RICHMOND, Va. – The dark-oak farmhouse table where Page and Robert Melton spent many a dinner hour is now laden with vases and framed pictures, fragile pieces of their life together that have to be tucked into cardboard boxes. The movers are coming in the morning and there’s still much to pack.

Page picks up a photo of Robert with family members by the porch of their homey Dutch colonial on the morning of their younger daughter’s christening, in September 2002. A brilliant fall day, it was exactly one year before the heart attack and collapse that left the 46-year-old father of two with a brain injury so severe he would eventually live in an assisted living facility.

Page rolls bubble wrap around the photo, much as she has tried to cushion the hard edges of the part of their bifurcated life they refer to as “after the injury.”

Robert had come a long way since 2003, when he looked at his wife sitting by his side in the hospital and said, “You seem like a nice lady. How come you’re not married?” She had gone home that day and put away the diamond and emerald ring he had given her when he proposed. Looking at it made her too sad.

Seven years later, Robert was still mentally impaired and his personality far different than before the accident, but he knew his family, knew he had had a brain injury that upended their lives, and asked lots of questions.

He carried with him at all times a reporter’s notebook, in which he had written the information most important to him: his daughters’ ages – 9 and 11 – and that he has “known my honey” 18 years.

He could remember snippets of his pre-injury life – the made-up song he and Page sang to their girls, his nicknames for colleagues, that he had been an Eagle Scout. And though he still broke Page’s heart every day with a sweet and childlike simple-mindedness, once in a while, he would say something insightful and on point.

Just days earlier, at the Sunrise assisted-living facility where he lived for several years, Robert had looked at Page and asked whether it was hard for her to pack up the house: “Does that cause you distress, darlin’? Make you sad?” Page took his hand, and her eyes filled with tears.

“We had the best days of our lives and the worst days of our lives in that house,” she said quietly. “So, it’s very bittersweet to leave it.”

“It is bittersweet,” Robert echoed.

The girls were so young when Robert fell ill – Hope was 3 and Nell 18 months – that Page was the only one of the four who remembered those days.

Page was the only one who remembered the day in September 2003 when, just home from the hospital after the heart attack, Robert collapsed and stopped breathing.

Wrapping up the contents of their home on the eve of moving day – and the beginning of a new chapter in their lives – Page couldn’t help but reach back to those best and worst of times, and one other memorable day:

On a Saturday morning in the spring of 2010, Page had arranged for Robert to come home from Sunrise for breakfast. She had asked Robert’s brother Will to drive down from Annandale, Va., to be with them and sent the girls out for the morning with Allan Ivie, a friend from childhood who had come back into her life.

She had consulted with Robert’s doctors and her minister. She cooked up some eggs. She was nervous as she sat down at the big oak table next to her husband of 16 years.

Then she had a conversation with Robert she had never imagined she could have.

Writers’ chemistry

During the eight weeks Robert Hamilton Melton spent at a rehabilitation hospital in Hanover, Va., after his brain injury, he would often pick up a notepad and pen. Before he remembered anything about his personal life, he remembered he had been a reporter.

Writing under the byline R.H. Melton, Robert, 54, had built his career at the Washington Post, where he worked since 1982 as an editor and a reporter, primarily covering politics in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Growing up in Springfield, Va., the second of five boys born to Mary Hope, a homemaker, and Eston Melton, a chemical engineer, Robert had a knack for language from an early age.

Page Boinest, a Richmond native and fellow graduate of University of Virginia, had met Robert in the mid-’80s when she was a UPI reporter. The two crossed paths, and friends even set them up on a date, but they didn’t hit it off. Page found Robert private, hard to get to know.

At a business dinner in Annapolis with Robert in 1992, something changed.

“I don’t know how to describe it, but there was this chemistry between us – it had never been there before,” says Page, now 51.

They were married in 1995, and their first daughter, Virginia Hope, was born in 2000, followed two years later by Nell Hamilton.

The fateful day

On its destructive path up the East Coast in September 2003, Hurricane Isabel ripped through central Virginia, downing trees and leaving thousands, including the Meltons, without power for days.

From his office near the Capitol, Robert was writing story after story about the devastation. He had spent days clearing out his own back yard and was surprised at how tired the work made him.

He was working at his office on Saturday, Sept. 20, when his chest started to hurt. Since he’d had a heart scare before, he walked across the street to the emergency room at the Medical College of Virginia. He was having a heart attack.

Four days later, on his 46th birthday, he was allowed to go home.

But two days later, Friday, Sept. 26, at about 4 p.m., the life they had known ended. Page was making dinner. Nell was in a high chair at the dining room table. Robert bent over the chair to scoot it in and suddenly dropped to the floor.

The children started screaming. Page called 911. Robert was barely breathing – then stopped. Page tried CPR. Neighbors came. Power crews in the area came in and tried to help. Page remembers a big burly man holding her 18-month-old. Still no ambulance. A sheriff’s deputy came in and tried to revive Robert.

“He was gone,” Page says.

Finally, after a half-hour, the volunteer rescue squad showed up. Page jumped into the ambulance, and it headed to Henrico Doctors, the nearest hospital, about 20 minutes away.

Robert had been down for about 45 minutes. When the cardiologist came to talk to Page, he told her, “I can revive him, but you’re not going to want me to.”

She had to decide on the spot. “Bring him back to me,” she told the doctor. “Bring him back to us.”

After about 20 minutes, the doctor came out. Robert was in a coma and on life support. Robert would either not make it, survive in a persistent vegetative state or, best-case scenario, come back but not resemble the man she knew.

Robert spent several weeks at Henrico Doctors, where he had a defibrillator put in, then was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital. He’d had little physical impairment, but his cognitive loss was profound. And he had no memory – short- or long-term.

Doctors told Page that Robert would benefit from someplace with regular activities and a set schedule as well as caregivers to manage his medications and his own space to recover in. The only long-term choices were a nursing home or an assisted-living facility.

“At that point, it was like the dream died,” Page recalls. “It was very hard, because when Robert came home, you have this not-even-rational thought that, ‘If I just love him enough, he’ll get better.’ ”

Father figure

As Hope and Nell got older, they seemed to miss the presence of a father more. But they were smart, well-adjusted kids.

Page had made her peace with her life. She had lost her taste for politics but she worked full time as a government-affairs consultant. On the side, she became an advocate for brain-injury and caregiver groups.

“I had made up my mind: ‘This is what our life is going to be, and I’m OK with that,’ ” she says. “ ‘We’re OK, the children are doing well, Robert’s happy. We can survive this way.’ ”

She didn’t go out much socially, but in June 2008 she attended her 25th college reunion in Charlottesville. At a cocktail party, she reconnected with Allan Ivie, a U-Va. classmate, who was now a banker and divorcing father of four sons living in St. Louis.

They began talking regularly. It was nice to have an adult to talk to, Page says, and she began to wrestle with feelings that they could be more than friends.

“It had never occurred to me at that point to be in a relationship,” she says. “It felt disloyal to Robert.”

Allan, too, was grappling with his feelings. He realized that the only way their relationship could develop was if it included Robert. As he started falling in love with Page, he said to her: “I see this responsibility that you have, and I want to help you with it. I understand this is a package deal.”

Page eventually introduced Allan to Robert, and Allan worked to forge his own relationship with Robert. Allan felt uneasy at first, guilty about befriending a man with limited cognition while starting up a romance with his wife.

Page tiptoed into the subject of dating with Robert, asking whether he understood and was comfortable with that. Robert told her it was fine.

“He’s a really nice guy,” Page says he told her.

Page felt 30 again but was racked with guilt.

“I believed my vows so strongly that they just kept ringing in my ears,” she says.

She consulted her minister, who told her that by continuing to take care of Robert, she was still honoring those vows.

They started having whimsical talks about marriage, but merging families seemed too complicated. Allan, now divorced, couldn’t leave St. Louis, where he had joint custody of his three youngest sons, and was about to become president of Reliance Bank. And Page’s support system – her parents, her sister and brother – were all in Richmond.

And there was Robert. Marriage would require divorce.

Nevertheless, in June, Allan proposed. Page said yes, and eventually, they came up with a plan. Page and the girls would move to St. Louis. And Robert would come with them.

Page discussed the plans with Robert’s brother Will and his father and stepmother. The only thing left was to tell Robert.

The decision

Page says she was a nervous wreck on the June 2010 morning when Will brought Robert to the house. She’d gone over the conversation dozens of times in her head but still couldn’t imagine saying the words out loud.

Finally, she started: “I’ll always love you, and we’ll always take care of you.”

“I know that,” Robert said.

“You know that Allan and I have been seeing each other, and we have a relationship and we love each other, and he’s asked me to marry him.”

Robert responded immediately: “You should marry him. He’s a good guy.” Then he asked what would happen to him.

Page explained that they would all move to St. Louis.

Page never used the word “divorce” with Robert, but that would have to be the next step. She hired a lawyer for herself and another one for Robert, and asked Will to represent Robert along with a guardian ad litem appointed by the court.

The divorce was final in early 2011. Page wanted to remain Robert’s legal guardian, as she had been since his injury, and no one objected. Will signed for Robert.

Page thinks Robert accepted the new expanded family.

“In a way, I feel married to Robert forever,” she said a few days before leaving for St. Louis. “It’s not a traditional marriage. It’s not the marriage we signed up for. But I feel like there’s a connection there that never ends.”