This Is How It Should Be
I am going to lighten the mood here this Sunday. I saw this article and a tear came to my eye. This is how things should end in a perfect world:
An Ohio couple that was married for 69 years died eight hours apart in what their son called an unsurprising end to the love story of two people who did everything together.
Eighty-eight-year-old Gene Warrington and his 86-year-old wife, Pat, died Dec. 27 in Findlay, Ohio, The Advertiser-Tribune in Tiffin reported.
“You could have almost predicted it,” said their son, Phil. “They did everything in their life together. They were never apart.”
Both had been in hospice care. A few days before their deaths, Gene Warrington had been able to visit his wife’s room and hold her hand. Phil Warrington said his father recognized that Pat was in critical condition and did not have long to live.
“He said ‘life’s not going to be fun anymore,'” the son told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “He went back to his room. He laid down and decided to die. He did will himself to die. I’m sure of that.”
Eight hours after Gene died, his wife passed away.
The couple raised three children and had seven grandchildren and a dozen great-grandchildren. They were nearly inseparable, even in failing health, their son said.
Gene and Pat met in junior high school and wed secretly as teenagers while he was home from boot camp before leaving for World War II. “He told me that when he came back from war, he knew he never wanted to be away from her again,” Phil Warrington said.
Oh, and if anyone wants to find the sheet music for the song, it is by Fern Glasgow Dunlap. The only version I could find of it on youtube is painfully slow and occasionally off-key, but it’s a beautiful song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97tDfFagMpk
Reminds me of some lines from a song called “A Wedding Prayer”, sung by my father to my mother while kneeling at the altar of their wedding (they met at Eastman School of Music), and since then used at my older sister’s and my own weddings. It ends with, “And when life’s sun shall set beyond the hill, may we go hand in hand together still.” Beautiful devotion and love.
I think this happens often after extremely long marriages (it sounds almost counterintuitive that the number of seniors getting divorced after long marriages is rising). My mother died after 66 years of marriage and my Dad struggled to stay positive until he had a spontaneous hip fracture four years later, and then, seeing an opportunity, he basically quit eating in the hospital after successful hip replacement. He lasted 33 days, the last 3 in Hospice. My regret is that I didn’t retire sooner to spend time with him before he fell.
God bless ’em, but if my wife and I were together for more than 69 hours in a row, we would both die within 8 minutes of each other, because we would kill each other.