On the cold February morning, the landscape was stiff with chill. The corn fields were glazed with a heavy wet snow, fresh from the night before. Cardinals chirped and flitted at the bird feeder hanging from the big maple tree that sheltered her children’s play area. The place was undisturbed today. The sandbox, long forgotten, was buried deep in snow. This, she thought, is the perfect snow day. Her mind recalled the bustle of her children layering themselves up with winter clothes, plodding out the door, their only pursuit being to dig out their sleds and slide down the hill leading to the open field. Those were the days, she mused, the days of innocence and joy. Those were among the memories she treasured, but today, reminiscing would do her no good. She had to face reality. She didn’t mind getting older, or even that she stood alone now looking into a cold winter morning. What bothered her was her failure, her inability to make her husband understand his priorities were skewed.

Even a happy life is marred with sadness, she thought. Of course, Claire expected that much, but what she struggled to accept was that her husband’s stubbornness would have such a lasting impact. Throughout the years she had made a special effort to develop loving bonds with her children, and she nurtured caring friendship between them, but there was nothing she could do to foster a healthy father-child relationship. In the early years the kids hungered for it and eventually, each in their own way, settled with and without it. The teenage years for the boys were especially hard, but with her steady support and prayerful concern, each worked his own way through those years, finding mentors and role models in other men.

Her husband’s love affair started innocently enough. At first it was guised as a legitimate business call. Someone unknown to Claire telephoned, asking for his advice and needing expertise in regards to an immediate crisis. As the years went on, he answered the phone routinely during dinner time. He would engage in brief conversation and soon be out the door, leaving his family at the table. Claire tried to go against it in the early years, hoping to make him understand that the children needed him to be present and involved in their lives. He would get so defensive, standing there with his shoulder tense, and arguing that time is money and he could only spare so much of either. He was a powerful man and self-justification came easy for him. Over the years, Claire resolved that there was nothing she could do to change his ways and so she focused more on the kids and their needs. In the most critical times, she was both mother and father to her children.

Over the years, her husband’s illicit relationship became more and more of the norm. Friday nights he stayed late on the job, saying he had to finish up just one more thing. His other love enticed him especially on the beautiful spring days. What did he see in her? Claire wondered. Along with helping him develop strategic business deals, certainly she must have flattered his ego, enabling to validate time away from his family. As the affair continued he became more obsessed and his love became an addiction. For so many years he felt at his best only when he was with her. He was lured away by her calls on weekends and Saturday morning into the late afternoon until she became Sunday’s mistress.

Claire shook her head hard, ridding her mind of these terrible thoughts. It was over now and time for her to embrace life again. Brushing the soft curls from her forehead, she claimed her gray hair as a prized silver trophy. Welcoming it as evidence of a life well lived. She turned away from the window and looked back at the estate planning books sitting there on the table. The attorney insisted she come up with an estate plan. Claire realized this was just another formality she simply had to deal with since her husband’s death, although this would be one of the easiest things for her to face. Besides, she trusted her attorney friend. They had been neighbors for over thirty years and parishioners at St. Mary’s for that long. Funny thing, she used to pray at mass weekly for years. Wasn’t that enough estate planning?

She put her head in her hands, and vowed she wouldn’t weep anymore. She let herself revisit the day when she first sensed the change in her husband. Vividly she recalled that warm October afternoon with the sun full and bright in the sky. The sound of the lawnmower hummed as one of the boys cut the lawn for the final time of the season. The smell of fresh green grass floated through open windows. The last wave of Indian summer had heated the air so much that Claire could have been fooled into thinking it might be August again and that winter would maybe never come.

Strangely, on that beautiful day, her husband was in the house. This was odd enough, but there he lay on the living room couch. When Claire asked him if he was feeling alright, he only responded, “must’ve torn a muscle.” Claire’s suspicions were heightened when his mistress called on that day and he opted to ignore her. Could it be that the affair’s intensity was lessening? It had to be.

Her husband’s pain increased so much during the month that he volunteered to see a doctor. Believing now that his sore back was due to misalignment, he went to the chiropractors first. An x-ray revealed something that spinal adjustment wouldn’t remedy. A mysterious mass was lodged in his upper back. The chiropractor suggested that he see his family practitioner and from there he was immediately referred to a cancer specialist. Stage four, lung carcinoma was the diagnosis.

Claire was with him daily though those last six weeks, but the mistress didn’t so much as give him a call. She no longer had time for him, and that’s when the romantic relationship ended. The children all came to see him in those last few weeks, one traveling all the way from the west coast. There was no time for fresh apologies or remember-whens, instead the sons and daughters sat together in the hospital lobby, talking, not of the past, but of the time to come. They had no need to say goodbye to him for he shut them out years ago. His love affair had left them fatherless. In those days before the cancer, work had already possessed him, but it was the cancer that took him at the last.

“Now you’re stalling!” she reprimanded herself. “Stay on track!” Once more she picked up the folder and flipped through the sheets. “What to do, what to do. A plan entitled “how to give a million,” she mused. Finally, after all those years of necessary financing for business expansion and assorted short term enterprises, there was no more debt. She glanced through the itemized columns and the total net worth of all her husband’s commercial investments. He would have been proud to see this day, but in her heart Claire knew he wouldn’t have been satisfied. He wanted more, more than she or the kids could give him. She scratched her pen across the lines, circling one or two items that she wanted to discuss with her attorney. By now the purple trimmed sky had guided the sun over the hills to the southeast. The sky transformed itself, letting the colors dissipate. It was time for Claire to move on too.