My mother met Mr. Wonderful after she'd pulled up stakes following my father's death and moved to another state, to a retirement community of her choosing.

The sojourners lived across the hall from one another, each solitary after lifetimes of marriage, each bright, willful, annoying, droll, kind, wry in outlook, facile with words - co-conspirators in lives of diminishing length but substantial depth and breadth.

Footsteps back and forth, back and forth - like a flying shuttle - across that carpeted stretch of corridor wove something substantial between these two.

Mr. W brought my mom roses each Valentine's Day, something my father had never thought to do and, in return, she gave him grief over sponging from her store of cigarettes.

They seemed to think it a fair trade. More than once I, the visitor, found them, heads bent over risqué limericks at my mom's table, situated by the wide window where she could watch the trivialities of the day - the delivery trucks, the plows - and the dramas, lightning storms, ambulances slipping off into starry nights.

She never spoke of her companion and love in the same sentence. She didn't need to. It was written all over her, in the way she tilted her head in flirtation, in the flutter of a hand when dismissing Mr. W's latest absurdity.

This was a woman smitten.

The day Mr. W killed himself with a gunshot - this month 15 years ago - my mother called me, her only child, from the depths of an unfathomably dark place of the soul. Her friend had left her a letter saying he didn't expect to ever be as happy as he was then.

He left another note for police, directing them to his body and his car.

His health had been failing and he'd already watched what failing health did to his wife over the course of many years.

It was not the path he wished to take. So he took another one, the one that broke my mother. Or could have, had she been a woman of lesser mettle.

My mother is gone now too; she has been gone for 13 years.

She lived a while longer after Mr. W exited, after the day his adult children came to clear out the room across from hers and return to their busy lives, after the day she finally understood she was truly alone.

She lived a while longer, into her mid 80s, clearly ready by that time to be somewhere beyond a wheelchair and the Bingo game. But she did, with my nudging, something nearly unimaginable for her, the pragmatist. She agreed it might help to talk with a therapist who made home visits. It was my last best gift to her, this nudge.

She seemed over the months of private talk with the shrink to pull herself erect into life yet again, sadder but clearly resolved to go forward.

She began to stargaze again rather than weep in the middle of the night when insomnia took hold.

All I could do in those last years was continue to visit, to advocate, to hold her hand, to drive up at a moment's notice after a doctor's urgent call of this crisis or that, then somehow navigate the 90 miles home, wishing everything could be otherwise.

Crying all the way down the Mass. Pike, a slipstream of grief amid barreling trucks.

Caretaking, for me, meant being there to take on paperwork matters cluttering up the deeper intentions of my mother's remaining time and to keep pouring on the affection, freeing mom to be entirely herself.

That seems to be what she wanted - she continued to make friends and grasp the moments - and it is what I gave. It was all I could give. I could not give back her Mr. W.

Today, 15 years later after that gunshot, this is what I think of when I remember my mother, as she grew frail, as she began to forget, as her limbs weakened, as she adopted a curious pose of gazing heavenward as if supplicating or listening.

It takes courage, yes, to age, but far greater courage to so embrace the unknowns of love - at a time of life when many withdraw into petty complaints of cold oatmeal and aching joints - that you can feel your heart crack open and bleed even as you hit the homestretch still engaged in every moment.

BETSY SHEA-TAYLOR, a former editor and writer for The Sun Chronicle, is a freelance writer. She can be reached at prosewing@aol.com.