THE ELDERLY couple found dead in their bedroom at the weekend passed away only hours apart, state pathologist Eleni Antoniou said yesterday.
George Tsirponouris, 84, and his 71-year-old wife Tasoulla, were found by a relative on Friday night. They had been dead around 15 hours, Antoniou said.
The pathologist, who performed the elderly couple’s autopsies, said Tsirponouris had died from heart failure, while his wife had died from a rupture of the thoracic aorta. Initially, food poisoning had been the suspected cause of death.
The doctor said the 84-year-old had had a history of health problems and had been dying. His wife on the other hand, had been unaware of her heart condition, and had died instantly.
“I cannot say for sure who died first, but it is likely the wife did and then the husband, helpless and unable to get up, died a few hours later from his grief,” she said.
The Tsirponouris’ are the third Cypriot couple in the space of two months to die only hours apart.
In January, Charalambos and Thekla Georgiou suffered fatal heart attacks only three hours apart while holidaying in Australia, while in December Despina Lakka died at her husband’s graveside in East Sussex during her husband’s burial service.
Although Antoniou said in her experience this was not a regular occurrence, psychiatrist Yiangos Mikellides said the phenomenon was very common.
“When a close couple has been married for 35 years and suddenly one of the two dies, the living partner feels that everything has ended with the death of the other and can’t cope. The grief sets in immediately and he or she doesn’t want help from anyone or to help themselves. They don’t want anything,” he said.
The psychiatrist said the living partner then became consumed with anxiety, insecurities and stress which brought out sickness in people predisposed to ill-health.
“If they have any sort of illness, then the stress brought about by such a crisis activates it, which leads to their death. It could be the same day, two weeks later or even three weeks later.”
Mikellides said it happened so often that there was a saying in Cyprus that said “he’s died and she followed him”.
“There’s no solution in cases like this. The grief sets in straight away and they want to let themselves go.”
Nicosia psychologist Vassilis Christodoulou, on the other hand, said he could not put the occurrences down purely to grief.
“There are instances where a spouse’s death is followed by the other’s soon after due to the emotional turmoil brought on by the loss, but I can’t just say for sure this is due to the pain alone. It’s much deeper than that. Research has also shown that when one half of a couple dies, the other becomes sick or is more vulnerable to sickness and even death as compared to the general population,” he said.
Christodoulou said in his experience there had also been cases of some inexplicable link between partners that made them die simultaneously. He said he knew of a couple that had always said they wanted to die together on the same day.
“But when the wife died, they didn’t want to tell her husband because he wasn’t very well at the time and they didn’t want to upset him. Then suddenly they heard him call her name and he too died peacefully on the same day, without having been told of her death,” he said.
