After a 73-year union, two hospital beds pushed together offer the best comfort

For 73 years - through wars in Europe and Asia and civil rights battles at home, through the assassination of a president and the rise of rock-and-roll - they shared a bed.

He’d be gone sometimes, flying missions during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, but he always came back to her.

So now, as he lies in a hospital bed unable to say or do much, she lies beside him.

Like many hospitals, Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, where retired Army Col. George Morris, 94, is receiving end-of-life care, allows family members to sleep in a patient’s room on a fold-out couch. But for George’s wife, Eloise, 91, a cancer survivor who has suffered two broken hips and a broken shoulder, that would be hard.

So the hospital made a special exception when they admitted him this month: They admitted her as a patient, too - a “compassionate admission,” their doctor calls it. Standard rooms are normally private, but Eloise’s hospital bed was rolled in and pushed up against George’s - a final marriage berth for a husband and wife who met as teenagers in rural Kentucky in the late 1930s.

He spotted her first.

“I was a sophomore in high school, and I’d gone to see a play in a country school,” said Eloise, sitting up in her reclining bed, a birdlike woman in oversize bifocals whose hair is hardly touched by gray. George rested in his bed beside her. “He saw me and went home and told his mother, ‘I just met the girl I’m going to marry.’ He said, ‘I looked her over real well and I couldn’t find anything wrong with her but one crooked tooth.’ “

A movie date and a picnic followed. Eloise can’t recall the movie - she was too distracted by the thrill of holding his hand in the dark.

The picnic, however, was unforgettable.

“Here comes George and he had something in his hand with a crank on the end and I wondered what this was.” It was something she’d never seen before - a portable phonograph, and when he turned the crank it started playing “Sweet Eloise,” a popular song at the time. He turned that crank all afternoon. “Oh, I thought that was great.”

The town of Russell Springs, Ky., where she lived on a farm, was eight miles from Columbia, where he lived. He didn’t have a car, so he’d walk the distance to see her. By 15 she was wearing an engagement ring and had no doubts about what she was doing.

“He had thick eyebrows and devilish eyes, and I

COMFORT >> PAGE 7