Why So Many Long-Married Couples Die Close Together
While death rarely brings pleasant feelings, from time to time we’ll see a story about death go viral on the Internet because it touches people’s hearts. Long-married spouses that die within hours or days of one another often fall into that category because they seem to remind us that, ideally, marriage is for eternity.
Don’t want to live without youMy first exposure to this phenomenon happened when my parents were in a nursing home. I visited daily and knew the staff and many of the residents. One elderly man on their floor had later stage Alzheimer’s disease. His wife of many decades visited him at least once a day until she was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. Even during the worst of her treatment, she visited as often as she could. Then, she died.
I didn’t know the family well enough to ask if or how the husband had been told of his wife’s death, but he was in such a late stage that most people would say he’d never understand it anyway. Yet, while the medical staff didn’t pick up any changes in his health after his wife’s death, he died within a week.
Most of us felt that somehow he did know of her death and internalized the information. Somehow, whether he was told or not, he knew that his life partner was no longer there with him and he simply followed her. Maybe there was another explanation, but there had been no change in his health until that moment when he simply gave up.
We felt sad for the family in a way, but for the most part we felt that what happened was meant to be. This couple had been partners for decades and the new widower wasn’t about to give that up.
Moving on
My own parents’ story is somewhat different in time span, yet it is much the same in substance. Dad had suffered from instant dementia after a failed brain surgery and lived that way for a decade. During the later years, Mom’s own health deteriorated to the point that she decided to move to the same nursing home. They each had private rooms, but Mom spent a lot of time in Dad’s room. The staff and visitors would always remark on how cute they were, since after each visit Mom would take her walker over to Dad’s chair and precariously bend forward to kiss him goodbye as she left for her own room. Those kisses seemed unusual to many, given my parents’ ages and the number of decades that they’d been married. When asked, Mom would simply smile and tell them that Dad the love of her life.
While Mom hadn’t been an active caregiver for much of Dad’s illness—that role fell to me—she did consider herself his caregiver in spirit. Through the years of her decline, her pain spread and her weight dropped, but she hung on. Then Dad died. It took Mom a long time to accept that he’d really died, but once she did I believe that she, too, gave up. During Mom’s death process, my sister and I kept telling her that Dad was waiting, and that seemed to help. It was five months from the day Dad died …
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