Evelyn and Robert Kraft.
Photo provided by the family
By Emily J. Minor
BRINY BREEZES — She slipped away on a Wednesday. He collapsed that next Sunday. And, in the end, which is what it turned out to be, no one was all that surprised that Robert and Evelyn Kraft died within days of one another.
“This was a romance that never stopped,” said Dolores Montgomery, Mr. Kraft’s first cousin. “It was a real love affair right up until the very end.”
Full-time residents of Briny Breezes since they retired in the late 1980s, the Krafts were affable fixtures in this mobile home community. For many years, Evelyn worked at the library and met the girls for morning coffee, while Bob joined a group of friends that held court at McDonald’s across the bridge.
She was the more social of the two. He loved his books and poetry.
“It’s her kindness I’ll miss most,” said Vivian Billock, who met the Krafts 25 years ago. “I can’t explain it. I wish I could, but everything she did was for him.”
But, as growing old is wont to do, recent months had been rough on the couple. After beating back cancer, Evelyn Kraft died from a recurrence on Sept. 9. She was 79. Stricken with grief, worried about life without his wife, Mr. Kraft suffered a major stroke a few days later. He died Sept. 22 at the age of 88. They’d been married 58 years.
Montgomery said Mr. Kraft was “distraught, but coping” after his wife’s funeral Sept. 11. They had immediately arranged for in-house help and talked about handling meals and laundry.
“And he said, ‘Yes, I can do all those things. But I’ll be lonely,’” Montgomery recalled.
It might seem a cliché to suggest that someone could die of a broken heart. Can the heart really break from sorrow? But Dolores Montgomery and her sister, Beverly — Mr. Kraft’s closest living relatives — said they watched him deteriorate in the days following his wife’s death. Beforehand, he’d been in good physical condition, taking no medications, said Montgomery, adding that doctors were “amazed” at his physique for a man of 88.
And yet, on the morning of Sept. 13 — when the two cousins came by to help Mr. Kraft with some personal affairs — they found him barely conscious.
Dr. Faustino Gonzalez, the chief medical officer with Hospice of Palm Beach County, says couples dying within close proximity to one another is well studied. “These couples that have been together since they were kids, they’re united,” he said. “They complement each other.”
Clinically named Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (after the Japanese doctor who studied this “broken heart syndrome”), the stress hormones that rage during grief can cause tiny capillaries around the heart to clot or narrow, Gonzalez said. “When we reach a certain age, our reserve is so weak and so small,” he said. “It’s like we’re walking on thin ice.”
If not for the poetic timing of his death, Mr. Kraft’s obituary story might very well have begun with his previous small-town claim to fame: Robert Kraft became a Florida snowbird in 1938, at the ripe old age of 11.
It was Mr. Kraft’s father, Joe, a retired Detroit city firefighter, who discovered Briny Breezes in the ’30s. The family bought a trailer and Robert began attending classes in both Boynton Beach and Detroit. “Because he was so intelligent, that wasn’t a problem for him,” his cousin Dolores said.
A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Mr. Kraft attended college after World War II, earning a degree in English from the University of Michigan. He took a job teaching English at Cass Technical High School in Detroit.
The school, still thriving today, was one of the nation’s first magnet schools and required an audition. Among his students were Diana Ross and Lily Tomlin. Through the years, Mr. Kraft would joke that he gave Ross some of the worst advice of his life, once chastising her about a messy paper and suggesting she might have to rely on typing to make a living. Ross graduated from the school in 1962.
Friends and family are uncertain how Mr. Kraft met the former Evelyn Hunter. One story is he spotted her working in the camera department at Sears. Another is they met when she was visiting Palm Beach with girlfriends. For many years, Mrs. Kraft worked for Pan American Airlines and left only as the company went out of business.
The Krafts never had children, but loved animals and, for years, fed many of the stray cats in Briny.
Besides Dolores and Beverly Montgomery, both of Washington Township, Mich., Mr. Kraft is also survived by a third cousin, Kenneth Montgomery, of Port Huron, Mich., and two second cousins, Douglas Bidigare, of Harper Woods, Mich., and Deirdre Nolan, of Lakeland, Colo.
Mrs. Kraft is survived by nieces and nephews: Sharone Klein of Los Angeles; Gary Symons of Laguna Niguel, Calif.; Cary Camphausen of St. Clair, Mich.; Jill Kwasniewski of St. Charles, Mo.; Dale Camphausen of Port Huron, Mich., Beth Willey of DeKalb, Ill., and by her brother-in-law, Jerry Henderson of Genoa City, Wis.
In lieu of flowers, the family is asking for donations to Hospice of Palm Beach County or the Peggy Adams Animal Rescue League. Both Mr. and Mrs. Kraft died with the comfort of hospice care.
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