Until Death Do Us Part: Couple With Coronavirus Die Holding Hands

FORT WORTH, TX — Their fingers intertwined the way lovers do, a Fort Worth couple spent their final moments on Earth clasping each other’s hands, dying less than an hour apart in a sorrowful yet poignant moment shining through the death and heartache wrought by the coronavirus.

Their deaths together that way, their children said, was a completion, a perfection of lives well-lived and a marriage built to last.

When they died, Curtis and Betty Tarpley, ages 79 and 80, had loved each other for more than a half-century and had known each other for even longer. They raised a son, Tim, and a daughter, Tricia, and lived in three states during their 53 years of marriage.

When Betty got sick in early June, Curtis fretted she had COVID-19, the coronavirus illness.

He was right.

She was admitted to Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth on June 9. Two days later, Curtis joined her at the hospital. They were in separate rooms, but the hospital staff made sure they could spend as much time as possible with one another.

But the virus was raging, showing Texas and the rest of the country that the pandemic is far from over. The cruelties of the coronavirus are many, but the prospect of Tim's parents dying alone weighed heavily on him.

It was “the saddest thing ever,” Tim told news station KSAX of taking his parents to the hospital. “Because you drop your parents off at the curb [in] their walkers, and they walk themselves into the emergency room and you don’t see them again.”

His last words to his mother were in a text message.

“I just said that she was a great mom,” he told KSAX, “but she’s going to be a better angel.”

As her condition declined, Betty called her children and said she was “ready to go,” Tim told CNN.

It took a bit for Tim to come to terms with that, let alone tell his dad.

When he did, Curtis’ oxygen levels began to fall.

“I really feel like he was fighting because he was supposed to, and once he knew she wasn't gonna make it, then he was OK with, you know, taking it to the house,” Tim told CNN. “I think he fought because he thought the team needed him, but he was also tired, and he was in pain.”

That was June 18.

Blake Throne, an ICU nurse who was caring for Curtis, knew what needed to be done.

“I started inquiring about if it was even possible, and then I started shaking the tree to try to get it done,” Throne told CNN.

When Betty was wheeled into Curtis’ room, both were on what’s called “comfort care” — that is, they were heavily medicated — but their son said his mom and dad didn’t need to speak words to communicate.

“I honestly think they were so incapacitated that all they could do was talk with their souls or something, a special unspoken language,” Tim told CNN. “They obviously knew each other well enough that they could communicate without words.”

Betty died about 20 minutes after Throne put their hands together. In another 45 minutes, Curtis was gone.

“I don’t know how one would have survived without the other,” Tricia told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I’ve had so many people tell me, ‘I’m so sorry you lost them both,’ but I almost think it would have hurt worse. They’re together. Neither one of them had to grieve for the other one. For them, it was perfect.”

Betty had always said she didn’t want to live to be 100, Tricia told the Fort Worth newspaper.

“She very much believed this world was temporary and it was a stop on going off to a better place,” she said. “She knew something better was coming, and she was fine with that.”

Curtis and Betty Tarpley built a beautiful life together. Their journey began in the 1950s, when they attended the same high school in Rockford, Illinois. They worked together at a local ice cream shop but weren’t sweethearts. They reconnected again in their 20s when both were living in California, fell in love and moved back to Rockford, where they were married. After Tim was born, they returned to California. Tricia was born two years later.

They weren’t wealthy and, in fact, had lived in poverty in the early years of their marriage.

“We were this poor family in California, yet we were eating lobsters every night because they worked a deal where he would build a lobster trap, and they would split whatever the fisherman caught,” Tim told the Star-Telegram of his childhood. “It was crazy.”

The Tarpleys weren’t college-educated but were hard workers, their children said. Curtis, a military veteran, worked as a cab driver in San Diego, often ferrying around the glitterati, and Betty worked her way up in a credit union office.

After Curtis was laid off from his job in the 1980s, the family moved to Fort Worth. Jobs were scarce, and it took a while for the couple to get started again, but it eventually worked out. Curtis retired from the Postal Service, and Betty from a couple of credit union jobs.

They were just regular people who worked hard, in life and at their marriage, and taught their children strong values.

“Growing up, nobody wants to turn into their parents, right?” Tim told KSAX. “Then, as we get older, we get to that age, right? They're our heroes, and you're lucky if you end up being half as good as they are.”

Curtis and Betty Tarpley touched the lives of others in ways the kids didn’t know until after they had died.

“A friend of mine, I don’t even know the situation honestly, but I guess he was homeless and living in his car, and my mom would let him shower and sleep on the couch, and she would make him food to eat in the car,” Tim told the Star-Telegram. “I had no idea.”

Tim announced his parents’ deaths in an emotional Facebook Live video.

“We lost our parents this morning and, in true Tarpley fashion, they go close to the same time, holding hands,” he said. “I still question that, you know? It seems like just a week ago they were both arguing about who should or shouldn’t be driving ... but anyway, I’ll buy that.

“It’s pretty romantic.”