Ledyard — Jon Hiller, a cancer patient undergoing treatment at Smilow in Waterford, went to Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London last month to have a feeding tube inserted in his stomach. His 92-year-old father, Irving, arrived at L+M the same day — brought to the emergency room with gastrointestinal problems and later admitted.

Son and father wound up in rooms across the hall from each other. Soon enough, they were sharing the same room.

Things like that don’t just happen.

“The point is, I didn’t request it or anything,” Jon Hiller, 62, said in an interview at his parents’ Long Cove Road home in Gales Ferry. “When I found out my dad was across the hall from me, I asked if I could see him. They said, ‘We’re going to get you in a room together.’”

Then they started pushing beds around and moving furniture.

Hiller said he saw L+M nurses and patient care assistants treating other patients with the same compassion, which he found all the more impressive because of COVID-19, which may have been no more than the elephant in the rooms he and his father occupied but which was demanding plenty of attention in other parts of the hospital.

In any case, L+M's no-visitors policy applied to all patients, COVID-19 or not, leaving the hospital — virtually all hospitals these days — devoid of loved ones.

The Hiller family knew the drill. Irving had spent three weeks in the hospital in October after a stroke. Back then, family members asked Irving’s nurses if they could help him to the window of his fifth-floor room so they could communicate with him from the street below. In a photo that captured the moment, Jon, his mother, Catherine, and sister Amy are standing on the Faire Harbour Place sidewalk, waving and holding a banner that says, “We Love You.”

At that point, L+M’s no-visitor policy, first imposed at the start of the pandemic and lifted in August, had recently been reinstated.

Jon Hiller’s nurse at L+M, Ashley Clark, said family members are very rarely assigned to the same room. But being the charge nurse, she was in a position to make it happen for the Hillers. Her supervisor approved the move.

“These are unique circumstances right now, with no visitors allowed,” Clark said. “Jon’s father was very confused when he got here and Jon was able to calm him right down. ... I remember Jon saying he couldn’t remember when he’d spent so much quality time with his dad.”

Often a family member is summoned when a patient is confused, upset or having difficulty communicating. In the age of COVID-19, nurses and staff have to muddle through.

Catherine said it was a blessing to hear her husband and son had been reunited in the hospital.

“I got a text from Jon: ‘We’re roomies,’’’ she said. "To have a family member there to calm him (Irving) was a great relief to me. If we couldn’t go visit him, what could be better?”

At this stage of the retelling, Jon got emotional. He said the hospital stay — it lasted four days for him — got intense. On the second night, the discharge nurse called to say his father would be released the next day.

“When dad heard that, he wanted to know if I had my truck. ... ‘Did you call mother?'" Jon said. “It was 2 o’clock in the morning.”

Nurses helped calm Irving down and let Jon sit next to him in a chair opposite his bed. Jon held his father's hand for the next two hours.

“I asked him, ‘When can we go to Maine, dad?’ He used to take us there as kids,” Jon said. “We went down memory lane. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. We don’t know how our memories are numbered.”

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Irving sat quietly as his son recounted their time in the hospital. He recalled it vaguely, he said. Asked how he was feeling, he gave what Catherine and Jon said was his standard response to such questions: “Sitting up and taking nourishment.”

The Hillers — Catherine and Irving — have lived in their tidy, comfortable home for 63 years. Irving, who worked for decades as a mechanical engineer at Electric Boat, designed it. After he retired, he built houses for Habitat for Humanity. He also helped design and build the house where Jon lives with his wife, Sharon, who worked for 38 years as a health unit coordinator in L+M's emergency room. Their house is perched on Pinelock Drive on a ridge directly behind Jon's parents' Long Cove Road home.

Flat Brook flows between the two Hiller residences. It's spanned by a footbridge Irving built.

Jon worked at Pfizer for 26 years and was let go in a 2010 downsizing. He got his captain’s license and spent nearly a decade with the Fisher Island Ferry District before joining a biotechnology firm that shut down the project he was working on at the end of January.

Last fall, not long after his father’s stroke, he was diagnosed with cancer of a lymph node. His course of treatment at L+M's Smilow Cancer Hospital Care Center in Waterford is scheduled to conclude this week.

“It was a hard year,” Catherine said of 2020.

To Jon, the family’s experience at L+M last month was nothing short of life-affirming. He said he just had to tell people about it.

“I had a moment after dad left,” he said. “I like to think I’m observant. I assess people by listening, observing. I saw the way they treated us, the way the hospital treated everybody. They showed themselves to be human beings."

“Our family couldn’t be more appreciative.”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com