Eternal Love

I saw a news story this evening about a murder-suicide this morning. A 90 year-old man shot and killed his wife and then shot and killed himself. When I heard the beginning of the story I immediately thought "why in the world would someone take another life and then their own?" I judged the man in this situation and immediately thought of him as a coward. What I learned after listening the the rest of the report and then looking up the story online is was that the man was suffering from cancer which had spread beyond what any treatment could deter and his wife had alzheimer's. In that moment I actually smiled (not because they were both dead or sick), but because I wondered if their death was planned. I wondered if they were just two people who loved one another so much they couldn't stand to see one another suffer or suffer themselves. Eventually with the cancer, he would have died and if he died before his wife she would have been left alone. If he continued to live and suffer her alzheimer's may have hindered their relationship. One thing is true, neither of them could take of the other. Where did that leave them? Without a letter of explanation left behind, no one will truly ever know why their lives ended this way; so the optimist and hopeless romantic in me will just that theirs was a case of Eternal Love.