Published Nov. 21, 2009

By JOHN CARLSON
jcarlson@muncie.gannett.com
MUNCIE — Even as kids courting, there was never any doubt in James and Dortha Watters’ minds how they would end up.
“They kind of grew up together,” their daughter, Flora Jean McCoin, recalled in a phone call from her Hartford City home on Friday. “Dad was Mom’s only boyfriend, the only one she ever held hands with. She was a true lady, through and through.”
Last Saturday, the Watterses’ time together on Earth ended, when 83-year-old Dortha, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, died in Miller’s Merry Manor in Hartford City. On Thursday, 85-year-old James — a dialysis patient — rejoined his wife of 66 years, dying in the same rest home from the effects of a fall he took earlier this month.
There’s no doubt in their daughter’s mind that their deaths were tied.
“I think so, because she saw him fall,” McCoin explained, noting the accident was a bloody, traumatic thing. “Dad fell on the 8th, and Mom went into renal failure on the 8th.”
For the most part, the timing of her parents’ deaths didn’t surprise her.
“I had always kind of thought it would happen, in the back of my mind,” McCoin said, “but I never thought that Mom would go first.”
Married as teenagers during World War ll when he was a GI headed overseas, James had retired from Indiana Grain in Dunkirk and had also worked at Indiana Veneer in Montpelier. A mother of 10, Dortha, who enjoyed quilting and camping, had been a homemaker.
There was never an abundance of money in the family, McCoin recalled, but there was always food on the table, supplemented by her father’s hunting and her mother’s knack for gardening.
In later years, the native Kentuckians called Montpelier home.
“They came this way hunting for work,” their daughter said.
McCoin believes her mother was traumatized by witnessing her husband’s fall, and likely thought him dead.
“I think she just gave up,” she said, noting James had cared for the ailing Dortha for six or seven years.
When it came time to tell her father of his wife’s passing, McCoin whispered the news in the dying man’s ear.
“I said, ‘Dad, Mom is gone,’” she recalled. “I told him, ‘She’s probably up there tapping her foot, saying where are you?’”
Passing on together, she thinks, was their ultimate plan. Joint funeral services are set for noon today at Montpelier’s Walker & Glancy Funeral Home.
“It’s hard to lose them that close together,” McCoin said, “but they wanted to be together. It was meant to be, I guess.”
For their daughter, the truth of that came when she visited their grave site in Gardens of Memory, and read the marker that will grace their final resting place.
“They already had that on their plaque,” McCoin said. “Together Forever’ is what it says. I just wanted to cry.”