This Halloween, Samuel Schneider Braslow and Kalie-Ann Nassoura found themselves celebrating the holiday in a hospital room. It was one of the many instances in which the couple had learned to embrace life’s pivots together.
Three days earlier, liver and blood complications caused Braslow to be rushed to urgent care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he has spent much of the past three years. Braslow, 33, was diagnosed with Stage 2 melanoma in December 2023, and the cancer has since progressed to Stage 4.
Rather than cancel their Halloween plans, the couple and their friends brought their circus-themed costumes to the hospital. Nassoura, 28, dressed up as a clown with their friend Becca Esopenko, while Braslow dressed as a lion tamer. Four other friends arrived in costume as a monkey, a lion, a fortune teller and an elephant. They ordered pizza to his hospital room, watched “The Great British Bake Off” and gave out candy on the hospital’s 17th floor.
It was the same floor where, just over a month earlier, Braslow was preparing for his wedding to Nassoura in the hospital chapel.
“There was something so casual and sweet about the whole affair,” Braslow said in an interview the day after Halloween.
They decided to marry after learning in June that Braslow had developed Leptomeningeal disease, a serious complication of some cancers in which cancer cells spread to the membranes and fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord. It was the latest in increasingly scary turns since his cancer diagnosis nearly three years ago.
“The reality is, I will statistically die,” Braslow said. If his time was limited, he wanted to spend it as Nassoura’s husband.
In a Substack article in July, Braslow wrote, “There is no version of my life where I die without something left unfinished. At almost 33, I would never have had time for everything I wanted to do, cancer or no cancer. But there are some things too big to leave undone. Really, one thing. I’m going to marry Kalie-Ann.”
He continued, “It’s going to be a very small affair, and everyone has my permission to wear black to the wedding and reuse the outfit for the funeral.”
When the two first met in Los Angeles in January 2022, they would not have believed that their love story would lead to marriage. Both walked away thinking they would be better off as friends.
They had matched on Hinge a few weeks earlier, in December 2021, and shared their writing with each other. Braslow, a reporter and photographer, sent her an ESPN profile of Patricio Manuel, a professional boxer.
Nassoura, a dancer and choreographer, sent him her college thesis project. She had grown up in Stratham, N.H., and graduated from Elon University with a bachelor’s degree in strategic communications and another bachelor’s degree in dance performance and choreography.
Braslow grew up in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Carleton College.
Nassoura thought Braslow was “really hot,” and they had a great conversation over drinks at the Black Cat, a bar in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Braslow lived at the time. But a romantic spark was missing.
“I had definitively decided I would never date him,” said Nassoura as she was lying next to him in his hospital bed, holding a brown teddy bear Braslow’s father, Joel Braslow, had given him when he was a child. (“Mister Bear sort of came back to duty when Sam got sick,” she said.)
They continued to spend time together as friends. Each time they hung out, they found more in common. Six months into their friendship they realized they both loved watching “Oh, Hello on Broadway,” the Netflix comedy special featuring John Mulaney and Nick Kroll. With that discovery, “we saw each other,” Braslow said. The show captured their shared sense of wry humor.
“They’re both very quick-witted and clever and smart,” said Esopenko, a close friend, who was present for the interview, along with Kenzie Cook, another close friend, to support Braslow in case he needed help filling in memory gaps or giving explanations. (Braslow’s disease has caused some cognitive impairment.)
In June 2023, Nassoura confessed her feelings to Braslow. Assuming they were unrequited, she said they should stop being friends.
Braslow felt he needed to organize his thoughts before he told her he felt the same way. It took four weeks — and lots of overthinking and stress — before he finally called her and told her he wanted to be with her. The two then made it official.
For the next few months, Nassoura felt like the luckiest woman alive. Their favorite date was grabbing breakfast at the counter of Millie’s Cafe in Silver Lake, and doing The New York Times Crossword and Games together. They formed a close-knit crew with Esopenko, a model, and Cook, a musician. “It just sort of became the four of us against the world,” Nassoura said.
The four hung out at Cook’s apartment in West Hollywood, which they call “the cottage,” making bagels from scratch and doing laundry. They swam in Nassoura’s pool in North Hollywood and watched movies.
“It felt like I had the perfect life,” Nassoura said. She was dancing for Elyanna, a Palestinian-Chilean singer, and felt like her career was going exactly where she wanted it to go. “I was getting ready to head on the road for tour. I had my dream partner, my best friends, our community in L.A.”
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In the summer of 2023, Braslow noticed a pimple on his left ear. He was 30 and healthy and didn’t think much of it.
After the pimple grew into a skin tag and began to bleed, he booked an appointment in July to have it removed. But on his way there, the appointment was canceled.
“Had he been seen that day,” Nassoura said, “our life would look a lot different now.”
In December 2023, he finally saw a dermatologist who removed the skin tag and sent it in for testing.
He got the call two days later: It was Stage 2B melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. He would need surgery immediately.
After the primary melanoma was surgically removed, two new lesions appeared on his ear. By April 2024, his cancer had progressed to Stage 3.
By September 2024, Braslow moved in with his father and stepmother, Kelsey Martin, in the West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan and started classes at Columbia Journalism School. The cancer treatment regimen gave him extreme fatigue and severe side effects and disrupted his ability to work as a reporter. School, at least, would be an investment in his career.
In January 2025, Nassoura began traveling around the world with Elyanna and Coldplay, who were on tour together, as a dancer and choreographer. By the time she visited Braslow in New York during a tour break in May, the cancer had spread to his spine, fracturing his back and progressing to Stage 4.
“That’s when life started to look really different, and things started to get really scary,” she said. Braslow took medical leave from Columbia, while Nassoura stepped away from the world tour and moved in with him and his father in New York.
“I feel it’s a very big honor to take care of someone,” Nassoura said. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s also the easiest and it’s also the most privileged position I think I’ll ever hold.”
“And to allow yourself to be taken care of is incredibly vulnerable and difficult,” said Braslow, whose instinct, even now, is to ask the people around him if there’s anything he can do for them.
This August, Braslow proposed to Nassoura at the Slipper Room, a burlesque theater on the Lower East Side that she adored. It was where her first choreographed work in New York, a show called Metal Soul Mercy, premiered. They had designed an engagement ring together, and Braslow’s father had passed down his grandparents’ wedding bands to the couple.
That night, Braslow wrote her a letter: “There are a thousand ways I’d prefer to end up here with you, but there’s no world in which I’d want to end up any other place but here.”
By September, the couple had planned to get married at St. Paul’s Chapel in Morningside Heights, followed by dinner at Braslow’s father’s house. But on Sept. 18, a week before the wedding, Braslow was admitted to the I.C.U. at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
“I remember I had a list of to-do’s for the wedding: print the programs, tie the bows, seating cards, little notes to write for every guest,” Nassoura said. “I just realized, ‘Oh, nothing of that sort mattered.’”
The focus shifted to stabilizing Braslow after he suffered from a brain bleed the day before their nuptials. By the morning of Sept. 25 — their wedding day — he regained alertness. They still wanted to get married that day and set out to hold their “dream wedding,” Nassoura said, in the hospital.
Within hours, friends and family, including Braslow’s mother, Christine Schneider, pulled the entire event together. They managed to reserve the chapel near the hospital lobby for the ceremony, and a conference room next door was transformed into the reception space. Caterers and florists dropped off deliveries, and 34 guests gathered to celebrate the couple’s union.
Esopenko and Cook led the ceremony. Though they had planned to get ordained for the occasion, the couple ultimately decided not to get legally married so that Braslow could continue to receive his Medicaid health insurance.
Braslow came down the aisle with his best man, Albert Andrade, to Chet Baker’s version of “My Funny Valentine.” Nassoura followed, escorted by her parents, Ann and Steven Nassoura.
After exchanging rings, the couple made their exit to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland,” a song featured in “Happy Feet,” Braslow’s favorite movie and the first film they watched together.
For the next four hours, they ate, talked and laughed in the conference room, and that night at the hospital became one of their best nights together, they said.
Three years after they became a couple, Nassoura still feels so lucky, she said, to have “this once-in-a-lifetime love.”
She recalled a moment in December 2025, after Braslow underwent a brain surgery that they weren’t sure he would survive. He could barely speak through his pain, but he managed to keep saying “I love you” to Nassoura and his parents. It was his way of reassuring them that he was still here, and that everything was going to be OK.
“You took that energy that you had — I don’t know how you had any of it — and you used it to love and care for others,” Nassoura said. “That is the Sam Braslow way.”
On This Day
When Sept. 25, 2026
Where Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York
Cake Braslow’s stepmother baked three raspberry chocolate cakes inspired by “The Great British Bake Off.” She handcrafted the toppers to resemble the couple alongside their family dog, Franny, and Nassoura’s late dog, Leonard.
Haircuts The staff at the hospital shaved Braslow’s beard and gave his father a trim as well. “Everyone on the 17th floor decorated our room like it was a honeymoon suite at a resort,” Nassoura said. “All the nurses and the staff were shouting and celebrating. They had bubbles and wands and everything.”
The First Look The groom got ready in his hospital room with Andrade, Cook, his father and his brother, Seth Braslow. He wore a suit by Todd Snyder, his favorite designer. The bride, Esopenko, Madeleine Rainier, her maid of honor and Brooke Maroon, her best friend, were at Hotel Belleclaire, where her parents were staying. Nassoura wore her mother’s 1989 wedding dress, working with the designer Rebecca Schoneveld to make it strapless with ribbons.
The couple took their first-look photos in the hospital room. “You looked so beautiful,” Braslow said in the interview, looking over at Nassoura. “I can’t express how beautiful you looked.”
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