A love poem about floods and money is read at weddings by people never tested on it. Martha Lillard, the last American in an iron lung, married at seventy-eight.
Many waters can't quench love, neither can floods drown it.
Song of Solomon 8:7
Martha Lillard caught polio just after her fifth birthday, before the vaccine arrived in 1955. Doctors told her family she would not see twenty. She died on June 26, 2026 at seventy-eight, the last person in the United States living in an iron lung. The Associated Press ran her obituary on July 11; STAT carried it two days later.
She wrote that obituary herself. Her sister only had to add the date. It calls her an avid beagle lover who assisted in animal rescue as a cross poster on Facebook.
She could not leave her house for the last five years of her life. For the last two, she was inside the machine nearly around the clock. After 9/11, wanting to understand what had happened, she went into an internet chat room and met a man in Egypt. They talked for more than twenty years. He got a visa. They married in February. She died in June.
The line about many waters gets read at weddings, usually to couples who will never be tested on it. She was tested on every clause. The poem does not stop at floods. It says a man who offered everything he owned in exchange for love would be laughed out of the room. Water puts out almost anything. Money moves almost everything else. The poem says God built one exception into the world, and it does not break.
Almost everything else in her life ran on money and machinery. Her sister, Cindy McVey, spent years hunting for anyone still alive who could repair an iron lung. Then, through tears: "But since she's the last one, we don't need that anymore."
The machine had a price, a repairman, and a last day. The twenty years had none of those. Love turned out to be the sturdiest thing in the house, and it was never for sale.