Elderly couples often seem to share times of death, be it the same day, week, month or year. It turns out there is scientific evidence for this phenomenon.
“People are interconnected, so their health is interconnected,” said Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School. “So we shouldn’t be surprised that we see this kind of effect.”
Some of the causes include what Christakis and his study’s co-author, Dr. Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania’s sociology department, call the “unmeasurable unstable attributes of couples,” the mysteries that are part of the complex and varied aspects of love.
Heartbreak, another way of saying psychological stress, is one of the aspects of what experts call the “bereavement effect.” It is the greater chance of an elderly person dying after a spouse is hospitalized or dies.
Other reasons why couples might die simultaneously is that married couples tend to share an environment and, therefore, both good and bad habits of daily life.
Finally, there is the complicated weave of threads that make up the mosaic of a couple’s life together.
Factors such as family ties, community support and the nature of a couple’s relationship are key to a person’s health and ability to cope with the stress of illness and death, experts say.
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