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People.com · https://people.com/married-couple-who-wed-over-70-years-ago-die-9-hours-apart-11946186
John and Alice Trice were married more than 70 years. In April they died nine hours apart, in the Tennessee home they had shared for sixty.
Set me as a seal on your heart… for love is as strong as death.
Song of Solomon 8:6
John and Alice Trice were married for more than seventy years. In April, in the Lebanon, Tennessee house they had lived in for sixty of them, they died nine hours apart. Their daughter was not surprised. One of them, she said, would not have wanted to live without the other, and they did not have to.
The Song of Solomon is the one book of the Bible that is, start to finish, a love poem. In its last chapter it reaches for the biggest comparison it can find. Love is as strong as death. For most of human history that has been a hope more than a fact. Death is the thing that always wins, that takes one and leaves the other behind.
The Trices got something rarer. For them the line held literally. Love kept pace with death all the way to the end, and crossed nine hours behind it.
Seventy years is a long time to practice arriving together.