Ida Peterson married her Roanoke College sweetheart, Michael Hardon, in 2020, in a small garden in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was receiving chemotherapy at the time. “I was totally bald,” she recalls, and replaced her flower crown with a lavender wig for the reception.
Peterson Hardon had been diagnosed three months earlier with acute myleloid leukemia (A.M.L.), an aggressive form of cancer that typically affects people in their 70s. In the hospital, she met Seth Waxman, another Roanoke student from her graduating year who was battling the same type of cancer.
