Floyd and Violet Hartwig had a fairytale romance, complete with a fairytale ending.
According to their daughter, Donna Scharton, the pair met in grammar school, but they didn’t reconnect until years later when Floyd was on leave from the Navy.
After they reunited at a local dance hall, they began corresponding through letters. According to Fox 2, Floyd and Violet married and had three children, four grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren.
The Harwigs went on to own a ranch near the town where they grew up.
And what their daughter remembers most was not only how hardworking they were on that ranch, but how they always worked side by side. She explains:
“You had a sense that they had a connection. And I think that connection came more and more, and especially in the last months of their lives.”
As the pair grew older, and their health worsened, Floyd’s affection for Violet only grew stronger.
“His main concern was my mom,” Donna recalls. “The last time we took them to the doctor he said, ‘I’m okay, I want her fixed.’”
Unfortunately, during that same visit, Floyd’s blood test showed that he had had kidney failure and only had a short time left to live. Violet’s health was failing as well, so the next week the two were put on hospice.
“They wanted to die at home and they wanted to die together, and that’s what we wanted to do for them.”
As time progressed and what looked to be the end drew close, the children did the only thing that seemed right.
They pushed their hospital beds together and enjoined their hands. Floyd died first, holding his true love’s hand, and Violet died five hours later.
“We felt blessed because we know that’s what they wanted…It was meant to be. That’s the only way it could end.”
In a remarkable tale of undying love, this couple’s story ends exactly the way it should.
A marriage built on working together
Sixty-seven years is a long time by any measure. Floyd and Violet’s marriage began in an era of handwritten letters and dance halls, and it carried them through decades of ranch work, three children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What their daughter kept returning to was not a grand romantic gesture but something more ordinary: they did the work side by side.
That detail says a lot about long marriages. Couples who stay together for six or seven decades often describe their relationship less as a love story and more as a partnership. On a ranch, every day starts early, the animals do not wait, and a bad season affects everyone. Working through that together, year after year, builds a kind of trust that is hard to create any other way.
Choosing to die at home
The Hartwig children made a decision many families face: when there is no longer a cure, where should the last weeks be spent? Floyd and Violet were clear. They wanted to be at home and they wanted to be together.
Hospice care is what made that possible. In the United States, hospice is a type of care focused on comfort rather than cure, for people whose doctors expect they have six months or less to live if the illness follows its natural course. Most hospice care is delivered in the patient’s own home, not in a hospital. A team that usually includes a doctor, nurses, home health aides, social workers, chaplains and volunteers visits regularly to manage pain and other symptoms and to support the family. Medicare has covered hospice since the early 1980s, which is one reason it has become a common choice for older Americans.
For families, hospice can also mean practical help, such as a hospital bed delivered to the house, advice on medication and someone to call in the middle of the night. It allowed the Hartwig children to spend their parents’ last days caring for them, rather than sitting in a waiting room.
Can a person die of a broken heart?
Stories of couples who die within hours or days of each other appear in the news regularly, and they always raise the same question: is it just coincidence, or can losing a partner really affect the body?
Medicine does recognize a real condition often called broken heart syndrome. Its formal name is takotsubo cardiomyopathy, and it is a sudden, temporary weakening of the heart muscle that can be triggered by intense emotional stress, including grief. It mostly affects older women, and in most cases the heart recovers within a few months. It is not the explanation for every story like this one, and in the Hartwigs’ case both partners were already seriously ill. But it is a reminder that grief is not only an emotional experience. It is a physical one too.
What families can learn from the Hartwigs
Not every family gets the chance to plan a goodbye like this one. But the Hartwig story offers a few lessons worth keeping in mind:
- Talk about wishes early. Floyd and Violet had made it clear they wanted to die at home and together. Conversations like this are easier to have while everyone is well.
- Write things down. An advance directive or living will, and a named health care proxy, help make sure doctors and relatives know what someone wants when they can no longer say it.
- Ask about hospice sooner rather than later. Many families say they wish they had called hospice earlier, when there was more time to benefit from the support.
- Look after the caregivers. Caring for dying parents is exhausting. Accepting help from friends, neighbors and professionals is not a sign of weakness.
The way it should end
Their daughter said it best: it was meant to be. After a lifetime of doing everything side by side, Floyd and Violet spent their last hours the same way, at home, in beds pushed together, holding hands. It is a sad story, but it is also a deeply comforting one.