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It was just like in the movies. A knock rattled Gina Lane's door. She saw three neatly dressed men -- a chaplain, a colonel and her husband's supervising officer.
"You know exactly what it's about," Lane said. "Your whole world falls apart."
Lane's husband, Mitch, a U.S. Army Green Beret, fell from a rope to his death in 2003 during a night mission in an area of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.
At 31, Lane became a widow with two young girls to raise.
"I wondered, 'How on Earth is everything going to get done?'" she said.
On the second anniversary of her husband's death, she began her pursuit of a master's degree in geography at Texas A&M University, where she had earned her bachelor's in 1993.
On Saturday, she will graduate with a 4.0 grade-point average. She is among about 3,700 A&M students earning degrees this week.
"If Gina can pull it off, with everything she's been through -- working, raising two young girls and still having the time and energy to do excellent work," said one of her professors, Daniel Sui, "I tell my other students, 'You have absolutely no excuse.'"
Lane typically begins her day at 6:30 a.m. She wakes up Michelle, 9, feeds her breakfast and puts her on a bus to school shortly after 7 a.m.
About that time, she wakes up Noelle, 12, who starts school later than her little sister.
When her kids are away, Lane studies or works. She's an editorial assistant for a geography publication that Sui edits. She'd rather not do that with them home. That's their time to spend together, she said. And she's determined to provide a normal environment for her daughters. That was a concern even on the day the three men knocked on her door.
Michelle was 4 and had not started school. She stood beside her mom and learned the news of her father.
Noelle, just three days shy of her seventh birthday, was at school.
"I was thinking to myself, 'This is the last normal day she's going to have in a long time,'" Lane said. So she waited until Noelle got home to tell her.
Mitch and Gina married just eight months after meeting in Arkansas, where she worked. They then lived in Fort Bragg, N.C., where Mitch was stationed. He was a hardened soldier who went into Afghanistan months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But he was an incredible father and husband, Gina Lane said.
He wrote plenty of letters, sneaked in phone calls and left little notes that said "I love you" around the house, in his daughters' sock drawers and cabinets for them to discover. Even though he was in another country, he found ways to maintain a bond with his daughters, Lane said.
"He was probably one of the most generous, friendly people you will ever, ever meet," she said.
At first, life after her husband's death was day-to-day, she said. When she thought she couldn't handle it anymore, she took a cruise to Mexico with her daughters and a roommate from college. On that trip, she learned to smile again, she said.
"I knew I needed to get my life back together," she said.
Lane moved back to College Station, where she grew up and has family. She surrounded herself with friends and family. And, she says, she learned to accept help from others.
Eventually, she enrolled at Texas A&M.
Geography attracted her. After she graduated with her bachelor's, she worked in Arkansas for Wal-Mart, advising the company about local markets, a skill she learned in studying geography.
She liked the sense geography made, she said, because often, life didn't. "I love to find the patterns," she said. "I don't think things happen randomly."
She's considering earning a doctorate in geography from Texas A&M.
Eventually, life became normal again. This week, she built snowmen with her daughters. But it's not easy. She was never married before Mitch. And she hasn't remarried.
"Once I met him, there was just no one else. He's my one and only," she said. "There's no fairy-tale ending for me. I have to live the rest of my life knowing that it will never be what I imagined. But it's up to me to make sure it doesn't dominate my life."
