The Staats bonded after losing their spouses to Alzheimer’s.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — One Kentucky couple took the most unfortunate of circumstances and turned it all into a love story.

Ed and Barbara Staats laugh looking back at how their romance began.

“Ed said to me, ‘Would you like to go for coffee sometime?’ And I was so shocked, because no man had asked me out in 40 years, you know, so I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and I just ran out of the building. I just left him standing there,” Barbara said, laughing.

They met each other in an Alzheimer’s support group through the Greater Kentucky/Southern Indiana Alzheimer’s Association. Both of them had been married for decades before Barbara’s husband, Al and Ed’s wife, Charlene, were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Al and Charlene ended up in the same care facility and passed away within just a few months of each other.

“So we’d see each other,” Barbara said of Al. “And I did see what a wonderful caring man he was, and he came every day, and he treated her so well, and I thought that’s a special guy.”

Ed said after both of them took plenty of time to grieve, “There was a happy ending, so called, to that, with our marriage a couple of years after the spouses passed away.”

Source: ‘There’s life after Alzheimer’s’: Loss turns to inspiring love