Together In Death / Real Life

• This pair of skeletons are speculated to be the oldest embracing couple, at about 8,100 years old. The couple pictured on the main page is believed to be the second oldest.
• There is a medical condition called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. It is a sudden and devastating weakening of the myocardium caused by recent high levels of physical or emotional stress. It's nickname of "broken heart syndrome" come from the large percentage of victims being older women, especially those who recently lost a partner.
• According to popular accounts, when it became clear that her revolution was doomed to failure, Boudica and her daughters drank poison and the Romans found them like this.
• Many of the bodies found at Pompeii and Herculaneum are intertwined like this. (Sometimes in couples, sometimes in large groups. Practically the whole city was Together in Death.)
• This was commonly invoked by widows in ancient India. Named the sati, this was a practice wherein a widow would commit suicide upon her husband's death, either by burning herself to death on the husband's funeral pyre or through some other means. While this sounds darkly touching, death by fire is a most gruesome way to go, and it wasn't entirely clear whether all of the women involved participated in the practice by choice; horrified by the perceived barbarity of the practice, the British Raj brought an official end to the practice in 1829 by outlawing it outright, though isolated reports of the practice being carried out continue to this day.
• A Muslim woman marries a Hindu man. Their local council disagrees for religious reasons and threatens to kill them. They kill themselves first to not be separated.
• Thebes had a special military unit - 150 pairs of male lovers, known as the Sacred Band. When Philipp of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) brought Greece to its knees in the Battle of Chaeronea, the band was slain. They were all found "Heaped upon one another", all were buried in the same place.
  • Upon seeing their bodies, the same Philipp who had vanquished them is recorded as saying: "Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly."
• Isidor Straus was the co-owner of Macy's and a passenger on Titanic, along with his wife Ida. When the ship hit the iceberg, Ida refused to get into a lifeboat and gave her spot and her fur coat to her maid Ellen Bird, telling her husband: "We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go." Isidor was offered a seat, with an officer saying that "no one would object to an old gentleman," but he refused to leave before the other men who weren't being given such an opportunity. They were last seen alive sitting together quietly on the boat deck. Sadly, only Isidor's body was recovered and identified afterwards. An urn was filled with seawater from the disaster area to represent Ida and was buried with him.
  • They're the elderly couple seen cuddling together in their bed in the 1997 movie as their room gets filled with water, and a deleted scene shows Ida refusing to enter the lifeboat. See the Film example.
  • They appear in almost every dramatization of the story, even the 1943 version made in Nazi Germany (which doesn't mention that they were Jewish).
• The famed lovers Heloise d'Argenteuil and scholar Peter Abelard ultimately were joined in one grave, her remains joining his when she died 30 years after he did.
• Shortly after legendary interior designer and former actor William "Billy" Haines died of cancer in 1973, Jimmie Shields, his partner of 47 years, took an overdose of sleeping pills. In his suicide note, Shields stated: "It's no good without Billy."
• Admira Ismic and Bosko Brkic, a Bosnian Muslim and an Orthodox Serb who were very much in love and dating since their teens. Then the Siege of Sarajevo happened. The couple tried to flee the city for Serbia, had a ceasefire brokered from all sides, and were still shot as they tried to cross a bridge. Bosko died instantly; Admira was wounded but crawled over to his corpse so she could put her arm around him and die. For worse, nobody dared get the bodies for quite some time... it was days before they were finally retrieved and buried side by side. No one is sure which side shot them either, as both deny it. This only has managed to show just how pointless their deaths were.
• Remains were uncovered of a woman who had been buried with her hand resting on her dog's back.
  • Dogs and cats whose owners die will sometimes refuse to eat or exercise, hoping to invoke this trope.
• A 60-year-old man suffered a heart attack while trying to revive his 59-year-old wife after she collapsed.
• Chang and Eng, the first surviving Siamese twins (being, in fact, from the eponymous Siam that the condition is named after). When an elderly Chang died in his sleep, the just as elderly Eng woke up and wrapped himself around his brother's corpse, verbally invoking this trope as the reason to refuse a surgery that would separate them. He finally died three hours later.
  Eng: "He's my brother. We've been together even from before we were born. I won't live without him!"
  • Similarly, there was a case of Juraci and Nadir Climerio de Oliveria, a pair of conjoined twins in Brazil. They were Polar Opposite Twins, and each controlled half of their mostly-shared body much like the Hensel twins. Nadir was less healthy than Juraci as a general rule; when she had a lung infection at age 16, and a separation would have saved Juraci but ensured Nadir's death, Juraci wouldn't hear of it, saying that she would rather die with her sister. Once Nadir died anyway, and Juraci knew she would die as well, she still didn't change her mind, and according to their father, showed no fear. She died ten minutes after Nadir.
  • An attempt to avert this ended in tragedy for conjoined twins Ladan and Laleh Bijani of Iran. While the sisters loved each other dearly, they had developed distinct personalities throughout their lives, and so both had expressed a desire for physical independence. But the problem is that the sisters were conjoined at the head, which meant operating on them would be risky, even more so because they were 29 years old when a surgery to separate conjoined twins is usually done on babies or children.^note Separation attempts were proposed while they were babies themselves, both at home and abroad, but a major vein sharing their two brains posed too great a danger for both twins' lives, so they were routinely rejected. Sure enough, when they found a surgeon who agreed to perform the operation, Ladan died on the operating table while Laleh died half an hour later, both from massive blood loss. The sisters were buried in separate tombs, having achieved their dream at the cost of their lives. A documentary about their journey was aptly named Dying to be Apart.
• Buckminster Fuller's wife was comatose and dying of cancer in a hospital. While visiting her, he exclaimed, "She is squeezing my hand!", before having a heart attack and dying. His wife died 36 hours later. They are buried together.
• Reportedly, Joe DiMaggio's final words were "I'll finally get to see Marilyn." She died in 1962, he died in 1999.
  • Similar were James Stewart's final words, "I'm going to be with Gloria." Gloria being his wife who'd died three years prior.
  • Rutherford B. Hayes's last words were "I know that I'm going where Lucy is", referring to his wife who had died three years earlier.
• Interestingly for a man so frequently associated with hate, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun actually committed suicide together. In Hitler's case, a major factor was the fact that the war was lost, but Eva had no real reason to kill herself beyond complete devotion to him.
  • This also happened with one of Hitler's most loyal officers, Joseph Goebbels. His wife Magda asked him to shoot her through the head. Goebbels did so and then promptly shot himself as well.
    • Goebbels also poisoned his own six children just before.
  • A non-romantic example is Hitler's generals Hans Krebs and Wilhelm Burgdorf, who reportedly committed suicide together the day immediately after Hitler and Eva died.
  • His ally, Benito Mussolini, was also executed alongside his mistress, after their corpses were publicly shown (and abused) in a public square, the arriving US Army took down the bodies and one cameraman positioned them arm in arm before autopsy.
• This is from a eulogy written close to two thousand years ago: "Amyntor, Philip's son... died holding his shield over a wounded friend."
• Nick and Mary Yankovic, the parents of "Weird Al" Yankovic, died together in their sleep due to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. Al has said that he took some comfort in knowing that neither one of them ever had to live without the other. They'd been married for 55 years.
• This is the idea behind the Temple Sealing ceremony in the LDS Church; such a marriage is not "until death do us part" but "for time and all eternity."
  • Joseph Smith and his older brother, Hyrum, were murdered not two minutes apart by a mob. John Taylor, who was wounded in the attack, later wrote of them, "...In life, they were not divided, and in death, they were not separated!" (Doctrine and Covenants Section 135 verse 3)
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Duchess Sophie had to endure numerous social slights throughout their fourteen-year, and exceptionally close and loving, marriage, due to Sophie's "lower" social station (though of old Bohemian noble stock, she lacked the requisite ancestry for equal marriage to a member of the Habsburg imperial family). They were assassinated literally alongside each other in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914, laid out side by side and entombed in adjoining sarcophagi; the Latin motto carved on the tombs is a variant of Taylor's comment on Joseph and Hyrum Smith (see above).
  • The true irony is that the reason Sophie came to Sarajevo was that, due to her "lower" status, she was not allowed to appear with her husband at social events. As he was there for a military review, she would be permitted to sit with him publicly. Had he been attending any other event, she would not have been there at all.
• Calamity Jane, at her request, is said to have been buried next to the body of Wild Bill, who died almost 30 years prior.
• This is the general idea for most married couples that are subsequently buried in side-by-side graves; or sometimes the same burial plot.
• Musician Johnny Cash died a mere four months after his wife June Carter died in 2003. Though the official cause of death was "complications from diabetes," many people who were close to him claim he had simply lost his will to live.
• Similar to the above, while Vincent Price's death was ruled out to be lung cancer, close friends claimed that the death of his third wife, two years prior, was a major contribution.
• In his last testament the philosopher Aristotle asked that his long-dead wife's bones be buried with his body, 'as was her wish'.
• On May 19, 1987, Dr. Alice Sheldon, known to the world as science fiction author James Tiptree Jr., shot her husband Huntington and herself. Both had severe health issues. They had long had an agreement to do this if life became too difficult, and she left clear messages. After shooting Hunt, Alice wrapped her own head in a towel before shooting herself.
• In The '70s, Yukio Mishima tried to pull a pro-Imperial Japan coup with his personal army (the Tatenokai), and when this failed he went through seppuku. His Number Two, Masakatsu Morita, had already said he was willing to follow Mishima in death; predictably, once Mishima was dead, he committed seppuku as well.
• Oichi, the younger sister of Oda Nobunaga, died next to her second husband Shibata Katsuie in the flames of Kitanosho Castle. Katsuie was about to commit seppuku after losing the Battle of Shizugatake and having Kitanosho rodeated by enemy forces, so he asked Oichi to flee with her daughters from her former marriage to the already dead Azai Nagamasa; Oichi sent the daughters to safety but stayed with Katsuie, so they went down together.
• Aisin-Gioro Huisheng was a Chinese noblewoman daughter of Pujie (the younger brother of Puyi, the Last Emperor of China) and a Japanese woman. In 1943, she was sent to Japan to live with her maternal grandparents and study there. She eventually met fellow student Ōkubo Takemichi, son of a railway executive... but her mother strongly opposed, as Huisheng was considered as a potential bride for future Emperor Akihito. The Star-Crossed Lovers disappeared on 4 December 1957 and were found dead on Mount Amagi; Huisheng was found wearing a gold ring on her finger, laid with her head cradled in Ōkubo's left arm, while Ōkubo held a pistol in his right hand. Above their heads was a twisted piece of tissue paper containing snips of their hair and fingernails – an element in the ritual of a Japanese love suicide. Huisheng and Ōkubo's ashes were interred together at Ōkubo's father's request.
• The Romanian Revolution culminated in dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena being executed together via firing squad.
• Another tragic variation with the Sullivan brothers in World War II. The five siblings were so fiercely loyal to each other that they refused to be split up after joining the Navy and were posted together to the USS Juneau. Unfortunately, Juneau was torpedoed at Guadalcanal, broke in two, and sank in seconds. The remaining vessels in the area believed that No One Could Survive That! and retreated to avoid further torpedo attacks from the Japanese. When they finally found the few remaining survivors some eight days later, reports indicated that the three middle sons had died instantly in the explosion, while the youngest had survived the initial blast but later drowned. The eldest was supposedly delirious from sodium poisoning, falling off the life raft before rescue arrived, his body never found, but some of the survivors suggest that he was so grief-stricken at the loss of his younger brothers that he deliberately went over the side so that the Sullivan brothers would never be separated. There may be some truth to the story—when the Navy christened two vessels USS The Sullivans, both ships carried the motto "We Stick Together." One ship, Fletcher-class destroyer DD-537, is a museum ship in Buffalo, New York, the other, Arleigh Burke-class destroyer DDG-86, remains in active service.
• The three Rogers brothers were killed when the USS New Orleans was sunk at the Battle of Tassafaronga. Gearing-class destroyer USS Rogers (DD-876) was name after them and was later sold to South Korea, where it is also a museum ship.
• On December 27, 2016, Carrie Fisher died of a heart attack. The next day, her mother Debbie Reynolds suffered a fatal stroke and died that same night. According to her son Todd Fisher, her last words were "I want to be with Carrie."
• When Mao's widow Jiang "Madame Mao" Qing hung herself, she left a note where she denounced the denigration of Mao's legacy and finished with her desire to be reunited with him in the afterlife.
  "Chairman, your student and fighter is coming to see you!"
• Allegedly invoked by Napoleon as he visited his dying friend, General Duroc, who had been eviscerated by a cannonball (the exchange was actually invented by his official newspaper, Le Moniteur, though Napoleon encouraged its use for the sake of his own legend):
  Napoleon: Duroc, there is another life! You will wait for me there, and we will be reunited one day!
  Duroc: Yes, Sire, but it will be in thirty years, once you have triumphed over our enemies and fulfilled our homeland's hopes...
• Vincent Van Gogh, the famous painter and his younger brother Theodorus "Theo" Van Gogh were buried together◊. Theo was the unfailing financial and emotional support for Vincent, and went to pieces after his older brother died.
• Katya Vlasova and Denis Muravyov, two Russian teenagers, killed themselves in 2016 after a shootout with police. They preferred to die rather than be separated.
• Anyone who works a lot with elderly (such as hospital stuff, hospice workers, etc) often mentions that couples rarely outlive each other for long. Once one of them is dead, the other does often become weak or ill and dies soon after as well. Also seems to occur more often with husbands than with wives, as can be seen by many examples on this page (a man is more likely to die soon after the death of his wife than vice versa). This suggests the presence of a phenomenon that is referred to as the Widowhood effect, in that couples will often manage to stay alive for each other's sake, only to die in quick succession when their times finally arrive.
  • Examples include George H. W. Bush dying in 2018 a few months after the death of Barbara Bush, his wife of 73 years, as well as Stan Lee, who also passed away in 2018 less than a year and a half after his wife Joan Boocock Lee, to whom he'd been married 70 years since 1947.
• In 1842 in the Netherlands, cavalry officer Jacobus W.C. van Gorkum married noblewoman Josephina C.P.H. van Aefferden. They were together for 38 years until Jacobus passed away in 1880 and was buried. It was Josephina's wish to be buried beside him, but there was a problem: he was a Protestant while she was Catholic, and neither side would have the both of them. As such, she hatched a plan: Jacobus was buried in the Protestant part of the cemetery, against the wall next to the Catholic part of it. When Josephina died eight years later, she elected not to be buried in her family grave but was instead buried on the opposite side of the wall from him. She had commissioned their gravestones to have hands reaching for the other over the wall separating them — Jacobus's grave◊, and Josephina's grave◊. It is considered a national monument in the Netherlands today.
• Former pro football player Doug Flutie’s parents died literally within one hour of each other. While his father Dick had been ill for some time and died in the hospital, his mother Joan was by his side and an hour later suddenly collapsed and died. The doctors and Flutie informally called the condition “dying of a broken heart”; his parents were married for 56 years.
• In December of 2009, Susan Powell disappeared from her home. Suspicion quickly fell on her husband Josh thanks to his flimsy alibi and Incriminating Indifference. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. In February 2012, during a court-ordered visitation with his two sons (custody had been given to Susan's parents in light of the suspicions surrounding him, as well as child porn being found in his and his father's possession), he locked the accompanying social worker out of the house and torched it, killing them all. Susan's grieving loved ones stated that the one comfort they could take from this was their belief that the boys had been reunited with their mother.^note  Police have stated that they view his actions as a confession to his wife's murder.The children were found in their playroom, holding each others hands.
• In 1969, a 65-year-old Salvadorian woman named Ericilia Marroquin immediately suspected that something was wrong when her daughter Reyna, who'd immigrated to New York City 3 years prior, abruptly stopped writing to her. 30 years later, Reyna's body was found stuffed in a barrel in the crawlspace of a house that had belonged to her boss/lover. ^note  He'd murdered her after she told his wife about their affair and her pregnancy. The remains were flown back to El Salvador to be buried. Her now-95-year-old mother died a month later and was buried with her.
• Just a year and five months after Christopher Reeve's death from a septic infection brought on by his paralysis, his widow Dana succumbed to lung cancer.
• Famed pianist and comedian Victor Borge passed away in his sleep just three months after the death of his wife of nearly 50 years. His daughter, Frederikke Borge, commented, "It was just his time to go. He's been missing my mother terribly."
• There exists a fossil of an amphibian and a mammal relative that died whilst sleeping in a burrow together during a flood, though admittedly studies remain inconclusive if this was a case of early Interspecies Friendship or they were merely tolerating each others' presence for mutual shelter.
• Similarly, we get enmity examples with fossils as well—the "Fighting Dinosaurs" fossil depicts a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops locked in combat, while another fossil shows a Rhamphorhynchus with a large predatory fish tangled up in its wing.
• Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton outlived her husband Alexander by 50 years. She stayed alive partially to protect and maintain his legacy. She kept a bust of him in her parlor and showed it off to all visitors. She frequently grew melancholy and longed for a reunion with “her Hamilton,” as she invariably referred to him.
  “One night, I remember, she seemed sad and absent-minded and could not go to the parlor where there were visitors, but sat near the fire and played backgammon for a while,” said one caller. “When the game was done, she leaned back in her chair a long time with closed eyes, as if lost to all around her. There was a long silence, broken by the murmured words, ‘I am so tired. It is so long. I want to see Hamilton.’”
• On 20 June 2018, Love Island star Sophie Gradon was found dead by suicide by hanging. About 20 days later, her boyfriend, Aaron Armstrong, also took his own life.
• Donald Sinclair, the real "Siegfried Farnon" popularized in the works of James Herriot — who, then in his mid-eighties, had recently endured the loss of both his brother Brian ("Tristan Farnon") and his longtime veterinary partner Alf Wight ("Herriot" himself) — took his own life by an overdose of barbiturates less than two weeks after the death of his wife Audrey. They had been married for over fifty years, and according to Herriot's son Jim, losing Audrey was just too much for him to take.
• In 1978, Formula One driver Ronnie Peterson was killed in a terrible crash at the Italian Grand Prix. His wife, Barbro, was so devastated over his death that she became more lonely in the following years even after she dated fellow driver John Watson. Then nine years later, in 1987, she took her own life and was buried next to him.
• When Annie Oakley died in 1926 her husband Frank E. Butler was so devastated he stopped eating and died 18 days later. They had been married for 50 years and their remains were buried together.
• Peter Cushing tried to kill himself when his wife died, but decided against it; she had left him a poem asking him not to, but to live life to the fullest. In any case, he had a firm belief that they would meet again in the next life.
• Many elderly couples underwent this during the COVID-19 pandemic (in fact, some of them weren't all that old), such as Johnny Lee and Cathy Darlene Peoples, who died holding hands within minutes of one another after being brought together for their final goodbyes.
  • Indian sports legend Milkha Singh died of COVID-19 on June 19, 2021, 5 days after his wife also died of COVID-19 on June 14 of the same year.
  • A non-romantic example. The legendary French duo, the Bogdanoff twins died of COVID, with Grichka dying on 28th December 2021 and Igor dying on 3rd of January 2022.
• On May 24, 2022, Irma Garcia was among the 19 students and two teachers killed in the Uvalde massacre. 2 days later, her husband of 24 years died of a heart attack, a likely demonstration of the "broken heart syndrome" discussed earlier.
  • Two 10-year-old students murdered in the Uvalde shooting, Annabel Rodriguez and Xavier Lopez, who had often played together and sent each other “I love you” texts, were buried side by side.
• Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip, who were Happily Married for over seventy-three years. Philip died at age ninety-nine in April 2021, which by all accounts devastated the Queen. Afterwards, Elizabeth, who had always been unusually lively for a woman her age, started a gradual deterioration in health, before ultimately dying seventeen months later in September 2022 at age ninety-six. In his first address to the United Kingdom after taking the throne, their son King Charles III outright acknowledged this trope, taking comfort in the fact that his parents were reunited in death, a sentiment similarly expressed in the statements from his sons as well as his grandson Louis, who reportedly urged his mother not to be sad, as "at least Grannie is with Great-Grandpa now".
• C. S. Lewis lived barely three years after losing his beloved wife Joy Davidman, whose death was the direct cause of his seminal nonfiction work A Grief Observed. He notes in the book that, just before she died, he asked her to come to him when he was on his own deathbed; her response was an emphatic affirmative. Thanks to their shared Christian faith, both firmly believed they would meet again in Heaven, but that didn't stop Lewis from being absolutely gutted by her death, and he later said that once or twice he felt as though Joy was attempting to comfort him from beyond the grave.
• The Lovers of Teruel, Juan Diego Garces de Marcilla and Isabel a Segura, who have known each other since childhood, were buried side by side, although Isabel was married to another man when Diego died. In 1560, their mummies were exhumed and placed in tombs◊ sculpted by Juan de Ávalos: Diego's arm outstretched, reaching for Isabel's hand with his coming close to touching her hand.

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