I don't remember the exact date, but in late November or early December of 2007, my then 19-year-old daughter told me she was pregnant. At that point I had never appreciated the term "numb with shock," and indeed, I was. There were several reasons why, the first being, "I'm too young to be a grandma." The second was that she was in no position to raise a baby on her own. She didn't have a job or her high school diploma or GED and the boyfriend, at that point, was in jail.

I knew that she was sexually active and, for reasons I won't mention, she and her partner had to make use of a condom, but I was told "the condom broke."

She had no documentation of the pregnancy, so my husband and I told her she needed to go to the clinic so we could get her to a doctor to get things rolling.

Sometime before Christmas Jazmyne told us that it had been a false alarm. As it turns out, the false alarm was a false alarm. She told us that she was not pregnant because of my initial reaction. Even though Jazmyne tends to be my biggest source of stress, we have a great relationship and can tell each other pretty much anything. I understand her reason – she did not like seeing me upset.

In January of 2008 she came home with documentation. She was definitely pregnant. It was not a shock at that point, but I did give her a hard time for lying to us.

Allow me a little background here. There are five of us living in a very small house: my husband and me, my two daughters and my brother-in law – not to mention various and assorted animals. It's fairly cramped living quarters and it's easy to get on each other's nerves at times, but we make great use of laughter to get us through some of the rougher times.

Jazmyne has had a hard time finding and keeping jobs. She dropped out of high school but had been taking classes at night so she could get her diploma. However, Jazmyne was a bit of a party animal. From the time she was 12 until she was 17 she lived with her father where there were virtually no rules and no supervision. Her father would not allow her to come live with me and her stepfather, so things just grew worse and worse. She was getting in trouble with the law and not going to school.

Because she had no family to speak of with him, Jazmyne went looking for one on her own and found life with a street gang. I won't go into all of the gory details, but suffice it to say that because of this, Jazmyne is more than just a little bit rough around the edges. I know that she has a good heart, even though she tries to hide it; I knew it from the time she was little. As I said before, she is my biggest source of stress, but I am also her staunchest defender.

Growing up in her most formative years with almost no rules made it hard on my husband and me to get her on the straight and narrow. She was almost 18 when her father, unable to handle her anymore, sent her to live with us in a small town in Colorado – a far cry from the rough streets of a big city in California. Often, she would take one step forward and two steps back.

Sometime in January, after confirming the pregnancy, Jazmyne and her stepfather got into it. He told her she needed to find another place to live; basically, she was being sent back to her father. I tried to lie to myself, saying this was the best thing for her because we had no way to get her insured and that her father, who was in the middle of retiring from the Navy, could get her covered without a problem if she was living with him.

Toward the end of January, Jazmyne flew to Nevada to live with her father and his new wife. I won't get into how slow the government can work, we all know this, but because he was in the middle of retiring, his insurance would not go into effect until the beginning of March. I told him time and time again that Jazmyne needed to be seen by a doctor because of other physical problems she has that might affect the baby. I told Jazmyne, as well, that she needed to stay on top of him about it, but he would not listen. I try not to blame him for what eventually happened, but it's hard not to at times.

When she left I had finally come to terms with her pregnancy. I would still bristle a bit at being called Grandma, but I was near heartbroken that I would not be able to feel the baby kick or to help her through everything that comes with a pregnancy.

The plan was to have her stay there through the end of the year and then have her come back here when we hoped to be in a larger house. We would fly out in July, when the baby was due, to hopefully be there for the birth and then drive out there again to bring her and my grandchild back home at the end of the year. Unfortunately, we never got that far.

Jazmyne sat for more than a month waiting. Her father refused to take her to a civilian doctor and insisted on waiting for his insurance to be active. Finally, at the beginning of March she saw a doctor. At that point she had an ultrasound and was told she was having a boy – she was also told there was a problem with the baby. The doctors did not want to speculate on what exactly was wrong because they wanted to send her to a specialist, a high-risk OB.

I immediately went to the Internet trying to find what might be wrong based upon the little she was told. The only thing I could find was that he might have a hernia of the diaphragm that allowed his heart to be crowded by his intestines. OK, not good but it could be fixed. The specialist told her something completely different.

Everything at this point becomes a bit of a blur for me. It seems like events just steamrolled out of control. Jazmyne was told that her son had a cyst near his heart and it was crowding it to the left side of his chest.

At the end of March, Jazmyne came back home to live with us. Her father simply did not want the responsibility of imposing rules, his excuse being that he was married now. It angered me, and still does, but I was more than happy to have my baby back home.

The specialist in Nevada was wonderful. He has a friend here in Colorado that is also a high-risk OB and he cut through a lot of the red tape that we would have to go through to get Jazmyne in to see him. This particular doctor was not in town for her first appointment, but she saw another high-risk OB at the University of Colorado Hospital; this was on a Friday.

I got a call at work that evening just before leaving. My husband told me that things were more dire than we had believed and that the doctor had told Jazmyne she would have to fly to San Francisco for emergency surgery. The cyst had tripled in size within a two-week period and the surgery was the only way to save him.

I immediately called my boss, leaving a message that he needed to call me at home and that it had to do with Jazmyne and the baby; he already knew there was a problem because I had told him that I might have to take some time off periodically to take her to doctor's appointments and the like.

At home, I was given more details and we began to plan for the trip. My boss called and told me to take all the time I needed; it was one less thing I needed to worry about.

The last-minute flight, hotel and rental car nearly wiped us out financially, but my husband kept telling us "we'll do what we have to do." Neither one of us wanted Jazmyne to lose our grandson, her first baby. My husband was the first to feel the baby kick and he never had children of his own; this was breaking his heart, as well.

All through the flight, through the trip from the airport to the hospital, and inside the hospital, Jazmyne and I kept throwing around names like everything was going to be all right. Throughout all of this Jazmyne had kept a tight rein on her emotions, never shedding a tear. That allowed me to do the same even though I was terrified that everything was going wrong. We were both exhausted, having little sleep the night before to catch an early flight out with a long layover.

When we finally reached UCSF it was a huge relief and I could feel my emotions creeping through the wall I had built.

Rachel, one of the nurses of the specialist (Dr. L) who would perform the surgery, was extremely sympathetic. She took us across the street where Jazmyne would have an ultrasound done and continually tried to reassure us that she would be well taken care of.

After a fairly short wait we were led into the room where she would have the ultrasound done. They spent close to an hour going over her belly with the ultrasound wand. My eyes never left the screen, watching my grandson's heartbeat and listening to it.

His heart rate was on the low side of normal, hovering around the mid 120s.

The cyst dwarfed his heart terribly; it was easily five times bigger than his tiny little heart. Because of the cyst, the baby also had something the doctors called Hydrops – a condition in which massive amounts of fluid was surrounding his skeleton under his skin. We were told that he looked like a little sumo-wrestler.

The original plan was to go in and drain the cyst, but there was no guarantee that it would not come back.

Finally, after the ultrasound, Dr. L came in to talk to us. He told us that he was going to be completely honest and that he would not pull any punches. You know when you hear that, things are far from good.

I don't remember all of the details. As I said, everything has become a blur, but suffice it to say there was not much chance the baby would live. The tumor, he called it, was still growing and the Hydrops condition was worsening. He was sending in the head of radiology to look over the ultrasound of the placenta to make sure it was not getting sick, as well. If the placenta was healthy they would be able to do the surgery. But, Dr. L went on to tell us, even then there was not much chance.

We would end up having to stay in San Francisco through the end of Jazmyne's term and then longer after that because her son would be very sick – anywhere from 4 to 6 months. He said if they could do the surgery the baby would only have a 10 percent chance of living if he went to term.

At that point, Jazmyne broke. Dr. L left us alone to grieve and to discuss things. I held Jazmyne as we both cried. Everything we had been holding in up until that point came gushing out.

I give credit to God for what came next, as I had been praying almost nonstop since the phone call at work the previous day. I have never had to deal with any situation close to what was happening. I've never had a friend that had a miscarriage or a stillbirth, so I had no idea how any of this affects a person. I never had any idea how much something like this can hurt. For me it was a double whammy. I was going to lose my first grandchild and I had to watch my own firstborn go through something that was breaking her heart.

After a few minutes of crying I was able to dry my tears a bit and talk to Jazmyne. I told her, "We need to decide on a name for him. And, your first instinct might be to get rid of everything we've already gotten for him but you don't want to do that. He's a part of you and he's a part of our family. He needs to be remembered."

Jazmyne nodded her agreement, still unable to talk through her tears. One of the first names she had come up with in the previous weeks was Angelo. We decided that Angelo was to be his name because he was our little angel baby.

Once the head of radiology looked things over, Dr. L came back in to speak with us again. The placenta was getting sick, as well. It was 2 to 3 centimeters larger than it should be in this point of the pregnancy. They were afraid that Jazmyne would develop something called mirror syndrome, in which her body would mirror what was happening to Angelo, specifically the fluid that was making him look like a little sumo-wrestler. The surgery was no longer available to us. Dr. L told us that he would be surprised if Angelo lived another week.

He sent us up to the labor and delivery ward so we could discuss the few options that were left to Jazmyne. There were only two. One was to terminate the pregnancy as soon as possible. However, she was just past the 6 month mark and it would be deemed as an abortion and 6 months is the cutoff point for that. The other was to wait for Angelo to die. The military insurance Jazmyne is covered under would not allow the first option unless her life was in imminent danger and Jazmyne was showing no signs of being sick herself. That left us to wait.

We spent the next two days in San Francisco recovering from our raw emotions and the long trip and trying to rearrange flight plans. We had been prepared to spend a week there with the need to recover from surgery. I took her to Fisherman's Wharf and we wandered from shop to shop, stopping to watch the street performers and eating overpriced food that left much to be desired, trying to forget, if just for a few hours, everything that was happening.

On Tuesday, the 8th, we flew out from San Francisco and into Phoenix for a layover. The flight from Phoenix to Denver was canceled. We spent the next two to three hours trying to get back home with the help of customer service. We finally ended up flying to San Diego first and then to Denver. It was a very long trip and with the both of us already spent, our nerves were on edge. I tried not to snap at everyone who came across my path, but it was a difficult thing, as it was also for Jazmyne.

The next day, Jazmyne had another doctor's appointment at UCH. Angelo's heart was still beating and she could still feel him moving around, but it was only a matter of time. The doctor told us that if she did not feel Angelo kicking in a 24-hour period to come back in right away. She told us that Angelo was not suffering in any way but would eventually just go to sleep and not wake up. After that appointment, Jazmyne never felt Angelo kick again.

We went back to the doctor on Friday the 11th but they found Angelo's heart to still be beating; we had gotten to the one-week time frame Dr. L had given us. It gave us a little bit of hope, even though we got the same expectation – Angelo would not live another week. We had another appointment scheduled for the following Monday and were told to come back then unless Jazmyne started showing signs of being sick herself.

That night, Jazmyne and I started on the blanket we had gotten supplies for to make for Angelo. It's something I felt was necessary, though I could not have said why. My husband stayed away, saying later to me, "I don't know how you're doing this. It would rip me to shreds if I stayed out there to help."

My only answer to that was, God is getting me through. All I really wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry until I could not cry anymore. I never imagined anything could hurt so much.

Over the next 24 hours we finished the blanket and filled in Angelo's baby book; she chose Nathaniel as his middle name after her best friend who was murdered a few years previously.

On Monday, April 14, we went back to UCH. After listening for only a few seconds for Angelo's heartbeat, we were told that he had passed away. We had lost our little angel baby.

What I felt was mostly grief, though there was some relief involved. Even as a mother I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like to be told, "There's nothing we can do. You have to wait for your baby to die." As a grandmother it was hard enough, as the mother of that child. There are just no words.

The waiting over that 10 days was interminable. Even though we held out little hope, we knew. We knew.

We were told to go home and gather some belongings and to think over what sort of pain medication she would want because they were going to have to induce labor. We were also told that it could take anywhere from two hours to three days. So we went home and my husband came home from work and I made another call to my boss as I had been expecting to return to work that next day. We packed up overnight bags, Jazmyne bringing both Angelo's baby book and the blanket, and we headed out again.

They got us set up in a room that allowed family to stay for as long as was necessary. None of us got very much sleep that first night. I went for a good 30 hours without any sleep at all, my husband and daughter doing little better.

I spent most of Tuesday trying to catch up on sleep while my husband went to work. I was scared that he would miss Angelo being delivered but it was a long process.

That night, the contractions started full force. She'd had a few here and there during the day but nothing that indicated she was in full-fledged labor. They put Jazmyne on fentanyl, not sure on the name, but it is in the family of morphine and almost immediately made her groggy, sort of like she was drunk.

That night, while on this drug, she called my husband over and told him that she loved him and that she appreciated him being there for her.

As soon as I heard this I knew he would lose it. My husband is a big marshmallow. He has made great strides in bringing my younger daughter out of the shell she put over herself. Jazmyne has been a tougher nut to crack and I know that it meant to him more than words can say, even if she was doped up on pain medication when she said it. He has told all of us, more than once, that if it were possible he would adopt both of the girls as his own.

Jazmyne also told him that when she was in labor and getting ready to deliver that she wanted both of us there to hold her hands.

Before Tuesday moved into Wednesday they gave Jazmyne an epidural as the fentanyl became not enough to hold back the pain. The medication they use for the epidural caused a lot of itching, and Jazmyne was told that she could "chase" the itch all night long and never catch it. At that point my husband asked her what was worse, the pain from the contractions or the itching. The look on the nurses' faces was priceless when Jazmyne stated that the itching was worse, saying they had never heard anyone say that before.

Tuesday turned to Wednesday and we were all able to get some much needed, if very light, sleep. At some point during the night I was having a very strange and vivid dream when I jerked awake. Jazmyne's night nurse, Jessica (who is an absolute doll), had awoken me and told me, ''We have a baby."

I immediately went to Jazmyne, who was still fairly unemotional. At some point between 2:45 a.m. and 3:15 a.m., Jazmyne delivered Angelo; she never even knew it, having slept through it all. He was so tiny that the contractions did all of the work for her, not having to push at all.

Jessica had come in to check on Jazmyne around 2:45 a.m. and all was well. At 3:15 a.m. the doctors came in to check – and there he was; Wednesday, April 16, at 3:15 a.m. ultimately was the time they decided on for Angelo's delivery.

After cleaning up Angelo a bit, Jessica wrapped him in a blanket. On top of the hospital blanket, she wrapped him in the blanket we had worked on together at home and brought him to Jazmyne. As soon as she had him in her arms, Jazmyne broke, as did I, if for a bit of a different reason.

I cannot begin to imagine the pain Jazmyne was going through at that moment, but her face told the entire story. Already she was so in love with him, I could see it in her eyes, but I could also see that her heart was breaking into millions of pieces.

The natural question of "why," came to mind, but I never truly asked it. All I could do was pray for God to give all of us the strength to get through this, especially Jazmyne.

Angelo did not have the look of a pink, healthy baby. During pregnancy babies grow many layers of skin, but Angelo never had that chance. We could see, that if born to term, he would have had a head full of very dark hair and his eyes would have been dark, as well. Even though Angelo never had a chance to come full term, even though he was more red than pink, and even though not everything had finished growing, he was still beautiful. He was, and always will be, our little angel baby, but now he was God's as well.

A few hours later we had the hospital chaplin come in and we dedicated Angelo to God. All of us, Jazmyne, my husband and I, Jazmyne's friends that had come to support her, the chaplin and Jessica the nurse were all in tears.

Both the chaplin and Jessica must deal with this sort of thing on an almost daily basis, but instead of becoming inured to it they still have hearts as big as any I've come across. Through all of this, from Nevada to San Francisco to Colorado, everyone, every doctor, every nurse, every person we came in contact with, was amazing. They were all sympathetic and sincere. I cannot imagine a better grouping of people to have helped Jazmyne, and the rest of us, through this tremendously trying time.

It has been not quite three weeks as I am writing this that Angelo was delivered. The feelings are still fresh but not as raw. The tears still come and the questions.

In this time we have had Angelo cremated. We will be putting his ashes into pendants for those of us closest to Jazmyne. I was completely dismayed at all there was left to him. Granted, he was only 1 pound, 13 ounces and 12 inches long, but I never imagined there would be so little.

Despite his size and the miniscule amount of ashes, Angelo will always fill my heart. Thoughts of my first grandchild will always bring tears to my eyes. As much of a shock it was when I first learned that Jazmyne was pregnant, I grew to love that little boy, our little angel baby. I had visions of holding him and singing "Itsy-bitsy-spider" to him, of playing with him. But now my visions have had to change.

That Wednesday morning, after Angelo was delivered, my husband went outside for a little bit. While he was out there he noticed a couple of things. Earlier that night and throughout the day, the wind had been blowing hard with great gusts. While he was out there the wind stopped and the trees in front of the hospital were now in full bloom, whereas they had not been earlier in the day.

When he came back in he told Jazmyne of this. It seemed to comfort her somewhat and she took it as a sign that God was watching out for her son and herself.

We also believe that she and I finished Angelo's blanket before he passed away. They're just little things but we hold onto them in faith. All of us believe that everything happens for a reason, even if we do not know or understand those reasons. Even if we do not like them.

I will finish by saying that I am very proud of my daughter. She has found strength and courage in all of this – things I knew she already possessed but never really showed. As I said earlier, she is a bit rough around the edges but some of those edges have softened. I believe she has become more conscientious of those around her and her thought processes have changed as well. She still has her moments, she always will, because that's who she is, but I believe she has come out a better person for all of this.

I would have loved to see her mother her son, to see what kind of parent she would be. And even though Angelo was never meant to live on this earth he will always live in our hearts. I will never bristle at being called Grandma, again. One day, when the time is right, I will hear that name and rejoice.