JAMES CITY — The Craven County woman, who, with her husband, held the Guinness World Record for being married the longest, died last week. She was 105.
Zelmyra G. Fisher passed away peacefully Wednesday at her home in the James City community near New Bern.
Daughter Norma Fisher Godette was with her mother when she died.
“She was very comfortable and at ease and never complained,” Godette said.
Zelmyra Fisher, together with her husband, the late Herbert Fisher, gained national and international attention after the New Bern Sun Journal published a story in September 2008 about the couple earning the Guinness record for being married for 84 years.
The two married May 13, 1924, and had been married for 86 years at the time of Herbert Fisher’s death on Feb. 27, 2011. He was 105 when he died.
In the 2008 interview, the Fishers told the newspaper they got along well together.
“He was not mean; he was not a fighter,” Zelmyra Fisher said at the time.
For his part, Herbert Fisher said that Zelmyra never gave him any trouble.
Godette said her parents were excellent role models.
“We were poor, but we didn’t do without a thing,” she said. “If he had two cents, he saved one cent.”
One time, according to Godette, “Mama wanted to work. Daddy told her she could not work, that he could take care of the family. She slipped down to Cherry Point and got a job as a caretaker there.”
“Well it was done; she got the job. I had to let it be,” Herbert Fisher said in 2008.
Even after her husband passed in 2011, Zelmyra Fisher continued on, Godette said. In recent days, she had been at the hospital, suffering from pneumonia.
“While she was in the hospital, she thanked all the nurses for taking care of her. She told them to do anything that they had to do for her,” Godette said.
Fisher is survived by two sons and two daughters, 10 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.