March 8, 2007
By Ed Lowe

Nancy Latham lives in Seaford, a short walk from one of my favorite haunts, Runyon's Restaurant. She wanted to tell me a story about her dad, a minister, earlier this month but interrupted herself to say that she was returning to work part time as a reading teacher in the Garden City School District, having absented herself in response to a diagnosis last March that she had acute leukemia.

Under the categorical umbrella "We live in good times," Latham said that she had received an avalanche of generosity from colleagues and friends and neighbors who cooked and shopped for her family for weeks at a time, who sent holiday gifts and forwarded packages to her daughter, Kaitlyn, during her freshman year at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, while Latham endured hospitalization, chemotherapy, radiation therapy and a stem cell transplant from a perfect-match donor, her brother, Jim Perkins, of Darien, Conn.

"Also, my husband, John," Latham said. "He bought an electric trimmer and shaved my head and said, ‘Wow, you've got a good head for bald!'

"The strangest thing about the transplant," she said, "is that now I am producing blood cells with my brother's DNA. The doctors assess the success of the transplant by looking for the XY chromosome in my blood. I thought it would make a good murder mystery: Based on blood found at the scene, cops go looking for a male suspect."

Latham then told me that her father, the Rev. William H. Perkins, had died in October 2003.

For 10 years, Perkins was the minister at the First United Methodist Church on Broadway in Amityville, around the corner from my house. He also served or led churches in Southampton, where Latham was born in 1963, and later in Rockville Centre. For the last six years before he retired, Latham said, Perkins was the district superintendent for the United Methodist Conference on Long Island.

Perkins started missions in Far Rockaway and Brooklyn, led tours to Ireland with priests from the Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, and worked closely with rabbis from Nassau County, while he was at St. Mark's United Methodist Church in Rockville Centre.

Latham said that her father and mother, Carol Perkins, loved to travel and frequently sponsored people from other countries to come to the United States and stay with them.

"We always had exchange students in our house," she said. "Every once in a while, my parents would host a group of travelers whose plans had changed for one reason or another and who had no place else to go. We had Vietnamese kids with us during the 1970s. Later, we had three brothers stay with us who were escaping from the war in Afghanistan. They're all now U.S. citizens with businesses and homes and kids.

"My father loved Ireland particularly," Latham said. "He lived there and led a church there for about two and a half years, in Longford. He also had a church in Limerick for about six months.

"From Ireland, they traveled to Europe. They did an African safari, a world cruise, where they visited every continent. They just went everywhere, even after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. In spite of the speed of the progress of liver cancer, he lived almost three years after his diagnosis.

"About six months before he died, he took the church in Limerick. During that time, he noticed he had lost his wedding ring. He had lost so much weight by then, he guessed he probably lost it in an airport bathroom, washing his hands. My mother was upset about it-they were married 42 years-but he just replaced it with a claddagh ring he bought in Ireland.

"Even three months before he died, he flew to California to walk his older sister, Barbara, down the aisle for her second marriage. She was 78. My dad was very sick by that time, but absolutely nothing was going to stop him from continuing. My parents probably spent about 10 days in California before coming back here to visit us, then back to Ireland for three weeks to see all the people there who had touched his life, and to say goodbye. They had taken a house in [McLean, Va.] by that time, but they spent almost no time there. They either visited with us or with his doctors in New York and Florida, or friends in Florida. He never spent two whole months in one place. He loved traveling, meeting people.

"When they were home in Virginia the last time, I went to see them. It was the week before he passed. My mom was very distraught, because his health had declined so fast after they returned from their last trip to Ireland. Hospice came, but then they would leave, because my mother wanted to care for him herself. I told her, ‘Mom, you need a nurse to help you.' She said she didn't know how to get the money out of the bank to pay a nurse. She did know, I think, but she was afraid to leave him alone to even go to the bank.

"A neighbor told her to fax him some bank papers, and he would help," Latham said. "The fax machine was in the office in the house, still in the box shipped from Ireland. My mom didn't know how to use a fax machine, but for some reason, she found the box and took out the machine. I suppose she eventually would have figured out how it worked, but she never did, because, inside the box, she found the wedding ring.

"She brought it to him and put it back on his finger," Latham said. "He died within hours. Now, my mother lives in a townhouse in Glen Cove. Finding that ring was very comforting for her."

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