Floyd and Violet Hartwig just reminded us all that love can and does last, despite the constant protest of cynics everywhere. After 67 years of marriage, they died holding hands, just five hours apart.
“We could tell my dad was in a lot more pain,” their daughter Donna Scharton told Good Morning America. “We said ‘it’s getting close,’ so we pushed the hospital beds together as far as we could. We put their hands together, and my dad died holding my mom’s hand. Mom was not coherent, but we told her that Dad had passed away and that he was waiting for her. She died five hours later.”
My papa passed when I was very young, but I still remember my dad breaking the news to me. My nana, who he always called his dove, lived many years after him. They had been high school sweethearts who married other people and when my papa came back from the Navy, they reunited. When my nana eventually passed from lung cancer, our family collectively knew she was ready to go be with her sweetheart again.
So, cheesy as it may sound, I think you fight as long and hard as you can until you realize you’ll be more content where you’re going because something or someone is waiting for you. In the case of Floyd and Violet, neither of them wanted a life without the other and that ran so deep, they both knew it was time.
To put it in Donna’s words, “What we felt was keeping them alive was the will to live, and that they didn’t want to let go of each other.”
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