The human heart of the Angel Ball

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