For a couple who had spent five decades by each other’s sides, Leslie and Patricia McWaters couldn’t have been more different.

Patricia, 78, was punctual, no-nonsense and to the point, her family said. She had to be, as a nurse for 35 years in a Jackson, Mich., hospital’s operating room. Retired truck driver Leslie, 75, or LD as he was known to friends (which was pretty much anyone he met), cracked jokes, appreciated one-liners and was always fun-loving, according to the family.

But the duo was also inseparable: They raised two daughters, three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren together, co-hosting every family gathering from Thanksgiving to Christmas to summer pool parties when they weren’t on the road in their ’59 Corvette.

They lived in tandem, and that’s how they died — both in the same hospital on Tuesday, Nov. 24, at 4:23 p.m., from complications caused by COVID-19 — the latest of the tragic tales of longtime couples claimed by a virus that has taken at least 267,000 lives in the United States since the start of the pandemic.

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