"[Sandra Day] O’Connor... retired at 75 to spend more time with her husband, John. He was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease..."

"... and O’Connor wanted to make his last years as full of companionship and good times as possible. But there wasn’t any time. John O’Connor deteriorated much faster than his wife had expected. 'John was in such bad shape she couldn’t keep him at home,' [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg told me. It was a lesson, maybe, in how even the noblest motives aren’t always enough reason to throw in the towel. Ginsburg kept fighting and working... When she was old and frequently sick she still kept on keeping on. Her worries about problems with naming a successor were real. But there was also just the way she lived her life...."

From "Ruth Bader Ginsburg Knew What to Do With Her Time/But she also knew something about the unreliability of happy endings" by Gail Collins (NYT).

"Noble" is the right word for what Justice O'Connor did, and seeing what happened, it's hard not to think she made the wrong choice, that — to use Collins's crude expression — she didn't have "enough reason to throw in the towel." But a choice like that is made in its time, without knowledge of the future. You can't look at what happened next when you calculate whether there was "enough reason."

And even when you look at the decision based on the knowledge that the decisionmaker had at the time, you can't know whether there was reason enough without knowing what only Justice O'Connor knew, the depth and the meaning of her love for her husband. To look from a distance and say she misjudged... there's no nobility in that.

Ginsburg "kept fighting" — and "throw in the towel" comes from boxing, where an actual towel was thrown down to signal defeat. But her beloved husband was already gone, and it was her own illness. There was no parallel way that O'Connor could have fought on. She had to choose whether to give her time to her husband. Ginsburg could no longer give time to her husband.

It's not that one woman "knew what to do with her time" — to use the words in the headline — and the other did not. Neither faced the choice that the other faced, and neither should be regarded as more of a fighter or more noble.