My Christmas Wish

The Worse Day of My Life

My name is Jeffery Justice Bellavance. When I was two years old, my mom started calling me Jeff. After that, it just stuck. We were a very tightknit family. I am the son of wealthy real estate guru Houston Lamar Bellavance. My mom, Marlaina Serena Evens-Bellavance, was a successful designer clothing store owner. Both of my parents were in my life until I was fifteen. That was when my mom died from endstage breast cancer, even though she went to cancer specialists who kept telling her that it a race against time. She was basically told she was fighting a losing battle.

From the time that I was a baby, I never saw my parents fight. My mom had told me once that they had been married for a year before I was born. I also know they were happily married for sixteen years. If there were ever any problems in their marriage, I never knew about them. I figured that if there were problems with my parents' marriage, my mom would have told me. The fact that I was never approached about any problems told me that the marriage between my mom and dad was more or less perfect.

The day my mom died was one of the worse days of my life. She died just three days before Christmas Eve. The date of her funeral was Christmas of 1998. As a result of mom's funeral being held on Christmas Day, I become a scrooge around the Christmas holidays. The last time I remember celebrating Christmas was right before my mother's health took a turn for the worse. Just a year before she died, I gave mom a gift certificate for a day of pampering at the brand new Hilton Day Spa in Boonesville. I sat in my bedroom for hours, trying to think of the perfect gift to get her. She needed a gift that would make her  feel good about herself. I had heard mom talking for days about going to the day spa because she wanted to get a mani and pedi. That was when I decided to go all-out and spend the extra money for the full day of pampering for her. Even though I knew how much the gift certificate was going to cost, I knew how much mom would like the day of pampering. At that time, she was still going through radiation and chemotherapy. I'd hoped, prayed, and cried out to God and asked that the radiation and chemotherapy would work. I wanted for the treatments to finally start working. I knew that it would, one day, eradicate the cancer that'd ravaged mom's body for the better part of four years. I'd hoped in the very beginning, when the cancer came back, that the chemo and radiation would work that last time around. That was the second time mom had gone through the chemo and radiation treatments. Dad and I hoped that mom would be around for many Christmases to come. Little did we know that it would be the last Christmas that we'd ever get to spend with her.

I had just about everything that I could want while I was growing up. I lived in the most affluent neighborhood in Boonesville. I went on vacations to the Bahamas, cruises around the Caribbean and other exotic places around the world.

Right before my seventh birthday, Mom and Dad took me on a world cruise. We visited every continent on the planet. Most people only dream about something this extravagant.  But that was the gift that I was given by my parents right before my seventh birthday. My parents and I went to Montana and spent many holiday seasons at a cabin that my family owned there in the mountains.

My parents gave me a childhood that most kids only dream about. By the time I was ten years old, I had opened my own checking and savings account. The day I opened my account, I deposited five thousand dollars. Every week after opening the account, mom took me to the Boonesville First National Bank every Saturday at one p.m. so I could deposit my weekly allowance of one hundred and fifty dollars.

Although mom died when I was only fifteen, I continued depositing my allowance into my checking and savings account. By the time I was sixteen, I had quite a bit of money saved up. Dad said that it was about time that I had my own car. So he went with me to the local Jaguar dealership where I picked out my first car. I bought and paid the full sticker price for it right then and there. After I bought my own vehicle on my sixteenth birthday, dad thought I could handle having my own cellphone. Dad took me to a local cellphone company where He bought me a new, top of the line cellphone and paid the first month's bill. As a result, I had the responsibility of paying my cellphone bill each month and keeping gas in my car, using money from my checking and savings account.