Mary Tyler Moore was “almost blinded” by diabetes in her later years, according to her husband.
Mary Tyler Moore was nearly blinded in her later years, her husband says
The sitcom legend died in 2017 at the age of 80 from cardiorespiratory arrest complicated by pneumonia, but a few years earlier he had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes – a condition which means the pancreas is unable to produce enough insulin – after suffering a miscarriage and now her widower Robert Levine, 68, has told how the disease almost completely blinded her.
He told Fox News Digital: “Over time, she suffered from many complications from diabetes. But the thing that had the biggest impact on her was the fact that she was almost blinded by it in her later years. Mary had such constricted visual fields and such limited central vision that she was unable to read. She was unable to cross a room safely without bumping into or tripping over it. And for a woman who was a dancer at heart and so physically capable and so independent, imagine what it would mean to you, to have your joy stolen from you. Vision loss due to diabetes was a big problem for Mary.
The former ‘Dick van Dyke Show’ star – who is the subject of new HBO documentary ‘Being Mary Tyler Moore’ – was the mother of the late Richie Meeks with her first husband Richard Meeker and later married the director of the television Grant Tinker in 1962 before settling down with Robert in 1983 and he went on to explain that all relationships come with some form of “baggage” and recalled how when he first met Mary , he had “no intention” of sacrificing his career for love.
He added: “We all enter relationships with baggage. I was a young doctor. I never expected in my life to have a relationship with anything or anyone other than medicine. It was my calling. That’s what I was committed to. When we met, I wasn’t ready to have a relationship with anyone. But as you see in her work, there was something so fascinating about Mary, so authentic, so approachable. And all my usual barriers to interacting with people, my fears, were kind of reduced. They have been eliminated.
Origin of message: woman first
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