The Boston Globe
On April 15, exactly eight years after Robbie Fox and Kelli Peters met during their freshman year at Elon University in North Carolina, their closest relatives gathered in Boston for their wedding.
The ceremony was intimate, with just seven people nestling them in a world all their own. Soft waves of brunette hair framed her face; he was clad in dark gray. They clasped hands as they exchanged vows, and the tearful guests burst into applause when they were pronounced husband and wife.
Peters leaned over Fox’s hospital bed and the 27-year-olds shared a tender kiss, beginning a married life they knew would be tragically brief.
Three days earlier, Fox had moved into hospice care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital after his aggressive bone cancer took a devastating turn.
It was a journey that had begun two years before, when Fox, in the midst of endurance training for a Half Ironman triathlon, took a hard fall on his bike. Fearing he had broken a bone, he got it checked out, he recalled in an essay about the experience. Instead, a scan revealed multiple tumors. He was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma and given about a 60 percent survival rate.
Peters and Fox were deeply in love and had planned a future together, perhaps in New England. But Fox said he would understand if she wanted to end it.
Without hesitation, Peters pledged she would stay by his side.
They clung to hope they would have longer together. But by this spring, Fox could no longer sleep at night, his body weak and wracked with pain.
They knew the winter wedding they had envisioned, at a cozy barn in Vermont’s Green Mountains, was not to be. But they could still fulfill a long-held dream, to declare their love, a bond deepened by profound hardship, to the world.
Peters asked the city for help obtaining an accelerated marriage license. City registrar Paul Chong did them one better. He came to the hospital to officiate. With only an hour’s notice, loved ones, too, rushed there.
As Chong spoke of choosing love in the face of adversity, Peters and Fox looked at each other with deep understanding.
“There were no words that we needed to say to profess our love,” Peters said in a recent interview. “It was showing up daily, doing the hard things.”
Fox died 10 days later, on April 25, with Peters at his side.
The wedding ceremony was captured in a TikTok video she posted two days after his death, her first on the platform. She never imagined more than a few people would see it, let alone hundreds of thousands, many of them inspired by their devotion.
At the end of May, Peters, who is from Connecticut, traveled to Fox’s hometown of Winston-Salem, N.C., to stay with his family. While there, she sat with his mom, Lynn Fox, and the two women who knew him best spoke about his life.
‘We had something special early on’
It was a sunny spring weekend, and students had packed into the backyard of Fox’s fraternity house when he and Peters struck up a lighthearted conversation. Though naturally shy, Peters found talking to Fox easy, as if they had known each other for years. They hung out the entire evening and were all but inseparable from then on.
Fox wanted to be dating, but Peters felt like she needed time before committing, she recalled. So they remained friends.
Things changed during their junior year, when they both studied in Europe. While having a lackluster experience in Barcelona, Peters confided in him about everything. He buoyed her spirits and made her laugh.
Peters visited Fox in Copenhagen, where they steered a small boat around the harbor while sharing a charcuterie board. They walked through the colorful waterfront neighborhoods, spending time in all his favorite cafes.
In Munich, they knocked back golden beers at Oktoberfest. In Paris, Fox pulled out all the stops, showing her the sights and taking her out for an elegant dinner.
When Peters got home, she realized she wanted something more from their relationship, too.
“I probably should have started dating him a long time ago,” she recalling thinking with a laugh.
On New Year’s Day, she told him she was ready to be a couple. But he gently turned her down. She went home and cried to her friends, thinking she had lost her chance.
“I’ve been waiting this long to date you, I’m gonna make you wait a little,” Fox had told her.
He didn’t wait long, telling her so the next night.
“We had something special early on. We both realized that,” Peters said. “There was never a question in our mind that we weren’t going to do this for the long haul.”
A few months later, the pandemic separated them again. They missed each other desperately and FaceTimed every day, their conversations stretching for hours.
As soon as Fox could, he drove up to Connecticut to see her, and then caddied at the Kittansett Club in Marion that summer. He loved playing golf with his dad and friends, his mom recalled, and took Peters to the driving range a few times to introduce her to the sport.
A year after they graduated from Elon University in 2021, they moved to West Hartford together and adopted a golden retriever, Beau. Peters got Fox into biking, and the pair regularly rode through the cornfields and hills of Connecticut.
When they moved to Charlotte, N.C., in 2024 to be closer to his family and friends, he had already set his sights on a Half Ironman triathlon.
“And then the whole thing kind of came crumbling down on us,” Peters said.
‘We both had an understanding of what was important’
Since he was a boy, Fox had struggled with health anxiety, so when the cancer diagnosis came after the bike fall on the rail trail, it felt like a “full-circle moment,” he recalled in his essay.
He credited his grandfather, who died the month before, with knocking him off his bike so doctors could find the large tumor in his left pelvic bone and several smaller tumors in the surrounding bones.
For several days after, Fox and Peters huddled with his parents in their home, trying to process the shock.
Fox immediately began to learn everything he could about the rare disease. He decided he would go to Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, the place he believed would give him the best chance to beat it.
Over the next nine months, he endured a grueling treatment regimen — 14 rounds of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and blood transfusions.
Peters made sure he had everything he needed at the hospital and spent every night sleeping beside him. Fox’s parents, who were staying nearby with family, would arrive to find the couple cracking jokes and playing games.
Through it all, Peters did her best to quiet her own fears and help carry his.
“Kelli was definitely the one who championed his care,” Lynn Fox recalled. “She was an angel.”
“Just from watching both of you, we’ve learned how to love better,” she added, looking at Peters as she spoke.
In February 2025 came joyful news, his cancer was in remission.
The couple moved back to North Carolina. Fox remained in pain, every ache or twinge a jolt of fear that the cancer was back.
But there were bright moments, too.
On a beautiful day in March, he proposed. They had designed her engagement ring together, an oval cut with a little halo of diamonds. He wanted it to be perfect.
He brought her into the backyard of his childhood home and dropped to one knee.
“He wanted to have that ring on my finger and know I was there forever,” Peters said.
Every morning, before she left for work, the two would drink coffee outside, with Beau wagging at their feet. They enjoyed having friends over, making homemade pizzas, and listening to Noah Kahan.
When football season rolled around, Fox was thrilled to join a fantasy draft with friends, and Peters turned him into a fan of the New England Patriots and quarterback Drake Maye.
Nothing about their life was normal, she recalled. But they were in it together.
“We both had an understanding of what was important,” she said.
‘It was a testament of our love’
One year after his diagnosis, Fox reflected on everything he had overcome. He was a survivor, he wrote in his journal, and stronger than he realized.
“You will be OK. I love you,” he wrote. “I love you Kel!”
But in November, the excruciating pain returned and his scans confirmed the worst. The cancer had spread throughout his body.
For the first time, he began openly talking about what he wanted if he died.
He entered a clinical trial at Dana-Farber, but it didn’t work as hoped. This February, two days before his birthday, he underwent back surgery to remove as much of a tumor as was possible, but it provided little relief.
“He could never catch a break,” Peters said.
Peters and Fox had always loved visiting Boston, watching the Red Sox and exploring the city. If he got better, they thought, they would live there.
But April came, and time grew short. Less than a day after he entered hospice, they made their plans to marry.
“It was a testament of our love, and that I wasn’t giving up, and I wanted to be his wife,” she said through tears. “Even if he wasn’t still here, you know, he’s here.”
On Saturday, family and friends will gather to remember Fox at a brewery in Lewisville, N.C., not far from his hometown. He didn’t want a funeral, Peters said, but for his life to be celebrated.
“Stop waiting for the right time, because life is so fragile and so unbelievably precious,” she said. “Do it now, before it’s too late.”