It’s a love story like few others see, a bond so strong that it seemed to defy death itself. Kenneth Felumlee died just fifteen hours after his wife Helen, his partner of more than seven decades. Together forever, they left almost hand in hand, as if they had chosen not to say goodbye.
Kenneth and Helen Felumlee: love until the last breath
Helen Felumlee died at age 92 on April 12 in Ohio. Her husband, Kenneth, 91, followed shortly after. A devastating tragedy for their loved ones, but without any real surprise.
“We knew that when one left, the other would follow.”confides their daughter, Linda Cody.
Since their youth, Helen and Kenneth were inseparable. They did everything together: sharing a meal “hand in hand”, a walk, a ride, or even a narrow bed, on the lower level of a bunk bed on a ferry, just so they wouldn’t be separated for a night.
A rare, almost fusional complicity that has spanned the decades.
The body that gives up when the heart goes out
When Helen passed away, Kenneth declined very quickly. Around him, twenty-four family members took turns watching over him. But nothing could hold back this old man who already seemed elsewhere, as if he had decided that he no longer belonged here.
For Dr Christophe de Jaeger, physiologist and president of the French Society of Medicine and Physiology of Longevity, this double death has a name: the Philemon and Baucis syndrome.
“This has always been seen in very old couples after 50 to 60 years of living together. A world that revolves around the other, a life punctuated by the other which suddenly everything collapses with the loss of the loved one. When the other person disappears, the spouse may wonder if life is still worth living, and without being able to really understand, the person lets themselves die.he explains.
The specialist adds:
“The loss of a loved one and the void it leaves can lead to the alteration of all the functions of the human body, through mechanisms that we do not necessarily know well, which corresponds to a stupefaction of the entire organism..
The mystery of an indissoluble bond
In these moments, emotional pain becomes physical. Blood pressure drops, the heart races, the body becomes exhausted. At an advanced age, this fragility makes decline almost inevitable.
This syndrome, however, differs from “broken heart syndrome”, a well-known condition that causes sudden weakness of the heart muscle. The “Philemon and Baucis syndrome” acts more profoundly: the entire organism goes out, like a light that nothing no longer nourishes.
Helen and Kenneth Felumlee therefore not only loved each other for a lifetime. They lived, until the end, according to their promise: never to leave each other.