Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage
(eBook)

A turbulent romance meets harrowing medical mystery: the true story of the author's twenty-year marriage defined by her husband's chronic illness-and a testament to the endurance of love. Eleanor met Aaron when she was just a teenager and he was working at a local record store-older, cool, experienced, and with an electric personality. Escaping the clichés of fleeting young love, their summer romance bloomed into a relationship that survived college and culminated in a marriage and two children. From the outside looking in, their life had all the trappings of what most would consider a success story. But, as in any marriage, things weren't always as they seemed. On top of the typical stresses of parenting, money, and work, there were Aaron's untended wounds of depression, addiction, and family trauma. Then, when burning lesions appeared on his body overnight, Eleanor was as baffled as his doctors. There seemed to be no obvious diagnosis, let alone a cure. And, when the lesions gave way to Aaron's increasingly disturbed concerns about parasites living inside him, the husband she loved began to unravel before her eyes. A new fissure ruptured in their marriage, and new questions piled onto old ones: Where does physical illness end and mental illness begin? Where does one-person end and another begin? And, how do we exist alongside someone else's suffering? Emotional, propulsive, and at times heartbreaking, Eleanor Henderson's Everything I Have Is Yours tells the story of a marriage tested by powerful forces out of both partners' control. It's not only a memoir of a wife's tireless quest to heal her husband, but one that asks just what it means to accept someone as they are.