well, I had actually found out she did about a week before but this was the day I heard it from the doctors mouth that there was nothing they could do for her and that she had anywhere from "one day to a few weeks' to live.
My mom didn't even know this...and she didn't want to know. My now 12 year old son was 8 months old at the time and I packed him up and drove to my mom's house to tell her what the doctor had told me. But she wouldn't let me say anything, as soon as I started to talk about it, she told me not to go on. So I had to spend the rest of the time she had left pretending that she wasn't going to die because that's what she wanted.
After getting used to "pretending", Christmas Day comes a few weeks later. This was my son's very first Christmas and my mom and dad had planned to come over to see him "open" his presents. Well, my dad showed up but my mom didn't. Dad said that she wasn't feeling up to going out. I was also planning on having dinner for everyone at my house that night and because my mom wasn't doing so hot that day, we decided to switch it up and bring everything over to her house and cook there. I spend the rest of the day there, cooking, cleaning and getting everything ready. Dinner is served and we expect my mom to come down the stairs and join everyone at the table. It's then that she says that if she used the energy it would require just to get down the stairs, she wouldn't have the energy left to eat.
She was so weak that just coming down the stairs would have used up all she had.
At that moment, I was so angry. After all, she missed my son on his first Christmas, I had to rearrange my whole dinner and then spend the day cooking at her house, and she wasn't even going to come down the stairs and eat! So my dad ate upstairs with her and the rest of us ate downstairs.
After we left and I was home laying in bed, I started thinking about the whole days events. I wasn't really angry that she couldn't come down the stairs to eat...I was angry because this was the very first time that I realized she was going to die...soon. Since her eventual death was something that NO ONE could talk about, I guess the feeling was it wasn't going to happen. But it was going to happen and it hit me like a ton of bricks right then.
You know how if someone you love was going to die, you would spend as much time as possible talking about the good times, telling that person how much they mean to you and how much you love them? Well, I couldn't do this because remember, we were pretending that this wasn't going to happen because that's what she wanted. So I got up in the middle of the night and wrote her a long letter telling her all the things I should have been able to say to her face...how much I loved her, how I would miss her, what a great grandmother she would have been to her first grandchild....I cried the whole way through this letter, it was tough to write it. I didn't know exactly when to give it to her though. I carried it around with me and everytime I went over her house, I wanted to hand it to her as I was leaving. But I thought that if she read it, she would be mad that I was "addressing the issue" again. So I just held on to it, trying to figure out when I should give it to her.
Well, don't you know I never did give her that letter. She went into the hospital on Jan 10th and was completely out of it, doped up on morphine for the next 8 days and then she passed away in the middle of the night when no one was there. I had been at a wedding that night and it ended late. It was the ONLY night I wasn't there too.
Not sure where I left the letter but somehow, my dad found it and gave it to the pastor of his church and he asked me if it was OK to read it at her funeral, in front of everyone. At the time, in my mind, reading it outloud was the only way she was going to hear it so I agreed.
So she finally got her letter.
All my friends were with their families and I was all alone......BaaaaaaHaaaaaaa 
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