62 years ... and counting

Joe and Dot Norek were together for 62 years. Both died last week within hours of each other.

BROCKTON - They met in 1947, at the Kresge's store on Main Street. Joe Norek managed the restaurant. Dot Whiting waited tables.

She's kind of attractive, he remembered thinking.

He'd just spent five years as a Navy cook. He was done with war and boats and being alone. They were both 37. Neither of them was getting any younger.

At first, they used a girl who worked at the counter as a go-between, sending messages back and forth, flirting like kids.

One day, a man came to see Dot at the restaurant.

Who's that? Joe asked. My fiance, Dot said.

Him or me, Joe told her. He was a no-nonsense kind of guy.

She told her fiance she couldn't go with him anymore. Within three months, Joe proposed.

Let me think it over, Dot told him. She was cautious.

They married a few months later.

He was Catholic and she was Episcopalian, and neither was interested in going over to the other side. So they said "till death do us part" twice: first in a Protestant church, then in a Catholic one.

And every Sunday, Joe went to Mass at St. Patrick's and Dot attended services at Trinity Episcopal in Stoughton.

They made a good life together. Even on sweltering summer days, the house filled with the smell of Dot's beef stews and turkey dinners. Joe was always up on ladders, fixing things. Dot liked to go out to eat sometimes. Not Joe: The son of Polish immigrants, he'd had a hard childhood, and he was careful with money. Besides, no restaurant could come close to Dot's cooking.

Dot was crazy about bowling and bingo. Joe loved to park himself in his beat-up turquoise recliner, listening to the Red Sox and Benny Goodman.

They saw Niagara Falls and Amish country together - strictly bus tours. You couldn't get Joe on a plane, and forget about a boat. They loved salty food, and Lawrence Welk, and "Guiding Light."

In their 40s and 50s, they raised their daughter, Laurie, her arrival a miracle after a string of miscarriages. In their 70s and 80s, they helped raise their grandson Brian, after Laurie's marriage ended and she moved into the apartment upstairs.

The decades piled up, and still Joe and Dot were walking around the neighborhood, holding hands, leading Brian's dog, Desaray, around Edgar Playground. Their 90th birthdays came and went. Longevity made their sweet, unremarkable relationship into something miraculous.

Joe knew how lucky he was that his wife had chosen him, but, apart from a video Brian made for school in which they recalled their early days, Laurie had never heard him say it out loud.

Not until a few years ago, when Dot got frail. It began with a broken hip, then came strokes, then heart congestion. Dot moved to a nursing home. Joe went to see her every day. I love you, he told her, again and again.

A year ago, Joe got frail too: he was in and out of hospitals, recuperating in the same nursing home as his wife, his bed a room away from hers.

A few weeks ago, as Dot's life was ebbing away, Joe contracted pneumonia. He died on Monday at 6.p.m. He was 98.

Laurie and Brian went to see Dot the next day. She had pneumonia too. It's OK to go be with Pop, Laurie told her.

And so, on Tuesday at noon, Dot died too.

Maybe Dot was just waiting for Joe to go before she did, as her minister said at the service, where both Catholic and Episcopal clergy prayed. Maybe Dot wanted to spare her family the suffering of grieving twice, as Laurie believes. Maybe the way they left this world, just 18 hours apart, is a miracle, as Brian sees it.

Two coffins draped in white sat side by side at St Patrick's church yesterday morning.

Not even in death did they part.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is abraham@globe.com