Word: tigran
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...enough that Natalia Goukassian, then 21, had to spend her honeymoon in June 2006 in West Palm Beach, Fla., helping her husband Tigran find alternative treatments for connective tissue sarcoma, an aggressive cancer, or that six months later, the Air Force-enlisted man, 21, succumbed to the disease. But as it turned out, her painful ordeal had only just begun. While the Veteran Affairs Department deemed the Russian immigrant (not yet a legal resident) eligible for surviving-spouse benefits, immigration officials at Homeland Security took a very different view: at Natalia's interview for legal residence the next year...
...that Congress will decide the widows "have the truth on our side." Still, she fears there is a culture inside the U.S. immigration bureaucracy that assumes foreign spouses are merely green-card gold diggers. (To be fair, immigration agents do confront myriad scam artists, male and female.) She and Tigran were genuinely in love, she says, because they were "Russian soul mates" - he was born in Russia and came to America as a child with his parents - who met a year after she arrived in the U.S. on a visitor's visa to improve her English-language interpreter skills...