It was a terrible end to a long and happy marriage - and it nearly cost a woman her life. The fact that it didn't has a lot to do with fate and a very observant newspaper carrier.

This bizarre story unfolded on the weekend, when Bruce Pitts was on his regular route delivering the morning paper to people in the town of Marion, Illinois. He rode by the home of Blanche and Fred Roberts, two seniors who he came to like after the wife left him touching notes indicating she was 'praying' for his safety as he completed his tasks in bad weather.

Pitts has come to know his customers' habits over the three years he's been delivering the dailies and that's why he was disturbed by what he saw at the Roberts house early Sunday. The deliveryman noticed that several papers had piled up outside their door, something they never did. And he began to worry something was wrong.

Still, it wasn't his business, so he completed his route, went home to his wife and took a nap. But Pitts couldn't get the customers he'd never met face-to-face out of his mind. "It was never like them to leave a newspaper in their tube," he recalls. "That wonderful, small voice inside me said, 'This isn't right.'"

So he and his wife drove back to the home.

They rang the doorbell but no one answered. And that's when Pitts found an unlocked side door and went inside. What he saw stunned him. Fred Roberts, his 77-year-old customer, had apparently had a heart attack last Wednesday after coming in from mowing the lawn and died, keeling over right onto his wife and pinning her right leg beneath him.

The 84-year-old woman had been unable to move her heavy set husband and had been trapped beneath him for five long days. She was weak after so long without sustenance but still alive. "The good Lord was with her," Pitts remembers. "She was not scared, wasn't panicking. She was conscious, talking. Just peaceful. It was remarkable."

She told him her husband was 'sleeping' and asked for water. Paramedics whisked the senior to a local hospital where she's said to be making remarkable progress. But she might not be alive if it wasn't for the deliveryman, his keen sense that something wasn't right and his willingness to actually do something about it.

Now Pitts thinks back on those good wishes the woman he saved had written him all those years. "Blanche would say, 'I've been praying for you at night whenever the weather's bad, realizing you're out in it delivering our papers,'" he muses. "We'd always say a little prayer back."

And on Sunday, one of them finally came true.