I stood in an ICU room with a young woman whose mother was dying.  She told me about the sacrifice her mother had made.  Fifteen years before, her mother had left home, traveled from the east coast to Colorado, to raise the children of her other daughter, who had died.  Then, the day before she was due to finally go home to her husband and her other daughter - after fifteen years - she suddenly had a massive stroke and would never awake again.