Together in life and at the end
arren Chapple’s routine began seven years ago, when Alzheimer’s forced his wife into a nursing home and he moved in with his son’s family.
He started his little sports car early each morning to make the 10-mile trip from Averill Park to Van Rensselaer Manor in North Greenbush. There, he fed Joan her breakfast and sat with his wife for two hours before returning home to rest.
In the early evening, Warren was back on the road.
He would return to the nursing home around five every evening to feed his wife dinner. For three hours, he would sit holding Joan’s hand until the nurses put her to bed. He kissed his wife good night and returned home, where, on summer nights, he would end the day with his beloved Mets.
Warren started the routine when he was 85. As the disease robbed his wife’s mind and
memory, he was as reliable as a clock and faithful as a monk. Only sickness or bad weather kept him away.
In an earlier and very different life, Warren had been a service technician for Hart’s Fuel Service and Joan was a seamstress for Standard Manufacturing in Lansingburgh. They raised two boys, Marc and Bruce, on Pawling Avenue in Troy.
Eventually, they moved to West Sand Lake, where they lived for 34 years and opened a business that made, among other things, furniture for dolls. Warren did the woodworking. Joan sewed and painted.
Those may have been happier
and easier days, but there was a simple beauty to those final years, when their life together was reduced to Warren’s routine.
“He lived for my mother,” Marc, the son, said.
“He kept her alive with that love,” said Marc’s wife, Pattie.
In November, Warren and Joan celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. In a photo from the day, Warren looks healthy. He is smiling, with his arm around Joan. She is smiling, too.
Nine weeks later, on Jan. 28, Warren visited Joan for the final time.
With his esophageal cancer worsening, Warren became too weak to make trip. He mustered the strength to say a last goodbye to Joan, then returned home to wait for the end.
Joan died first, on Sunday. Warren died on Monday.
Did Joan die because she knew Warren was going? Did Warren die because he knew Joan had passed?
Some things we can’t know. What Marc and Pattie know for sure is that Joan and Warren had a bond that comes from their decades spent side by side. They had a connection words can’t explain.
That bond that was their own, of course, as unique as a snowflake. But longtime couples die in proximity enough that the phenomenon has a name: the widowhood effect.
In an exhaustive study on older, long-married couples, published in 2008, Nicholas Christakis of Harvard and Felix Elwert of the University of Wisconsin
found the death of a spouse significantly increases the odds the recently widowed will soon die.
Christakis and Elwert didn’t say the couples die of a broken heart, exactly. But many decide not to continue on once their partner is gone. The world becomes empty, and so their obituaries become love stories.
Marc Chapple said his father didn’t mention Joan after that final visit to the nursing home, not until just before she died.
“How’s mom?” Warren asked, out of the blue. “Is she like me?”
What did he mean? Marc and Pattie aren’t sure. Was Warren asking if Joan was also near the end?
Yes, dad. She is. Hours later, Joan died.
“She’s gone,” Marc told his father. “You can go now.”
Warren, morphine dulling his pain, was out of it by then, and it wasn’t clear he had absorbed the message. But the father did as his son suggested. He followed Joan’s path.
Warren, 92, and Joan, 87, died in separate beds miles apart. But it was as if they were sitting hand-in-hand on one of those evenings at the nursing home. They died as they lived, connected by love.
“They were always together,” Pattie said. “They’re still together.”
Warren and Joan will share a funeral 10 a.m. Saturday at Bryce Funeral Home, Troy. At Elmwood Hill Cemetery, also in Troy, they will be buried side by side.