Husband Of Fault In Our Stars Couple Passes Away

Much like The Fault in Our Stars, this couple’s story is both beautiful and heartbreaking.

Katie and Dalton Prager both suffered from cystic fibrosis when they met and fell in love. In July, they celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary, which marked their final day together. On Saturday afternoon, Dalton Prager passed away at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

His wife, on hospice in Kentucky, could not be by his side at the time of his death, so she FaceTimed him, to tell him she loved him one last time.

“Dalton fought a long hard battle with Cystic Fibrosis,” Katie Dalton wrote in an emotional Facebook post. “He was a courageous fighter and ‘give up’ wasn’t in his vocabulary.”

The couple met online when they were 18 years old, both battling cycstic fibrosis. He had Burkholderia cepacia, a highly contagious infection for people with cystic fibrosis, so doctors cautioned the woman who would become his wife not to meet him. She chose to meet him anyway.

Two years later they got married and spent the next five years facing one medical hurdle after another as they both received transplants and dealt with further complications. Katie Dalton contracted Burkholderia cepacia. Throughout it all their love never wavered.

The day before her husband passed away, CNN asked Dalton if she regretted that she met him. Even when confronting his loss, she said she did not.

“It gave me some of the best years of my life,” she said. “I’d rather have five years of being in love and just really completely happy than 20 years of not having anybody.”

This article first appeared on Womanista.com