‘She Was the Love of My Life’: WWII Vet Reflects on Long-lost Love’s Death 1 Year After Reconnecting

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Norwood Thomas lost touch with his first love Joyce Durrant in 1945. And after reconnecting last year, he now is now mourning her death.

Durrant died on Dec. 9, two months after suffering a heart attack, according to Thomas.

“She was the love of my life,” Thomas, 93, said in an interview with The Virginia-Pilot. “I hadn’t spoken to her for seventy years.”

Thomas, 93, and Durrant first met on the banks of London’s River Thames in 1945 during World War II. “Tommie” — then 21 — was a D-Day paratrooper with the storied 101st Airborne Division and Durrant — then 17 — was an Australian student nurse.

Following a whirlwind romance, the pair lost touch after the war ended, but never forgot one another. They reconnected in November 2015 after Durrant asked her son Robert Morris to search for her old beau on the Internet.

And after Durrant’s search went viral, a GoFundMe page was started and Air New Zealand offered to sponsor a trip for Thomas to visit his long-lost love in her hometown of Adelaide, Australia. In February, he flew from his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Durrant’s home Down Under.

“To me, it was about the best experience that I’ve ever had,” he said of the couple’s reunion after more than seven decades apart. “It’s hard to sit here and explain to people — my emotions, how I felt, how I do feel. But it was wonderful.”

Before meeting, the couple talked about how much they wanted to give each other a “squeeze.” And in February, they did just that.

“When I put my arms around her, I felt an emotion that I hadn’t felt for a long time,” Thomas said in his emotional interview. “And then, as we were together, that emotion grew. And pretty soon, the old feelings were back.”

“She always had a smile, and she was full of life,” he said, reflecting on what he loved most about Durrant.

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Since their two-week-long reunion earlier this year, the pair have called each other four to five times per week and Thomas hoped to fly out to Australia again in the spring. But he told the The Virginia-Pilot that finding his way back to her was more than worth the heartbreak he feels now.

“I’ll tell you it was a great pleasure being with her in England, a great pleasure being with her in Australia and a great loss that I’m feeling now,” he said of their love story.