I was listening to A Prairie Home Companion until a few minutes ago. They have been doing this ongoing skit about the life of a snowman. He and the snow-woman down the street have been talking together for some weeks. They both know their time is short. Today was about saying good-bye. The tears started streaming down my face. I had to turn it off. I don’t like to be distracted when the tears come. I want to feel them. My friends in the grief groups tell me that is the best thing to do–that if you try to hold them back you only make things worse later.

I keep coming back to something my mother-in-law said when she was told what she had was fatal: “Everyone dies of something–I just know what it is that is going to kill me.”

Jane knew what was going to kill her. She walked across the street one day to see our neighbors. They winter in Florida. They told me she said to them that day shortly before they left that she did not expect she would still be here in the spring. To me, she said optimistic things. She was being brave for me.

I had done the reading. I knew what the odds were–knew that her seeing another summer was not likely. But I stayed upbeat every day about her chances. I apparently did such a good job acting brave for her that she thought she had to be brave for me.

But I think there were times in the hospital that we both believed devoutly that she would make it–that we would find a cure and that she would be the first person to truly defeat this disease and live to tell of it.

We had the best doctors and the best hospital and the best attitude.

My mind knows we did everything humanly possible. But I keep looking at it and wondering if there is anything else I could have done–that either of us could have done–that anyone could have done.

The truth is there was nothing we could have done differently by the time we knew what was going on. And even had her doctors figured out what she had five years earlier all we could have done was, maybe, hold off the end another year or two longer.

Do we know more now than we did then? Yes. Would it have made a difference in her quality of life? Maybe. But the truth is we still have no cure unless we find this cancer early–and for Jane, early was five years before I met her.

We are all snowmen and snow-women. What matters is not that we will melt–but what we do with the time before we do.