For more than 20 years, KSTZ radio station in Des Moines, Iowa has been granting Christmas wishes for listeners, but this year they received a request unlike any other.
Brenda Schmitz wrote into the station, asking them to fulfill three wishes, but there was a catch: Brenda isn't alive.
The wife and mother to four died in August 2011, after losing a battle with ovarian cancer. Her youngest son, Max, was just two at the time. She wrote the letter one month before she passed away and entrusted it with a friend, giving specific instructions not to send it until her husband had found someone new.
That happened this past summer when her husband David proposed to Jayne Abraham, a mother of two herself.
In the letter, Brenda asks the station to fulfill her last wish to do something for the new woman in her husband's life, for her family and for the doctors and nurses who helped ease her pain.
On Friday, Brenda's husband was brought into the station, but didn't know what was happening until host Colleen Kelly started reading his wife's last letter.
'When you are in receipt of this letter, I will have already lost my battle to ovarian cancer,' Brenda wrote. 'I told [my friend] once my loving husband David had moved on in his life and had met someone to share his life with again, to mail this letter to all of you at the station.
Her first wish was directed at her husband's fiance Jayne, asking that she be treated to a spa day.
'She deserves it,' Brenda wrote. 'Being a step-mother to all those boys, and especially giving little Max a mother's love that only she can give. Make her smile and know her efforts are truly appreciated from me.'
'Thank you. I love you, whoever you are,' Brenda added.
The second wish was that her family be taken on a magical trip, somewhere they could all enjoy and make memories to last a lifetime.
Her final wish was for the nurses and doctors who took care of her in the cancer unit at Mercy Medical Center.