On Jan. 13, Beaulah Smith was seated beside her husband, Isaac, as he lay in a hospital bed listening to a team of doctors explain the grim state of his health. Ms. Smith, 63, knew that her husband was weak after having several strokes, and she suspected that the pain he was experiencing might be the result of an ulcer. But as she sat beside her husband of 40 years, she was totally unprepared for the words she would hear.
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Beaulah Smith, who cared for her dying husband while battling ovarian cancer, depleted her savings trying to pay expenses.
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Terminal colon cancer. Inoperable. Six months.
The family was thunderstruck. This could not be right. The couple's daughter Marisella Wilson, 41, who was in the room, ran out of the hospital in tears.
As it turned out, the doctors were wrong about the six-month life expectancy. Isaac Smith would die three weeks later, on Feb. 2.
"Do you see how that blows a person away?" Ms. Smith said in an interview, while speaking about the short time she had to say goodbye. She could not understand how doctors had missed such a substantial health problem, particularly since her husband was either in a hospital or under nursing care for much of the previous year.
She was left wondering how the situation might have turned out differently if they had found his cancer earlier, while it was still treatable. Perhaps that is why the biggest source of pain that Ms. Smith has had to face in recent months has been the discovery of a single piece of paper she found in her home while preparing to move. It was a biopsy result that said her husband had a diagnosis of invasive adenocarcinoma, a type of cancer. The report was dated Oct. 27, 2006. Although the report indicated that Mr. Smith had been informed of the diagnosis, Ms. Smith said she had no idea.
The emotional fallout from that discovery has been a significant setback for Ms. Smith. "I'm going forward and trying to make the best, but I feel spiritually broken," she said.
In June 2010, her husband had a series of strokes. The episodes transformed the once-independent man, who used to work as a chauffeur, into a frail person who was plagued by confusion and was in need of constant help.
Mr. Smith was transferred to a nursing home for recovery and therapy, and eventually he returned home to the brick split-level house on Staten Island where he and Ms. Smith had lived since 1999.
Speaking in her tidy living room decorated with framed family pictures, Ms. Smith recounted the challenge of dealing with the sudden changes in her husband's personality, especially the mood swings that became violent at times. "He became unglued," she said. "I had to spend a lot of time rendering care to him."
Then in December 2010, Ms. Smith began experiencing health problems of her own: she was struck with stomach pains so severe that she was hospitalized for what doctors diagnosed as diverticulitis. She had surgery later that month and received alarming news.
The surgeon discovered that Ms. Smith had ovarian cancer, which had advanced to Stage 3. "All of a sudden, in a few days, your life gets flipped around," she said.
She began chemotherapy in April 2011, balancing the difficult treatment with her demanding caretaking responsibilities at home. She was still undergoing chemotherapy at the time of her husband's funeral.
Throughout this ordeal, Ms. Smith's finances tightened.
Although she used to work as an HIV counselor at the Special Funds Conservation Committee in New York, she had lost that job and relied on a pension of $312 a month and monthly Social Security disability payments of $1,771.
Faced with her husband's home-care expenses and funeral costs, Ms. Smith fell two and a half months behind on her rent and was given an eviction notice. Not knowing what else to do, she turned to Catholic Charities Archdiocese New York, one of the agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.
In July, Catholic Charities provided Ms. Smith with $705 from the fund to help her avoid eviction and to pay off what she owed on her rent, which is $1,805 a month. Her caseworkers also sought an interest-free loan for her from the Bridge Fund, a nonprofit organization aimed at preventing homelessness, which provided her with money while she settled her affairs and prepared to move to more affordable housing. She intends to move at the beginning of next year, and is looking for a new job to help get her life back on track.
Ms. Smith's health has improved, and she makes regular visits to her doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. But she is still troubled, wondering what would have happened if her husband had acted on his sickness when his illness was first discovered.
"It is a miserable feeling," she said. "I'm wrestling with it. And I can't do a thing about it."
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