Star Jones offered the boisterous room at Cipriani Wall Street a proposition of devastating simplicity: anyone whose life had remained untouched by cancer was welcome to carry on talking. The silence was immediate.
Perhaps her appeal was so intimate because it returned us to the people cancer had taken from our lives: my father, my table companion’s grandmother, Lynda Carter’s husband, Robert Altman. Each name held an entire relationship, with its own language of affection and the particular comfort of being known.
For Denise Rich, that absence has a daughter’s name. Gabrielle Rich Aouad died of acute myelogenous leukemia at twenty-seven, leaving a wish that others might be spared the suffering she had endured. Alongside her daughters Daniella Rich Kilstock and Ilona Rich Schachter, she has honored that wish by funding the search for less punishing treatments and, ultimately, cures for leukemia, lymphoma and related blood cancers.
There is room for tremendous pleasure here, too. The 28th annual Angel Ball, held on October 19, raised $3 million for cancer research and honored Carter alongside entrepreneur and philanthropist Nicola Verses and the incomparable Dionne Warwick.
The musical company was suitably illustrious. Deborah Cox, the evening’s emcee, performed Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All,” with additional performances by Taylor Dayne and Shaggy. DJ M.O.S. and DJ Kiss supplied the soundtrack for the dance floor. Kathy Hilton served as dinner chair, and guests included Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, Carol Alt, Sandra Lee, Lorraine Schwartz and Simone I. Smith. Jones’s paddle raise alone brought in more than $340,000.
Still, it seems fitting to remember Gabrielle herself. An Oxford graduate fluent in five languages, she had studied acting and written a screenplay she wanted to see produced. Those details help restore to the name on an invitation the young woman who had plans for her life.
During Gabrielle’s treatment, Denise donated her own bone marrow in the hope of saving her daughter. Gabrielle’s response was almost unbearably tender: “Mummy is giving me birth again.”
What stays with me, just as much, is the duration of that devotion. Thirty years is a long time to keep asking others to care, to gather another room, to carry a daughter’s wishes into the daily demands of sustaining an institution. Grief has no obligation to become useful. Rich has nevertheless undertaken the formidable work of giving hers a public purpose, year after year, with her family beside her.
Since its founding in 1996, the foundation has, in turn, awarded more than $47 million in research grants. Its support for early career scientists helps promising investigators pursue new approaches to leukemia, lymphoma and related blood cancers. The foundation reports that, on average, eighty-eight cents of every dollar raised directly supports research. Behind the ballroom’s generosity, of course, is the patient work of people testing ideas that may, in time, give someone else years of life.
That emphasis on less toxic treatment felt all the more urgent when Kelly Leach spoke about her husband, Todd Day. He died in October 2024 from complications related to treatment for secondary lymphoma, diagnosed seven years after his initial diagnosis of stage III diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. The couple had been pursuing fertility treatment when the second diagnosis arrived. Following his death, Leach continued with their plans for a family and gave birth to their daughter, Chloé, nearly a year later.
Her account brought the unfinished business of a life into painful focus. There had been a marriage and a hoped-for child, a future already taking shape when illness intervened. Chloé’s birth carried their shared plans forward into a world Todd would never see. Leach now advocates for safer cancer therapies, seeking to spare other families the suffering she has known.
For me, the most moving measure of what Denise Rich has built remains the possibility of an ordinary future: more time with the person you love. I thought of my father, and of what I would give for another conversation. The chance to protect that time for another family is, surely, reason enough to fill the room again.
For those who would like to continue supporting this extraordinary charity, donations can be made at gabriellesangels.org.
