The sunset years, Erna Kern says, are no picnic.

All your milestones have passed, your health goes downhill.

There really isn’t all that much reason to keep living.

“I figure we’re only here for so many years and some of the years are good and then they start to get worse and worse and worse,” said the 85-year-old Londoner, who pleaded guilty last month to trying to kill herself and her octogenarian husband by putting drugs in their ice cream last fall.

“What’s the point of hanging around when they’re not good?” she said of the advanced years.

There’s a woman, she said, in the retirement home where she lives who is 101 years old. “She never does anything but sleep. What’s the point of being around at 101 if you’re just going to sleep?”

It’s her underlying explanation to why she thought it was time for her and Devy, 84, her husband of 62 years who’s in the late stages of dementia, to check out of this world last November.

Kern — who sat down with The Free Press to talk about the case — said she’d reached such a low point, she believed death for her, her husband and her two cats was the best choice.

She calls it “the day I did the dirty.”

“I shouldn’t have done it. It was not clever. It was not the right thing to do,” she says now, sitting at the dining table in her daughter’s apartment.

Kern’s story is a no-nonsense, nothing-held-back response to what it means to grow old — and the picture she paints isn’t all that pretty. The feisty, engaging and opinionated senior is now a convicted criminal, serving a three-year term of probation after pleading guilty to attempted murder .

She’s been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s and is living at a different retirement home than her husband after moving there in February.

She’d been in hospital for three months for psychiatric evaluations following the failed murder-suicide attempt. She has other underlying mental health issues and some suicidal thoughts.

As part of her probation, Kern can’t visit her husband without her daughter or son with her.

She doesn’t sound bitter or morose, just practical about the experience that made sense at the time.

Her mind harkens back to almost 70 years ago, when she was an 18-year-old arriving in Canada with her Scottish family from England and settling in the Hamilton area.

Across the road from their rented farmhouse lived a woman with a son her age — a tall, dark-haired and “handsome” Devy, she said.

They were married in 1954 in Ancaster after he completed his studies at the General Motors Institute of Technology in Flint, Mich. She worked in a bank and had a career in bookkeeping and accounting.

They had two children, Stewart and Laurie, and lived in Hamilton, Oshawa, London. Regina and Saskatoon, where Devy taught mechanics at dealerships, before retiring in their 50s and returning to Ontario.

For two decades, they cottaged near Parry Sound and wintered at their trailer in Florida.

“We were the life of the party wherever we went,” she said.

But in 1989, Kern became ill after suffering balance problems. She was diagnosed with hydrocephaly and was in hospital a month after a shunt was inserted in her head.

Then it was Devy’s turn. Twelve years ago, he began to lose weight and it took months for a diagnosis. He was moved to the London Psychiatric Hospital where he stayed for four years. He contracted C. difficile and required an illeostomy. He was moved to retirement homes and had been in the nursing home where he lives now since 2009 with advanced dementia.

Kern visited him three times a week. She helped with bingos and played cards with her husband. There were times she was upset about his care and would voice her concerns.

But November was the last straw. Devy had grown a beard after he retired. When he was working, “he couldn’t have a beard because GM didn’t like their men to have beards.”

Kern, who always cut his hair and trimmed his beard, said someone at the home had “started hacking away at his beard.” She complained, but nothing was done.

On Nov. 15, his “prized” beard had been snipped again. “Nobody did a damn thing about it. So I figured, what the hell, you know? We’re both at the end of our road. There’s nothing more for us. We might as well go out together and we’ll take the cats along.”

“I could see no other place to go because nobody listened to me . . . In my mind, that was the end, it was over, I wasn’t looking after him the way I should, and I was unhappy about that.

“And I figured I wasn’t going to be around much longer, he wasn’t going to be around much longer, so let’s end it, and then the kids can get on with their lives and they’ll be free and clear of us . . .I probably was on a downward slope.”

She signed Devy out and took him back to her apartment.

They played cribbage and then she gave him some ice cream — “he loves his ice cream” — laced with mirtazapine, an anti-depressant.

The cats, Gracie and Luc, because “he’s French”, had the drugs sprinkled on their cat food.

“We’re all going off up the road together,” she said. “I was at peace.”

There really wasn’t enough drug in the dessert to do much damage, but they were disoriented when Laurie found them and the suicide note.

They were in hospital under observation for two days in separate rooms. Kern was under London police guard and they were “very, very kind” — so kind, she took down all their names and wants to write a letter to the police chief to commend them.

Even though she says she still has happy times and is grateful she’s as able as she is, sometimes “I wish it would have worked. Then it would be over and done.”

The criminal conviction still hasn’t sunk in, she said and admitted it crossed her mind that she might go to jail. “You commit the crime, you do the time,” she said.

“I’m guilty — there’s no two ways about it,” she said, but she doesn’t believe she’s a criminal, “because I didn’t do it with evil intent.”

“I did it from love.”

Kern said her health is deteriorating but her husband’s downhill descent is much faster. “It’s a heartbreaker, it really is.”

“The man I married is the man I still love. What is there now I feel sorry for, I do. I feel very badly for him because I don’t think if he was in his right mind that he would want to be around the way he is now.

“But, he doesn’t know, so that’s good for him. And I’ll just chug along.”

jsims@postmedia.com

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