In sickness and in health Love stories from the front lines of America's caregiving crisis

Laura Mauldin, 1977-

Book - 2026

"When twenty-seven-year-old Laura Mauldin moved to New York for graduate school in 2005, she fell wildly in love. But just months into their relationship, her partner's leukemia returned-and what began as a love story quickly turned into something else entirely: without adequate systems for long-term care or meaningful support for disabled people, Laura found herself slipping from partner to unpaid caregiver, fighting to keep the woman she loved alive within a system built to let them both fall through the cracks. Now a sociologist and professor of disability studies, Dr. Mauldin turns her personal reckoning into a powerful, urgent investigation. Weaving together her own story with intimate interviews, fieldwork, and cutting-edge ...disability research, In Sickness and In Health exposes a quiet national emergency: the impossible expectations placed on spouses and intimate partners to provide round-the-clock care in the absence of public support. In these heartbreakingly vivid portraits of couples navigating love and loss in the context of disability and illness, Dr. Mauldin shows how deeply ableism is baked into our ideas of romance, desirability, and worth. She reveals how the state systematically offloads care onto private homes, disguising abandonment as devotion-and how the labor of keeping someone alive is rendered invisible when it's done out of love. Blisteringly honest and fiercely compassionate, In Sickness and In Health is a rallying cry for a radical reimagining of care-not as a private burden, but as a collective responsibility. In connecting disability movements to the politics of love and intimacy, Mauldin reframes the conversation around caregiving, urging us to build a world where no one is left to do the work of love alone"-- Provided by publisher. more