It seemed a romantic beginning, carrying my new husband across the threshold of our apartment for the first time since getting married.

In reality, paramedics carried Harry, his frail frame strapped into an emergency chair. I trailed behind them on four flights of our walk-up, holding his oxygen tank, its plastic tubing connecting us that April afternoon.

It would be among the last times I saw my husband alive. In the space of a month, I was engaged, married and widowed to Harry, who had been my friend and roommate for nearly 25 years. Just as surreal, our wedding took place at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx the day before, on Easter Sunday 2022.

Harry, whose birth name was Wing-Ho Chow, my reluctant husband who wanted to keep our marriage secret, had just exercised spousal privilege, releasing himself into my care despite knowing I was flying back that day to Purdue University where I was teaching and pursuing a Ph.D. The months before his death were exhausting as I traveled every few days between Indiana and New York.

Hospital weddings may be a common trope in movies and TV, but they are exceedingly rare. Only one nurse on Harry’s floor could recall witnessing one. Such is their rarity that the head nurse told me that the hospital wanted to issue a news release about our nuptials, something Harry adamantly refused.