I just read the story of a Chicago couple dying within an hour of each other, after being married 69 years. Teresa died at 12:10 a.m. aged 89, while her husband, 91-year-old Isaac, died at 12:50 a.m.They were holding hands when she passed away and he stopped breathing when family members separated the couple’s fingers. According to their daughter, her parents’ “love for each other was so strong they simply could not live without each other.”
I knew such a couple, married 59 years. Our father’s passing filled us all with grief, but our loss was nothing as compared to our mother’s pain. In the year she lived without him, she did what she needed to do, but her core was extinguished; her spirit snuffed out. She grew frail each day and felt betrayed that he had left her. She spoke often of joining him.
I was present as she spoke to the psychiatrist (we feared she was depressed and set up the appointment against her will) and learned things I had not known before. On quiet nights, they talked about the end: the unlikelihood of going together; the assurance that the first to go would wait for the other; the agreement that the survivor would stay in their own home. Ma called it thikaana – a Hindi word that translates as fixed abode, for the body but perhaps also for the spirit. The doctor asked her if she felt alone and she said simply, “I am not alone. He is here with me”.
She departed one year after him and she was ready to go. We all felt sadness at her passing, but I knew she was finally where she wanted to be – rejoined with him in an afterlife. One can’t but envy what they had. Perhaps, they have it still…
