One bright, sunny day, several years ago, a woodpecker landed on a tree. He put his curious ear to the tree and heard something, something inside that made him want to dig into that tree.

And so, he created the smallest hole. Maybe he flew away with a meal, maybe he didn’t. At any rate, that hole remained, and as the years went on, the area around the hole started to rot. The rot spread deeper into the tree, but from the outside, it still just looked like a tiny little hole.

Eventually the tree died. It started to lean, toward our driveway. Steve drove past that tree several times a day, and worried that it would fall and block the driveway, or fall on a car. After the storm we had earlier in the fall, we had so many trees fall down and cause so much damage. He had reason to worry. The kids and the dogs walked the driveway all the time. The tree had to come down.

Over the course of his life, Steve had taken down hundreds of trees. There was a time in his life when he was inexperienced and made dumb mistakes. This was not that time. Over the years, he worked with my father, who was also an experienced woodsman, who had gone to school for forestry. He learned a lot from my father. He learned a lot because he was an avid reader, and someone who listened to the voices of experience. Dale Earnhardt, Steve Irwin, any of the space shuttle astronauts who died on their missions. The world is full of people who knew what they were doing and died anyway.

That morning, he had been on the phone with his best friend. M later told me that he thoroughly explained his plan for the tree. It was careful and well-thought-out. Later that morning, my brother drove by the project and inspected the setup. He also saw no errors and approved of Steve’s plan. No one knew about the line of rot inside the tree. No one knew about the woodpecker. When he started to cut into the tree, it split. Unpredictably. Suddenly. Horribly.

I have had the assurances of everyone who was there, everyone who investigated it, everyone who reviewed the evidence that he did everything right. It was just a freak accident. It doesn’t make it any better or worse. He is still gone. I don’t necessarily blame the tree for causing this. I blame myself for leaving him alone that morning. I blame myself for not fighting with him to come to the swim meet with me. I blame a conversation I’d had with a friend earlier in the week, when I said I just couldn’t imagine what I would do without Steve, like that somehow put it in Karma’s head to show me. I blame a discussion about his life insurance policies that we just had last month, and we re-evaluated how much coverage we really needed, because after all, “what were the odds of anything happening.” I blame the woodpecker.

At the end of the day, a really bad thing happened to a really good person for no reason at all, other than a woodpecker wanted a meal. Who is to say it was even a woodpecker? That just seems like the most likely scenario. The irony of losing Steve while he was in the middle of performing a chore that he hoped would save us from any harm or inconvenience is also a lot to swallow.

As I look back over my life, I can see several major turning points, where a decision I made or a decision someone else made completely turned my life around. Most of the time, when that happened, it felt like the bottom was falling out of my world, I had little to no control over the direction of my life, and usually, it felt like the worst thing ever to happen. Eventually, though, over time, I was able to see most of these awful events as blessings in disguise.

For example, I lost a coaching position, and I quit another one. Both situations absolutely broke my heart and years of hard work seemed to go down the drain. However, after that, I lucked into an amazing coaching position that allowed me to work with an entirely different caliber of athletes, travel, and take my own coaching skills to another level. Eventually, I was grateful that things had worked out as they did.

The WH and I frequently talked about how many twists of fate it took for us to finally find our way back to each other as more than just friends. We talked about how awful previous relationships made us into the two people that might have been the only two people on earth who could love each other like we did.

Even when A was diagnosed with a serious heart condition, we were able to rationalize it because it truly tested and proved our love for each other, and it slowed us down to a point where we had to stop and appreciate every single moment of life and how precious it is. Even now, I can say all of that happened so that I didn’t ever take a single moment of time that we had together as a family for granted.

This, however, I can’t believe I will ever feel that the ends justified the means. Steve was just trying to be a good dad and do something to keep his family safe, and in the end, his family ended up shattered anyway. There is small comfort in finding out just how well a person was loved and respected by others, in finding out the lengths that friends will go to help you in any way they can, in finding out that just about everyone who ever met him has a good Steve story, but none of that is worth losing him.

We are continuing to try to move forward, although it seems impossible most days. In the end, I can only do it because I know Steve would have wanted that for us.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.