Salvatore and Angelina Nigro; married 63 years

Angelina, the tiny woman he married 63 years ago, was slipping away from Alzheimer's disease in the home where they raised three children and lost a son to childhood leukemia.

"Sal, Sal," Angie, 83, often called out through the haze of fading memory, her 5-foot-1-inch frame down to 72 pounds.

"I'm right here, ma," he would say and touch her hand as she lay in the blue recliner he bought to match his own parked in front of the television.

Early on April 11, Mr. Nigro died at home in the bed next to his wife's.

No one tried to tell her Sal was gone. Her children believe she just knew. She died later that day.

"My mother's heart went with him when he died," said their oldest daughter, Janet Tyler of Quincy.

Angelina Monti was 18 when she met Sal during World War II. He was a sailor on leave from the USS Gridley when a shipmate named Tony Palma suggested they go to his girlfriend's house in New Jersey for a good Italian dinner. Tony was dating Yolanda, one of Angie's nine sisters, and later married her.

When Angie and Sal met, "it was like lightning," they told their children.

"My father would only be able to see my mother under the direct supervision of her father," said their son, Michael, of Quincy.

Angie's father came from Italy and her mother was from Brooklyn. They insisted she wait to marry until Sal made it home from the war. They didn't want her to be a widow, Michael said.

Sal survived six major campaigns in the South Pacific aboard the destroyer.

The couple married in October of 1945. They set up house in Quincy with Sal's parents, who had immigrated from Naples, and lived in the two-family home on Elm Street where they spent the rest of their lives.

"My mother and father were just the type of people who did everything together," Michael said. "My father dropped something, my mother picked it up. She dropped something, my father picked it up."

Sal, who graduated from Quincy Trade School, worked as a member of the Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 17 for more than 30 years.

He had a quick wit. He loved baseball and goofy puns, his son said. "He never passed up an opportunity. As kids we covered our heads and my mother would just roll her eyes."

Angie ran a traditional home. She made Sal's lunches, changed the curtains every season, and had her husband take off his work clothes covered in a fine white dust before he came into the house, Janet said.

When Janet was 10, the Nigros bought a piano and Angie took lessons. She would play the piano while Sal played guitar and his daughters played homemade kazoos of combs and wax paper.

"We weren't the Partridge family by any means, but we had fun," Janet said.

The Nigro children recalled a home full of joy and Italian food. Angie began cooking sauce on Friday for dinner on Sunday, the day the family went on sightseeing trips.

Sometimes they drove the Mohawk Trail in Western Massachusetts or drove to the New York border, visiting plenty of rest stops on the way. "My dad would say, now girls, rate the bathrooms," Janet said. "We had so much fun."

Fights never went on for long. "You always saw a transition, things going back to normal," Michael said. "You had to be respectful, that was the bottom line."

Their mother sometimes administered discipline with a wooden spoon, Janet said. "But the biggest threat was, 'Wait till your father comes home,' and Daddy never did anything," she said.

In 1976, the Nigros were devastated when their eldest son, Paul, died of leukemia at age 17. The night he died at what was then Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, his mother awoke in her bed and told her husband she knew he was gone, the family said.

As a couple, the Nigros were inseparable all of their lives.

After Sal retired, they took adult education classes together. Sal learned to use a computer and printed a card for his wife on their anniversary in 2007.

His most recent digital achievement involved creating postage stamp-size photos of his grandchildren.

He cared for his wife as her memory failed, administering her medications and imploring his children to care for her at home if he should die first.

"I don't know what their secret was," said daughter Paula McEvoy of South Weymouth. "They were just two incredible people. They just did it. There was no question."

The day Sal died, his children and grandchildren saw Angie weeping. "She just knew. You could see the tears coming down her face," Janet said. "At the very end, she reached up, and then her hand went down, as if somebody was going to take her hand."

In addition to their daughters and son, the Nigros leave six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Nigro also leaves his brother, Thomas Jr., and sister, Frances, both of Quincy.

Services for the couple were held at St. John the Baptist Parish in Quincy. They were buried in Pine Hill Cemetery in Quincy. During the service, two sailors from the USS Constitution presented military honors to the family.