Perhaps if you had called Delta they may have waived the fee for booking less than 21 days in advance due to your circumstances. On the other hand, they may have turned right around and charged you the telephone booking fee instead. It really is amazing that these fees still exist.
The fee to book an award ticket inside of a 21 day (or 14 or 7 day) window is a throwback to when tickets were issued on paper. To get your ticket to you they would need to expedite the printing of your ticket and overnight it or in some cases arrange for the ticket to be printed and held at your departure airport. With e-tickets all of that special handling went away but the expedited service charges didn't.
I just did a fare search for a round trip BWI (Baltimore) to SDF (Louisville, KY) and even without any advance purchase (I used departing this Thursday and returning Sunday in my search) most airlines (Continental, Delta/Northwest, US Airways) were $235-$238 round-trip. Oddly enough Southwest, who supposedly always has the lowest fare, priced out at $382 for the same dates. I know times are tough and that you were under duress due to your loss but it seems to me that just buying the tickets outright would have been a better move. Most frequent fliers value their miles at about 2.5 cents per mile. I'm assuming you redeemed 25,000 miles for this trip since it's the lowest redemption level for a domestic round trip. So the "value" of the miles you redeemed was $625 and then you paid $160 in fees and taxes on top of that! So a ticket which you could have paid less than $300 cash for actually benefited Delta as you burned miles and lined their pockets with $150 of your hard earned cash. ($10 of what you paid went to the government.) As Howie Mandel would have said, "not such a great deal."
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