"Till Death Do They Part"?

[Laurence Horn]

I take it this is another for the "Woe am/is I" file.  At least I've
always assumed that the line in the (old-style) standard wedding
ceremony (from the Book of Common Prayer, perhaps?) involves the
pronoun as the object, not the subject, of "do...part":

"To have and to hold, from this day forward; for better, for worse;
for richer, for poorer; in sickness and health; to love and cherish,
till death us do part"

or maybe

"...till death do us part" (so suggests wikipedia).  Either way, it's
"us" and not "we", the latter of which would make no sense
whatsoever--until we part death?  So when the Times Magazine story on
cryogenics  last Sunday (I'm just getting around to recycling it) was
entitled "Till Death Do They Part", I couldn't make sense of that
either.  Granted, it's a play on the wedding vows, with the funky
word order and all, and the idea is, well, let's let the subtitle
tell it:

The men who want to be cryonically preserved, and the women who
sometimes find it hard to be married to them.

It's about "the hostile wife phenomenon", as the "cryonicists" see
it.  OK, difference of opinion, I get that.  Creates rift in the
marriage before he kicks the frozen bucket, I get that too.  So it's
still a case of death parting the couple, only now it's before they
become, what's the expression, metabolically discordant, right?  But
I still don't get why it's not "Till Death Do Them Part", in the
headline and the Contents page, rather than "Till Death Do They
Part".  Am I missing something?

LH

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