She told me years ago, most affectingly, how it was she had become involved in raising funds for cancer research. She had watched her husband succumb to cancer. Witnessed the devastating decline of a healthy man well past middle age, but still vibrantly involved with life, slowly plunged into a struggle to maintain hope that he would survive past the surgery, the radiation, the drug regimen that had turned him into an invalid.

She had been with him all the way, nursing and encouraging him, trying to lift his spirits, to renew his interest in so many things that were once of importance to him. The slow decline rapidly accelerated as cancer returned, not once, but twice, until finally the prognosis was inevitable and obvious even without the sombre pronunciations of the consulting oncologist.

By the time I got to know her she was already approaching her 80s. She was still a robust woman, stylishly dressed, enthusiastic about life, heavily involved in community and proud of her two daughters themselves mothers of teen girls. Of her sons-in-law, one had her deep admiration and respect, he was a "really good man", she confided to me. One daughter a nurse, the other involved in the plastic arts, a sculptor of some local renown.

Over the years she has presented as no different than when I first knew her. A youthful appearing woman for her age, with ample energy to mobilize the lethargy of many very much younger than herself; an optimist, a very busy and engaged personality. Impossible not to admire her, not to say to yourself, I'll be like her eventually, hopefully. She has had her health problems, but while taking them sufficiently serious to follow the required protocols, not allowing them to structure her life.

Yesterday, she kept my husband listening for quite a long time. He had gone over to her house, a few streets off from our own, on an errand. Even at her age she is durable enough to continue living on her own, in her own home, driving her car, looking to her own needs, along with continued community involvement. She is gregarious, open and gracious.

She conveyed to my husband how regretful she feels looking back at her life and how it unveiled itself for her through a course she sometimes felt helpless to alter, even when she was desperate to effect a change. Above all, she said, she regrets now her free-will choice that was of such a great influence on the turns her life would take. Her choice of a life companion. Her husband, whom I never had suspected from what she conveyed to me previously, was someone she neither loved nor respected; rather someone whose venality and abusive character she came to despise.

She hadn't, as she had thought she was doing, chosen a life mate who would complement her own life, someone with whom she would enjoy the passage into the destiny that each of us faces through fortune, good or bad. She has no memories to treasure of her passage alongside his. She regrets what she had the misfortune to bypass; a happy contented life with a "good man".

Recognizing, I infer from this encounter with someone else's choice who happened to be a "good man", just how different the trajectory of her intimate life could have been, might have been, had she hesitated in her free-will choice. But then, none of us can read the future, and even if we could we would not necessarily be possessed with the kind of clairvoyance that might allow us to assess traits submerged only to rise in time and take possession of our hopes.