Colleen Mellor and Paul Gates were together for 33 years. Why now they'll never be alone

Her wedding was scheduled for the next day, but because her groom, Paul Gates, 83, had Alzheimer’s and was living in the Rhode Island Veteran’s Home, Colleen Mellor, 78, felt she should bring him to their house in the Cowesett section of Warwick for the night before the ceremony.

There were smiles as Colleen arrived through the Veteran’s Home entryway for the pickup – the staffers knew the unusual wedding was about to happen.

The arrangements had been last-minute. It was not the kind where a “Save the Date” is sent a year in advance. Colleen planned it in weeks.

The two had been together 33 years, and although Paul proposed more than once, Colleen had lost one previous husband to cancer and a fiancé to a heart attack. She joked to Paul that she didn’t want to jeopardize him by getting engaged.

But then, as she was doing some life planning, she asked the state Veterans Cemetery about plots and found that their three decades together didn’t matter. Only spouses could be laid to rest next to soldiers.

That convinced Colleen it was time.

“After 33 years,” she says, “I didn’t want to be alone at the end.”

There at the Veterans Home, Colleen headed to the room of her new fiancé, Paul Wesley Gates.

He had enlisted during the Vietnam era 63 years ago and was assigned to the SeaBees in Davisville, which brought him from his native Little Rock to Rhode Island. Paul went on to serve in Rhode Island’s National Guard for 19 years while working first as a long-haul truck driver and then as a state correctional officer.

Paul had now been living in the Veterans Home for a year. For the 14 years before that, during his decline into memory issues, Colleen had been Paul’s sole caregiver at their Cowesett house.

But it finally became too much for her, so reluctantly, she began to look at care facilities. As soon as she walked into the Veterans Home, she knew it was the place.

“The love there between the caregivers and the residents is unbelievable,” Colleen says.

She and Paul have a small ritual whenever she greets him in his room on the Echo 1 floor, which hosts many with cognitive impairments.

“Hello, honey,” Colleen said. “Are you good?”

Paul still recognizes her, and always responds with the same phrase.

“I’m good now that you’re with me.”

Colleen packed a few things for him, was given packets of his medications and, as the staff wished them luck on their big day, the two signed out.

The next morning, in their Cowesett home, it was time to get ready for the wedding. Colleen had decided it would be a casual event. So she helped Paul get dressed in a button-down shirt, a sweater, brown pants and comfortable loafers.

For herself, she put on a plum dress with shiny fleck, and for footwear, she wore flats – comfort first. But even at 5-foot-8, Colleen could have worn heels since Paul is 6-foot-1, affectionately called “Tall Paul” by some of the staff at the Veteran’s Home.

At 10:30 a.m., Colleen helped Paul into her Subaru, putting on his seat belt for him, and they headed to the venue – the East Greenwich home of Colleen’s daughter Amanda and her husband, Eric O’Connell. They would be the only guests, along with their two children, Seamus, 6, and Lachlan, 3. Colleen's other daughter, Kerry, lives in Seattle with her family, and Colleen told them there was no need – it wasn't going to be a big event.

Colleen had brought bouquets for her two grandsons to hold, but she was afraid they’d used them as weapons against each other, so she disengaged the flowers and pinned them on their outfits.

Soon, it was time. Colleen asked her son-in-law to put the music on.

Given the bride and groom's age and stage, Colleen felt there was no need for an entrance. So they simply took their places at the “altar” – a spot in the living room in front of the fireplace.

Colleen had interviewed a few officiants she found online, and liked one named Peter Denomme, from Charlestown, so he was standing ready. So was the photographer she’d hired, Laura Paton, whom Colleen noticed shooting pictures at a church festival where she had recently taken her grandson.

She also felt there was no need for a long service. Instead, the ceremony began just before the vows.

Colleen faced Paul. As she looked up at him, she realized that although her decision to marry was to get around a bureaucratic rule, this was a lovely moment, making their relationship official after being there for each other all these years.

Colleen had grown up in West Warwick, daughter of the town’s high school principal.

“Which guaranteed I had no dates,” she jokes – though it was true.

Her brothers went to Brown and West Point and Colleen to URI, later becoming a junior high teacher in Cranston.

She married at 23 and had a baby at 25, but it was a difficult relationship, so she left him six months after the birth. After raising her daughter on her own for six years, Colleen married again at 31, to Daniel Mellor, director of the state’s drug abuse program. But sadly, he died of cancer eight years later in 1986.

Colleen had no interest in meeting someone else, but that’s often when it happens, and in time, she was engaged to Bob O’Connor, an engineer at Amtrol. But before being wed, she lost him to a heart attack in 1991.

Colleen was 46, and that, she decided, was it for her.

But in late 1992, Colleen was with her sister and brother-in-law at an East Greenwich tavern that played music, and as they sat at a table that night, she noticed a tall, slim man standing alone, swaying to the beat.

There was something about him, and the spirit moved Colleen, so she just did it – walked over and asked him to dance. It was Paul Wesley Gates.

“He’s gobsmacked,” she recalled. “He can’t believe I’m doing this.”

But she adds: “We’ve been dancing ever since.”

Paul was divorced in part because of his previous job as a long-haul trucker, but he’d moved on to a second career as a Rhode Island correctional officer.

The two loved the same pursuits – they kayaked off Wickford and bicycled in Nova Scotia, and Colleen was often on the back of Paul’s BSA motorcycle for rides through the countryside.

The forgotten hero: Uncovering Rhode Island's lost Medal of Honor recipient from WWII

They lived in separate residences, but it worked – Paul mowing Colleen’s lawn and being a Mr. Fix-It whenever she needed one. He proposed more than once, but Colleen felt things were fine the way they were.

“I figured I’d save him,” she says. “He’d live if I didn’t marry him.”

Ten years into their now 33-year relationship, Colleen got breast cancer and a mastectomy, and that’s when Paul finally moved in to take care of her. She says he was her champion – in many ways. He was a deeply devoted partner after Colleen's early decades of loss in love.

She rebounded from the cancer, but around 16 years ago, it was Paul who started having issues. He became forgetful, and began doing illogical things, like caulking a shower in all the wrong places.

Paul went downhill faster after a 2010 car crash near a winter home the two had bought in Asheville, North Carolina, so Colleen decided to sell it, feeling a back-and-forth lifestyle with a partner facing challenges was too hard.

In 2013, when Paul was 72, he was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Counting from his decline, Colleen spent 14 years as his caregiver, and in fact, as a longtime writer, she’s about to publish a book about it called “Az and Me: A Partner’s Journey with Alzheimer’s.”

Colleen wanted to continue keeping him at home, but at last, a year ago, she felt she had to place Paul in the Veterans Home. Yet it's what he needed, and in many ways, it has become a second home of sorts for Colleen, with many visits each week.

It proved to be the perfect arrangement – and she felt the same about their relationship status.

Until she got the news about the burial plot situation.

Colleen recalls thinking: “We’d been together 33 years, but because of a bureaucratic rule we can’t be together at the end? At that point, I said forget it, we’re getting married.”

Memorial Day 2024: Parades, memorials and events around RI honor those who gave their lives

And now the two were saying their vows at the East Greenwich home of her daughter’s family.

Later, I asked Colleen what she was thinking at that moment. She began to answer, then had to pause.

“I’m kind of crying here,” she told me on the phone. “I’d been through the wringer in life by a young age. Then I met Paul, and he got me through and gave me a belief in myself.”

The wedding happened last December, but Colleen mentioned it to our newspaper as a possible story only days ago. When I asked why, she said it was that Memorial Day was approaching, and it got her thinking about the veterans in the home, and how important they remain to the people who love them – and really, to the whole country.

Colleen and Paul spent the night of the wedding back in their Cowesett house, for the first time as a married couple.

The next day, she brought him back to the Veterans Home. They had lunch there together and then it was time for her to go. Colleen has learned never to say “Goodbye” to Paul because that would upset him.

Instead, she told her new husband she had to step away to fill out some papers with the staff.

“You’re going to be right back?” he said.

Yes, she told Paul. She would be back soon. And she knew she would be.

Because he was her champion for so many years, and now she is his.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: To be buried in RI Veterans Cemetery couple weds after 33 years