amazing grace; Three extraordinary women-Max Kelly, Sarah Dudley Plimpton, and Elyn Zimmerman-have very different experiences of widowhood.

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian

Widow is a dark word, with implications that are ancient and dire-black vestments, endless sorrow, a life robbed of its future. (The widower, by contrast, has always been socially desirable, as potential husband or extra man.) This makes no sense today, of course, when so many women's lives are active and productive outside their marriage, but the old imbalance persists. How to go forward alone, cope with your grief, bring up children, stay afloat financially-the problems and challenges of widowhood can seem overwhelming, and in a time of war and global terrorism, the possibility of our having to face them may be more on our minds. The three recent widows who generously agreed to talk with me for this article have in common that their late husbands were public figures who played a significant role in American life. Each woman's experience is different, but all three have had to define and perpetuate the individual legacies of men who were deeply involved with the cultural life of our time. In doing so, they discovered unexpected strengths within themselves. The future, as they see it, is wide-open, free of self-pity, and anything but dark.

Madelyn "Max" Kelly saw her husband, Michael, for the last time in February 2003, in Paris. They and their two young sons, Tom and Jack, celebrated Max's forty-first birthday there a few days before Mike left for Kuwait. He was killed six weeks later, when the Humvee he was riding in came under fire outside Baghdad and plunged into a canal. The first American reporter to die in the Iraq war, Kelly was a great journalist and a much-loved, larger-than-life personality, whose sharp eye and slashing style had enlivened The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, and whose editorial daring transformed the venerable Atlantic monthly into a must-read for political insiders. As his friend Maureen Dowd wrote, "He did many things well enough to provoke envy. . . . Except he wasn't the sort you'd envy; he was too generous."

Max and the boys live in Swampscott, north of Boston, in a big, old, unpretentious house whose wide porches overlook the ocean. "It's so much us," Max tells me, " 'cause it's sort of shabby, and it's a great kid's house-we thought growing up here would be magical." She's a warm, outgoing woman with a mane of golden-brown hair and an air of unshakable competence. During the early years of their marriage, she traveled as much as he did, for her work as a producer for CNN and, later, CBS. (They met in 1988, when they both covered the Dukakis campaign, and they got married in 1991.) She gave up her career when Tom was born, in 1996, and they bought this house soon after Mike took over as editor of The Atlantic in 1999. "Mike said, 'We're staying here forever,' " she tells me.

In her sunny kitchen, we sit down for a cup of tea and a bowl of fresh raspberries. Her two boys are in school-Tom, eight, and Jack, five. "This town has been unbelievably good to us," Max tells me. "I don't think I've ever had to tell anybody about Mike, because everybody knows. I didn't make dinner for four months-every night someone brought it. The thing that helps the most is when people do things like that without being asked." The Atlantic and The Washington Post forwarded hundreds of letters from readers who loved and missed his writing. "That meant a lot to me, knowing he had touched so many lives. People tell you that you need other widows in your life, and it's true. I now know five widows whom I keep in good contact with. One of them, a September 11 widow, talks about 'the head cock,' where people look at you with their head tilted and say, 'I'm so, so sorry.' Always two so's. But I don't mind the head cock. I mean, what do you expect somebody to do?"

When David Bradley, The Atlantic's owner and chairman, called her at 6:30 on the morning of April 4, 2003, with "the saddest news I've ever had to give somebody," her first thought was that he was going to tell her he was selling The Atlantic. It hadn't occurred to her that Mike was in any real danger. "I talked to Mike every day," she tells me. "I talked with him for an hour the night before he died. We'd both ...