She was, a friend of hers once noted, “a great wife, a great ex-wife, and a great widow,” and when Nancy Barbato Sinatra died at 101 on Friday, she took with her perhaps the last living link to a world that knew Frank Sinatra not as a legend but as an impossibly skinny fireman’s son from Hoboken, who would sing for a pack or two of cigarettes and a sandwich, but dreamed of more. 

And from the moment she first laid eyes on him, while filing her nails on a front porch in the beach town of Long Branch, New Jersey, when he was 19 and she two years younger, until his death at 82 in 1998, she was the one he trusted most—with his fears, his joys, his children, and whatever he was able to share of his innermost life. That he could not love her with the constancy she deserved is well known. His infidelity was famous, and shattering, and he married thrice more.