Many years ago, when my kids were in grade school, I chaperoned a school trip. I met another mom and she told me her life story on the long bus ride.

Quick version is she met a guy, they got pregnant almost immediately and decided to marry even though they barely knew each other. A few months after the baby was born, he was killed in an accident. The morning of the funeral, she took a test and found out she was pregnant again. And her final line -- I think she'd told this as a story so many times she had it down -- was something like, "I knew him for one year, two months and four days."

That's always stuck with me.