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.
Harry was in many closets. I learned of his undocumented status when getting him out of a legal snafu that involved providing a social security number. His panicked response: "Let's get out of here." He also hid his sexuality, asking me not to tell anyone in our Washington Heights apartment building I was gay, because, by association, they would know he was.
To plan our hospital wedding, I contacted a Catholic priest friend whose church helps the undocumented. He was a former lover, making it even weirder to ask the favor of marrying Harry and me. With so many strange circumstances, like a handsome male nurse on Harry's floor we jealously joked about, I sometimes felt I was starring in some pansexual Pedro Almodóvar film, full of off-kilter erotic connections.
Timing was a huge obstacle. "Michael," my friend said, "you can ask me to marry you any day of the week, but not on Easter Sunday. By Monday I'll have all the time in the world."
But Harry did not have all the time in the world. "I don't think I'll make it," he said. "We have to get married by Easter."
I searched "Top Wedding Officiants in New York City," and only one, Samantha Freire, mentioned gay weddings. When I reached her, she said she had never officiated a hospital wedding, but she quickly agreed.
The hospital provided balloons and bubbly apple cider, and I added the Easter touch of chocolate bunnies and jelly beans.
I cried at my wedding. I felt that my mother was there with me via her memorial card in my pocket. She had hoped I would marry in some way, telling me in 2015, when same-sex marriage was legalized, "You can marry a man, or you can marry a woman. Now pick one and settle down. And give me grandchildren."
Why did Harry and I marry under such dire circumstances? We had considered it years before, even though we were never partners in a romantic sense. In the summer of 2021, Harry was diagnosed with terminal Stage 4 lung cancer. This was soon after I learned that one of my oldest friends had terminal brain cancer, mere months after the death of my uncle whose name I shared, and not even a year after my mother's passing, the worst sadness I have ever experienced.
I was a shellshocked, mourning mess who now had become Harry's primary caretaker weeks before moving to Indiana for my Ph.D.
Harry's undocumented status played a pivotal role in why he had not learned of his cancer sooner. Fearful of doctors reporting him as undocumented, he sought medical care only for the worst emergencies. He was also impoverished and uninsured.
It's not that he had no skills. A polyglot of Chinese descent born in India, he was fluent since childhood in Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Urdu and English; later adding Spanish and Arabic. He could have been a high-level interpreter though these languages were useful in his work as a restaurant host where he was poorly paid and often laid off especially when bosses worried about undocumented crackdowns.
Since the pandemic I mostly supported us on my freelance writer income which wasn't easy.
A problem we encountered was that despite my being Harry's legal caretaker and medical proxy we were at the mercy of hospital staff. One hospital's refusal to honor paperwork made it clear how tenuous this was but if I were to become his spouse they could not say no.
From the beginning, Harry entrusted me with his care. As an American-born, native English-speaking son of a lawyer, I was who he had long relied on for legal and medical tangles. The day he learned he had cancer, he was in the hospital bed, fussing with the socks they gave him, saying: “I don’t understand any of this. You have to make the decisions.”
Mostly though, people tried to help us. New York City was then a refuge for immigrants regardless of status. One social worker enrolled Harry in emergency Medicaid which covers undocumented immigrants under certain circumstances; his cancer meeting the criteria. An incredible relief even if it did not cover everything.
But Harry, ever worried, would change hospitals as bills for uncovered tests accumulated even if I agreed to pay. Meaning I was constantly re-establishing his care. Anxious about bills and barely able to breathe or walk, he stopped seeing doctors for a few months. He also caught Covid, setting off a death spiral.
A few days after our wedding, he was rehospitalized in Manhattan. Clearly dying, he needed hospice care, which emergency Medicaid did not cover. The Catholic Church came to the rescue for this gay couple, and he entered Calvary Hospital in the Bronx.
"We can't let the nuns know we're married," he said, his head twisting worriedly on the pillow, tubes sprouting from the paper-thin skin of his arms, black and blue from needle punctures.
"I know the Pope personally, and he doesn't care if you're gay," I said, a conclusion I had confidence in after meeting him several times through my work as a journalist in Rome and Buenos Aires.
Purdue's spring semester ended in early May, and I drove east for 13 hours straight, making it home in time for final goodbyes. Harry died Sunday morning, May 15, four weeks after our wedding.
Death did not end the Kafka-esque indignities of marrying an illegal immigrant. These came not from the church but from the government. I had to document that he was undocumented with the federal government; a procedure to ensure I did not claim death benefits. I learned from the funeral home that New York provided Covid-era emergency financial assistance for burials. However, I was repeatedly denied reimbursement; the government throwing at me various regulations which paradoxically stated undocumented Medicaid recipients qualify.
This humiliating denial hinged on the definition of resident; with the State telling me no undocumented immigrant can ever be one. It didn't matter that Harry had a lease; lived in New York for 33 years and that he; like many undocumented immigrants; filed taxes. This Catch-22 made it seem Harry's status was a political liability in an ever more anti-immigrant atmosphere. I often think of mixed status families in my neighborhood; including a woman whose son was taken away by ICE; one of Harry's constant fears.
As he was dying; I saw how these fears played out over his life. I am naturally gregarious; and was conversational with his doctors. This angered him; and he would say: “Only tell them what they need to know. Nothing personal.”
This was how he navigated life for more than three decades; keeping so much secret; from immigration status to orientation. It must have been exhausting.
In the end; it killed him.
Harry is one of millions of stories of undocumented Americans. But to me he is not a statistic. He was my friend; my roommate and my husband; and he cannot be erased.
Several times when I visited Harry in the hospital; he said: “Are you going to write about me?” He was a private person; so I can't imagine he wanted me to. But writing about Harry is how I can best ensure that he is not forgotten. In this one way; at least; he is now documented.