They met as teenagers at her Sweet 16 birthday party and remained true to each other for nearly seven decades, sharing the bittersweet trials of marriage, child rearing, career changes, retirement and old age.
And even when 99-year-old Marcello Giachino slipped into a coma and died last Saturday, his wife, Elizabeth, 92, knew she wouldn't be far behind. Minutes before he took his last breath, she whispered into his ear that she would be joining him soon.
Five days later, Elizabeth was gone, too.
The elderly lovers' deaths didn't surprise their three adult children. They had always admired and marveled at their parents' devotion for each other - how he held her hand and called her "Bette"; how she cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and read the newspaper for him after he went blind.
"They were always together," said Thomas Giachino, 61, the couple's youngest son.
It was a closeness, the family believes, that even death - he of complications from influenza, she of colon cancer - couldn't sever.
"It's definitely a marriage in heaven," said Ellanora Giachino, Thomas Giachino's wife. "I don't think he would have been satisfied in heaven without her."
Their love blossomed in 1931 in La Spezia, a city in northern Italy where Marcello was born and where Elizabeth's family originated. She was American-born and New York-raised, but still very much Italian. Her father owned a wine company, and he took her to his ancestral home on a business trip.
It was during this trip that the couple met and fell in love, but Elizabeth returned to the states, and though they exchanged letters, the two didn't see each other again for seven years.
On a subsequent trip with her father in 1938, Elizabeth was reunited with her beau, Marcello. They were married the same year.
The couple stayed in Italy and settled into married life. Marcello was a chemist, and Elizabeth was a homemaker and mother.
But life in Europe was not for Elizabeth: She missed her family and worried about political instability there. And so in 1946, a pregnant Elizabeth returned to the United States, bringing with her the couple's two young children. She set up house in New Jersey and waited for Marcello, who was denied immediate entry to the United States because he had served in the Italian army, according to the couple's children.
