By Jody Callahan, Memphis Commercial Appeal
October 31, 2007
During their 71 years of marriage, Don and Myrtle Rutledge rarely spent any time apart.
In the early days, Myrtle picked up the family and followed Don when his job uprooted him.
When one was confined to a hospital, the other stayed right there at the bedside.
They even went fishing together (the family insists Myrtle was the better fisherman), dropping lines in the water whenever they found a little time.
So it was fitting, then, that when Don died just after 11:30 a week ago Monday night, Myrtle passed away just four hours and five minutes later, in the same room at the Golden Living Nursing Home in Southaven near Memphis.
The retired power company worker his colleagues called “Pops” was 90, the seamstress and housewife was 88. Both just missed their next birthdays, which would have rolled around in November.
“They were together so long. He was holding on for her, she was holding on for him,” said their daughter, Eunice McCollough.
“I was glad it happened that way. I wasn’t glad she was gone,” Eunice said. “I was just glad she didn’t have to be here without him.”
The Hernando, Miss., couple met during the Depression, when Don went to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
“My mother, that was her home. He got to be friends with a guy down there that she had dated. That’s how he met her,” Eunice said.
They married in 1936 and, with the exception of Don’s short time as a Navy Seabee at the end of World War II, spent most of the rest of their days together.
Where Don was, Myrtle wasn’t far behind. Or the opposite. For 71 years.
“Whatever one liked to do,” Eunice said, “the other one did it with them.”
Fishing. Playing cards. Watching television.
“They watched ‘The Price is Right’ every morning, they watched ‘Jeopardy!’ every afternoon and the ‘Wheel (of Fortune)’ every night,” said their daughter, Charlotte Davis. “You didn’t call when they were watching those programs.”
By all accounts, Don and Myrtle were as much in love in their 71st year together as they were their first, even when Alzheimer’s began to whittle away at Myrtle.
“If he was up walking around, he’d walk by her chair and give her a kiss, saying, ‘How you doin’, babe?’” Eunice said.
Added the couple’s third daughter, Juanita Burton (they also leave a son, Jerry): “He wouldn’t eat without her. Until she got into there to eat, he didn’t eat. That even went on in the nursing home.”
And then there was that longtime staple of young couples in love, handholding. Even to the last, Don and Myrtle clutched each other’s hands in a quiet show of love, something everyone who saw them remarked upon.
Charlotte: “They held hands anytime they went anywhere, always held hands.”
Eunice: “They held hands wherever they went.”
Juanita: “They were always holding hands, always. They didn’t go anywhere without holding hands. They sat out on the front porch swing, holding hands.”
In their last minutes together, with time draining away, Charlotte imagines they had this conversation:
Don: “You’ve tarried long enough. Let’s go fishing.”
Myrtle: “Just a minute, I’m coming.”
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