It’s considered lucky to live to be 100, but often when you hit that milestone, you’re faced with significant mobility issues.
Not Winnipeg’s Jack Mudry. The centenarian regularly walks five blocks to get where he wants to go, the care home where his wife Stella lives.
“I ask God to help me,” said Mudry. “Help me with my movement, with my walking because I walk there and back.”
Mudry met his wife Stella in 1947 when he was getting a ride from Winnipeg to Sandy Lake. She was getting a ride too, and the pair hit it off.
“Stella turned around and kissed me,” Mudry remembers.
They were married three years later, and have been together ever since. At least they were until last year, when health problems forced the couple apart.
She was forced to move out of their retirement home to a care facility.
“He really misses her, and she really misses him,” said Mudry’s daughter Alexandra Todd. “And he likes to pretend sometimes that she’s here, but he knows that she’s not.”
So the 100-year-old goes to see her whenever he can. Sometimes he gets a ride, but often he walks.
Todd said he started walking there last winter.
“And I’d hear about it, and he’d be excited. And to tell you the truth, I think it did good for him.”
Still, sometimes the staff at his retirement home tell him he shouldn’t try to make the half-hour trek to Stella’s care facility, five blocks away, but he never listens.
“When I make my mind up, I just dress up and I’m going,” said Mudry. “And I don’t care what anybody says.”
Because at the end of every long walk, Stella is waiting. And their 75-year-long love story can continue.