Your Plateau: Perhaps August 24, 2012?

Nothing makes me weep more than to think about this: your plateau. I will be investigating this more so that I can better pinpoint the precise day you reached your plateau. As the doctors described it, this was the point at which you would improve the most. By improve, they mainly meant your speech and mobility. It was slightly before this plateau when I brought your iPad into your room. First I let you look at some of the emails you had received. You seemed to be reading them. I take that back: you were reading them. You had trouble holding the iPad, so I set it up on your snack tray with a large picture of water behind it, so that you would not have to hold it.
  It was during this time that I brought your attention to two emails that were from LegalZoom.com. One of the emails mentioned a change of Executor, and the other email mentioned a new Will. The emails were basically reminders for you to complete the process, which I later learned meant that you had to sign them. There were many days that I thought you had created your new will just two days before your stroke, but I have since learned that it was six days before your stroke. Little did I know that these documents had already arrived at the house in large white envelopes. Both Mary Jo and I thought they were some sort of junk mail, so we just set them aside for you to look at when you got back home. We had quite a pile of mail on the kitchen table for you to look at when you got home. Little did either one of us know that that day would never arrive -- meaning that you would never be well enough to sit at the kitchen table and look at your email.
  When I asked you about these emails, your eyes lit up. You wanted to tell me about this, but I could not understand what you were saying. Oddly, I also forgot about this in a few days. It just didn't seem important to me. But about two weeks later I called LegalZoom to find out more info, but they would not give me any info over the phone. I explained that you had had a stroke and were unable to tell me about the documents. But since I could not prove who I was, they could not tell me anything.
  It was not until after you died that Mary Jo opened one of those large white envelopes and saw that it was a new Will. Of course it was not a legal document because you had never had a chance to sign it. But in this new Will, you left the house to just me and Mary Jo. This was a drastic departure from your first Will of 2001 which gives the house to all four siblings. Little did I know the trouble this would soon cause. I never planned to tell John or Laura about the Will because it would only hurt them, but Mary Jo mentioned it to John, so I let John see it. John and I agreed not to show it to Laura. But as days passed after your death, it became painfully obvious to me that your last wishes *had* to be known by Laura -- even though she herself was a stroke victim just four years ago and was still having difficulties speaking.
  I think it was the next day that I opened up a few of your scrabble games on the iPad for you. I wanted to see if you could make a word or two. In a game that you were playing with Angela, you actually dragged the letters and made LA. You also pressed play. Looking at the board later, I saw that despite this being such a small word, it really was one of the best moves you could have made. In another game that you were playing with me, you made the word LASS. You pressed Play, and the word was recorded. You were growing tired at this point, so I didn't pressure you to make any more words. Little did I know that "Lass" would be the very last word in Scrabble you would ever make. Little did I know that this word would be the theme of the eulogy that I would deliver on September 25th.