Have you ever wished that life came with one "take back" card? That when you hit one of your later birthdays you could whip out that card and take back some major bit of stupidity, spend the card on fixing some unforgivable blunder in your life?

I'd spend mine in a heartbeat on my first stepmother. I was The Asshole Stepdaughter From Hell? to that woman and she deserved far better. Excuse me for a moment while I replentish my sackcloth and ashes supply ...

First a little background on Margaret so you know her. Her own mother was widowed young and went wild, tended to party with men who liked to drink and smack her around.

It was anything but a stable or happy home. Margaret got out by getting herself pregnant at 17, married and a mom for the first time at 18, her second child born just over a year later.

Things were going pretty well. Her young husband, Doug, had a good paying factory job, her two infant sons were flourishing.

One morning Doug was tinkering under their car in the driveway, gabbing with Margaret about this and that, when the jack gave way and he was killed instantly.

She was not yet 21.

That would have finished me right there.

Not this feisty little woman, who was a smidge under five feet. She taught herself to type and do bookkeeping, got an office job. Eventually she met, fell in love with, and married my widowed father. He came with three amazon daughters, the oldest being The Asshole Stepdaughter From Hell? who was only 15 years younger than Margaret.

The Asshole Stepdaughter From Hell? was very good in school. She was so arrogant and stupid that she was positive the only education out there was the one you got in school. She had a mean, sarcastic mouth on her, she liked to taunt Margaret about her lack of formal education.

Full of rage at her own mother for checking out of life early, The Asshole Stepdaughter From Hell? spewed her venom at her stepmother at every opportunity. She almost broke the marriage, but fortunately disappeared off to university and another life. I'm sure everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

The Asshole Stepdaughter From Hell? didn't drift back into her family's orbit until she had a kid of her own. Wish I could say that the difficulty of raising her own child made her aware of the great gift that had been given to her when her stepmother agreed to take on raising three kids that weren't her own.

I can't. We're not talking about the sharpest pencil in the box, folks.

Around her 40th birthday, Margaret was told she had an incurable liver disease, that her only chance at survival was a liver transplant. She was called to the hospital three times, and three times it proved a mismatch.

This tiny woman, who had always watched her appearance, was ravaged by this illness, but she refused to give in to it. She had always taken care of my father in every way, managed the household, dealt with the bills. When she knew she was running out of life, she sat down and made her own funeral arrangements, so my father wouldn't have to deal with it himself.

She didn't quite make it to 45. Dad gave us warning, we all came home for one last visit, and Margaret died quietly and with what I realize now was incredible courage and dignity. Me, The Asshole Stepdaughter From Hell?, I was 30 then and in my unbelievable smugness and arrogance felt she had been given a good run at life.

Please, just shoot me now ...

I'll be 49 soon. I've now outlived Margaret by four years, four full and happy years. I feel there's so much left to experience yet ... and I can't imagine how she found the courage to let go gracefully at what now seems to me to be such a young age.

If someone was to say to me, "Marn, you've got three, four years tops to live (and by the way your quality of life in those years will suck big time) ..." Honey, if someone were to say those words to me now, I know that I could not find within myself any where near the courage, the grace or the wisdom that Margaret displayed in both her life and her dying.

I used to think I was some smart. I used to think that all the books I had read, all those years of education, that they had taught me everything I needed to know.

Sometimes, for incredibly stupid people like me, it can take almost a lifetime for the important lessons to sink in. I am book smart and life stupid.

I will always regret that I did not thank Margaret for the life smarts she tried to teach me.