Less than a week later, I got a call from a friend of my father's, telling me my father had driven himself from his office to the hospital and had himself admitted. Although my father wasn't in any immediate danger, he told me, "Your father is a sick man." He had leukemia.

I caught a "red eye" flight out of Los Angeles and was in New Haven the next morning. My father had a smoldering kind of anger. I talked to him for awhile but nothing I said seemed to take the edge off it. Finally, I said to him, "All these years you've taken excellent care of your body, and now you're very sick. You're angry at your body, aren't you?" He admitted he was, and as he acknowledged it, the anger seemed to drain from him.

His doctors couldn't give me any prognosis for his recovery. They were able to treat the immediate throat infection, but since his white blood count was low, he was prey to any number of other infections and attacks on his immune system.

They treated him with chemotherapy. It was a struggle for him to eat since the chemotherapy caused him to lose his appetite and much of his sense of taste. He felt nauseated much of the time. Lying in bed, he tried to find enough energy to joke and converse with the staff, most of whom he knew.

Over the next nine weeks, he survived three rounds of chemotherapy, but he lost a lot of weight. I was living in Milford, coming to the hospital each day to care for him and doing what needed to be done to keep his affairs in order.

y fiancée, Maribeth, and I had planned to be married in Los Angeles at the end of April. She suggested that, since my father couldn't be there, that we secretly marry in his hospital room and not announce it, so as not to diminish any of the joy and anticipation of the later, Los Angeles ceremony.

On April 5th we were married in his hospital room.

He was my best man.