This couple lasted 72 years together, 72 years!!! Relationships barely last a couple of years these days. They died holding hands, this is like something out of a novel or a movie. Hit the jump to read the story and watch a family video.
@wiL
An elderly Iowa couple, who spent 72 years together then died together holding hands – will now spend eternity the same way.
The family of Norma and Gordon Yeager, both in their 90s, made the unusual decision this week to lay out their bodies in a single casket holding hands, just as they were when they died in a hospital after a car accident last week.
Following the viewing, the Yeager’s ashes will then be mixed together and buried as one, according to ABC News.
“All their life has been together,” daughter Donna Sheets told ABC. “So, when it came to the funeral home, the family asked, ‘Can we have them put in the casket together holding hands?’ Because that’s the way their life was.”
The couple died last Wednesday after Gordon mistakenly pulled their car in front of oncoming traffic at a busy Iowa intersection. The couple was taken to an Iowa hospital.
Nurses pulled their beds along side each other so the two could be together, according to several media sites that covered the story.
“They brought them in the same room in intensive care and put them together — and they were holding hands in ICU. They were not really responsive,” Dennis Yeager, one of the couple’s four children, told KCCI TV in Des Moines.
“It was really strange, they were holding hands, and dad stopped breathing but I couldn’t figure out what was going on because the heart monitor was still going,” Dennis Yeager added.
“But we were like, he isn’t breathing. How does he still have a heart beat? The nurse checked and said that’s because they were holding hands and it’s going through them. Her heart was beating through him and picking it up.”
“They were still getting her heartbeat through him,” Donna Sheets, their daughter, elaborated in an interview with the Iowa station.
One hour after Gordon Yeager’s death at 3:38 p.m. last Wednesday, his wife, Norma, died, as well, according to ABC News.
By all accounts, the loving couple not only spent their lives together, but complemented each other’s personalities like bookends.
“They always did everything together,” Sheets told ABC News. “They weren’t apart. They just weren’t.
