When Sickness Eclipses Health, How Does a Marriage Survive?
I’m a terrible patient and an impatient nurse. I will take to my bed with a scratchy throat, texting a bossy shopping list to the family member who is unlucky enough to be dispatched to the drugstore on my behalf. (Why is it so hard to find Luden’s cough drops?) But when the tables are turned — for instance, when my husband was recovering from shoulder surgery — I assume a brusque, snappy air, Florence Nightingale overseeing a ward of rowdy soldiers instead of a kind man whose worst offense is playing hockey in midlife.
Accompanied by my own eccentricities, I ventured into EVERYTHING I HAVE IS YOURS (Flatiron, 400 pp., $27.99), Eleanor Henderson’s account of her husband Aaron’s three diseases — as she describes them, “addiction, mental illness and what I have taken to calling, inadequately, ‘chronic illness.’” I wasn’t sure I would have the stomach for Aaron’s bewildering medical conditions (worms are involved; so is skin) or for her forbearance, which is evident from the first page.
Henderson begins in their bedroom in Ithaca, N.Y., where she is trying to coax Aaron to sleep as he writhes in pain from the rashes and boils covering his body. After being sober for four years, he’s chasing a battery of prescription medications with Smirnoff Ice. “He is struggling, crying out, his eyes squeezed shut in pain,” Henderson writes. “I rub his back. I kiss his forehead. ‘It’s OK,’ I whisper. ‘You’re OK.’”
Aaron is not OK, that much is clear. Over the course of the book, spanning states and decades, births of two sons and deaths of parents, he receives diagnosis after diagnosis, each more incomplete and indefinite than the last. Some experts believe he has Morgellons disease (don’t Google it); others blame stress; one acupuncturist and herbalist says Aaron has “too much fire.” There is no clear path to wellness or course of treatment. Family members are loyal but perplexed; the neighbors don’t arrange a casserole brigade. It’s hard to mobilize around a condition that has no name, trajectory or known cause.
Henderson jumps around in time, dipping into her early days with Aaron and then back to the waiting room at urgent care and then to the time she meets her brothers to spread their father’s ashes and Aaron can’t be there. You feel for him, but you also worry about Henderson, who bears the brunt of their emotional and financial responsibilities. When she’s recalling the most difficult moments, she lapses into the second person: “After many unbearable hours on the porch, as the sky darkened and you’d both talked yourselves dry, you took him into the bedroom and made peace.”