A Georgia couple’s love story that lasted seven decades came to its bittersweet end the day after Christmas.
Robert and Louise Bain had promised to love, cherish and honor each other until death did them part, 72 years ago. On Dec 26 they finally fulfilled those vows, together. On Christmas Day Louise, 90, opened her eyes as Robert, 92, sat beside her in their hospital bed. Early the next morning she took her last breath. Six hours later Robert died, too.
“The moment Mom passed, daddy grasped his chest,” said their daughter Charlotte Tallent. “He knew she was gone.”
While fewer than half of U.S. marriages today survive 25 years, the Bains’ endured nearly three times that long, lasting through a world war and all the turmoil of most of one century and the transition to another.
When mourners gather today, they may well regard the virtues and values the couple embodied as echoes of an era long gone by.
They met, for example, at a Texas church camp meeting in the early 1940s. Robert came with another woman but once he caught a glimpse of Louise, “He took the other lady home, came back and got my mother,” said Tallent. They married Sept. 14, 1942.
From then the two were inseparable.
Read the rest of the obituary posted on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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