It feels wrong to know so little about a woman others loved so much.

But that is how it always is — isn't it? — when someone else's beloved dies. Those left behind wrap themselves in grief and their own trembling arms while the rest of the world moves on.

Sometimes, though, a single death tells the story of a grieving nation. Sometimes, once you know, it is impossible to turn away.

Here is what we know about Nidal Faleh because Associated Press reporter Scheherezade Faramarzi took the time to note her passing among the 47 who died in and around Baghdad on March 11, as the Iraq war neared its fourth anniversary:

She was 49, married later in life. Her husband was Mahdi Abdul Munim al-Khadhimi, a 60-year-old pharmacist. They had no children.

Her dark, immaculately groomed eyebrows arched over large brown eyes that sloped dramatically when she smiled. A family photo suggests she preferred patterned, colorful scarves that framed her face.

She was a devoted daughter whose sisters counted on her to regularly make the 12-mile trip to care for their elderly mother, who is in poor health and lives in their hometown of Youssifiyah.

Faleh taught organic chemistry at Baghdad University, and she had stayed up late into the night to grade exams. She was in a hurry to get to her 8:30 a.m. class after spending the weekend with her mother. She ate a piece of cheese and washed it down with some tea. Then she kissed her mother and her aunt on their cheeks and whisked out the door with her 42-year-old cousin, Kawkab Faleh.

"Pray for me," she called to her mother.

It was a warm and sunny spring morning. Faleh, a Sunni Muslim, was traveling a highway often used by Shiites making the pilgrimage to a shrine south of Baghdad. The road, which connects Baghdad to villages where al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists operate, runs through a region called the Triangle of Death because of frequent attacks.

Surely Faleh knew this, but she had traveled the road many times before, and always, she had been safe.

American troops and Iraqi security forces also used the highway regularly. They were the apparent targets when the roadside bomb exploded under Faleh's car.

Relatives said that only skeletons remained when they came to recover the bodies of Faleh and her cousin. Her exam papers were in ashes.

Those who most grieved her death — her husband, her mother and her siblings — could not attend her funeral because it was too dangerous.

Instead, cousins retrieved her charred remains from the morgue, and distant relatives and gravediggers buried her.

I thought the news of more Iraqi deaths had become too familiar to shock anymore. Then I saw Faleh's photo in the newspaper on my kitchen table, and I had to sit down.

We lived thousands of miles apart, but the distance closed in the details. She was 49, just like me. She found love later in life, just like me. She took care of her ailing mother, just like me.

Faleh was doing what so many women do, tending to loved ones, rushing to keep commitments. Her day started like the days of so many American women, but ended as few of us can even imagine.

I wanted to know more about Faleh, and so I coaxed out details from what I knew of her faith.

She was Sunni, not Shiite, and so it is likely that she prayed five separate times a day, one arm folded over the other, just below her rib cage, as she invoked God and the Prophet Muhammad. Her mosque would have domes and minarets, and no portraits of any kind on the walls.

We know from Faramarzi's report that Faleh's brother had captured her smiling face with his cell phone camera. We know, too, that after she died, her husband was surrounded by other men, but he sat silently in a corner.

What no one knows is what dreams died with Nidal Faleh, and how those who loved her will carry on.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer and author of two books from Random House, "Life Happens" and " … And His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz ([email protected]), and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.