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WINSTON-SALEM — Tim Billings asked if we could do the interview outdoors.

It was a spectacular autumn afternoon, and Wake Forest's defensive backs coach leaned against the brick wall bordering his home away from home: the sun-splashed Doc Martin football practice fields.

It was the kind of day Billings' first wife, Terri, treasured before she died at 36, forever young.

"It was a tough deal for about a year before she passed away," Billings said. "But at the same time, she would take a day like today — she'd have her oxygen tank and stuff, and we had a two-story house — and she'd get on her rear end and slide down the stairs one at a time to go outside and work in the garden.

"She'd tell me, 'I don't know how many days I have left, but I'm going to enjoy the ones that I have, the ones God's blessed me with.' "

She was 29 the first time she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was a 35-year-old mother of two the second time.

She'd already been through a mastectomy and radiation and chemotherapy, and the Billingses were trying an experimental stem cell treatment at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston when they found the disease had spread too far.

"Suddenly you're single with an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old and people ask, 'How do you do it?' " Billings said. "Well, it's a pretty easy answer: You don't have any other choice, so you just do it. You find a way."

Billings, then the defensive coordinator at Marshall, hired a nanny.

"I'd leave for work in the morning and the kids were asleep," he said, "and I'd come home at night and they were in bed asleep. It was tough."

Billings leaned on his faith.

"You ask why. Why me? Why her? That's something you never know. You never know what God's plan is," he said. "At the end, I tried to make the kids understand that their mother was in so much pain it would be better for her to be in another place that's better than this one."

Billings remarried five years ago. He said his kids — Taylor, a sophomore at Wake Forest, and Trenton, a high school freshman — treat Lisa as if she were their mother. Life is good, but the scars remain.

"The toughest thing is when you hear the C-word for the first time," Billings said. " ... Then it's in your life every day."

Even the bright, sunny days.

Contact Jeff Mills at 373-7024 or jeff.mills@news-record.com