Elderly Couple Weep as They Are Forced to Live in Separate Nursing Homes

A Canadian woman’s heartbreaking photograph of her elderly grandparents weeping has gone viral as they apparently have been put in separate nursing homes despite wanting to “spend their last moments in the same building.”

Granddaughter Ashley Bartyik’s wrote in her Facebook post, which has been shared close to 5,000 times, that the image of her “Omi and Opi” holding hands and crying was the “saddest photo I have ever taken.”

She says Wolf and Anita Gottschal, who have been together for 62 years, have been separated for 8 months in different nursing homes “due to backlogs and delays by our health care system.”

Bartyik details how the family makes the nearly one-hour commute every second day so that her 81-year-old grandmother can visit her husband, who is suffering from dementia and lymphoma.

“His Dementia is growing ever stronger each day, but his memory of my grandmother has not faded a inch…yet” she writes as she implores friends to share the post so that healthcare authority Fraser Health can reunite them. “We are afraid however that if they are living apart much longer, his memory of her won’t stay.”