“We all have this long line of love we just treasure,” said the Webbs’ bereaved daughter Ann. “No one should ever settle.”
All three of Will and Judy Webb’s daughters passionately agree on this matter. In 56 long and happy years of marriage, their parents were always together, from the moment they met until the moment they passed away, hours apart, hand in hand.
The couple’s correspondence nurtured a deep connection.
After an emotional reunion, the infatuated pair married on Feb. 16, 1963. They moved to Melvindale and started their family, enjoying the deep satisfaction of married life and wholesome family values. “They always had their arms on each other,” remembered Lori, the couple’s third daughter. “If she was away five minutes, he would say, ‘Where’s mama, have you seen mama?'”
The inseparable couple enjoyed decades of closeness, laughter, and good health, right up until Judy was summoned for surgery and experienced unforeseen complications. “She ended up coding from it,” Lori shared, remembering the moment that the whole family believed they might be losing their beloved wife and mother. “My father watched it and broke.”
Will, helpless in the face of Judy’s medical emergency, was forced to return home alone while doctors fought to save his wife. But the empty house and the stress of Judy’s failing health were too much for the 77-year-old. In the morning, his daughters found him, collapsed. He was rushed to hospital, but not the same hospital as his wife. The couple were separated for the first time in over five decades.
What happened next confounded both doctors and the Webbs’ three daughters: Will and Judy’s wavering health began to mirror one another’s. “She would get a fever from her infection; he would get a fever,” Marybeth explained. ”She ended up with encephalopathy as a complication from the antibiotic she was on; he ended up with encephalopathy.”
Eventually, both Will and Judy were taken into intensive care. They were fighting hard, but their separation was taking its toll.
Daughter Ann accompanied her father to the hospice. “I put him in hospice and let God take it from there,” she recalled. Judy’s health, by then, was in rapid decline. The Webbs’ daughters decided that they couldn’t keep their parents apart any longer. They needed one another. Ann and her sisters agreed without contest: “We said, ‘We can’t do this, they can’t die without one another.’”
On March 2, 2019, the heartfelt decision was made to reunite the ailing couple, and that decision was reaffirmed the moment Judy was brought into her husband’s room. “He looked over and saw her,” Ann shared, “and said ‘Mama!’ And that was like the last thing he said.” The Webbs’ daughters pushed their parents’ hospital beds together, close enough for the loving couple to hold hands. They were back exactly where they should always have been: together.
“They were holding hands when my dad took his last breath,” Lori shared. Judy, noticing Will’s quiet passing, rubbed his hand lovingly. Just a few hours later, Judy took her last breath and joined her husband.
The Webbs’ three daughters were heartbroken at the dual loss of both their parents at the same time, but wish to honor their extraordinary closeness and unique connection. “If you have someone you truly love, you should fight for it,” Ann asserted. “They fought for their love every day.”
Marybeth added that she and her sisters will be forever grateful for one thing: “They will never have to suffer the loss of each other.”
