After a Lifetime Together, Coronavirus Takes Them Both

Excerpted from an article published in The New York Times

Dr. Delutha King Jr. and Lois King had their own narrative, 60 years in the making and winding from the South Side of Chicago to Tuskegee, Ala., and then Atlanta, with excursions to South Africa and South America. But it ended just as the Lenders’ did.

Dr. King died in early April at the age of 96 and was buried on April 10. An hour after the graveside service, the couple’s son, Ron Loving, heard his phone ring.

The call came from Arbor Terrace at Cascade, the assisted living residence facility in Atlanta that Mr. Loving, 77, had moved his parents into last summer: His mother had died, too.

“For her to pass the day we lay my granddaddy to rest,” said their granddaughter, Kristie Taylor, “it was like, ‘Wow, you two really were inseparable.’”

The Kings both tested positive for Covid-19.

Lois and Dee, as Dr. King was known to friends, met in 1960 at a cocktail party in Chicago. She was 36, a dental hygienist and divorced mother raised on a corn and tobacco farm in Ahoskie, N.C. He was a World War II veteran who attended college and medical school after the war, and had just completed a residency in surgical urology at Howard University College of Medicine in Washington.

They were married within six months, and he quickly became a surrogate father, and then just a father, to Mr. Loving.

The family moved to Tuskegee, Ala., where Dr. King worked at a V.A. hospital, and then to Atlanta, where Dr. King began building a medical practice in 1966.

Mrs. King delighted in being a doctor’s wife, having supper on the table when he arrived home, playing bridge and raising money for organizations they both cared about, like the Sickle Cell Foundation of Georgia, which Dr. King helped found.

At night they would watch “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” sitting in the built-in recliners at either end of their couch and reaching their arms toward the middle, over the newspapers they had been reading, to hold hands.

They visited Barbados and Venezuela, traveled through the Panama Canal, and took a cruise through Europe with their best friends, Dr. Clinton E. Warner Jr. and Sally Warner. In the mid-90s, after Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, the two couples traveled there to take part in the historic moment. The trip ended with a safari.

Dee, who had majored in zoology as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, loved the excursion. Lois, who longed for air-conditioning, tolerated it.

“She was very opinionated,” said Mrs. Warner, 73. “If Lois thought something, she would say it. If Dee thought something, he would think about it long and hard.”

The Kings were part of Atlanta’s African-American professional elite. Their social circle included Andrew Young, the former mayor and ambassador to the United Nations. They celebrated the new year at the home of Billye and Hank Aaron, the Hall of Fame baseball player and executive, who helped Dr. King raise money to fight sickle-cell anemia.

The Kings’ son, Mr. Loving, an Army veteran and former Atlanta police officer who had a long second career as a news cameraman for WXIA in Atlanta, revered his parents.

His wife, Freda Loving, remembers that when she and Ron began to date seriously in 2012, he told her, “I want us to be like my mom and dad.”

As the Kings slipped into old age, Lois developed dementia and Dee had Parkinson’s disease. Their son visited them daily and arranged for visiting nursing aides, so that his parents could keep living in their house for as long as possible.

But by last year, it was clear that it was no longer safe for them to live independently. That’s when they moved into Arbor Terrace. “They were still going to be together, that was the important thing.” Mr. Loving said.

When you are 77 and your parents are 96, Mr. Loving said, you know that their deaths will come. But to lose them in such rapid succession, and have the virus deny him the chance to comfort them at the end or give them proper funerals to celebrate their lives,  particularly his father’s career and civil rights achievements — he found that hard to cope with.

“This has been devastating,” Mr. Loving said.