“What's really important is for disabled people to understand that their situation is political, and for caregivers to understand that their situation is political,” Mauldin says of her new book.Mother Jones illustration; Victor J. Blue; HarperCollins

It’s an old adage: when people get married, they promise to stick together “in sickness and in health.” But that’s easier said than done when you’re caregiving for a spouse or long-term partner, when systemic failures often lead to burnout.

In her new book, In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis, University of Connecticut professor Laura Mauldin explores the relationships between caregivers and their disabled and sick spouses, and the underlying lack of structural support in the US that makes unpaid care an inescapable feature of most such relationships.

The topic is personal for her: Maudlin’s partner leukemia came out of remission as they were getting closer in 2006. “Falling in love with J had called upon me to increasingly fill a role that required meeting nearly every one of her needs,” Mauldin writes in her introduction. “This was more than just providing emotional support when the person you love is suffering.” J passed away in 2010.

I spoke to Mauldin about crafting this book based on her lived experiences, how systems fail both disabled people and their caregivers, and what is at stake with Medicaid cuts exacerbating the damage to an already broken system.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What led you to write a book about spousal caregiving? 

“What’s really important is for disabled people to understand that their situation is political, and for caregivers to understand that their situation is political.”

I had this experience of being a caregiver for my partner, and while I was doing that, I was also being trained as a sociologist. I was in graduate school, and I was focused on the social and political aspects of illness and disability from an academic perspective. I had this deeply emotional, traumatizing, transformative experience as a human, and then at the same time, I was being trained to think about and understand the world in particular ways, through theories of disability, through disability studies, with an emphasis on the politics of disability.

I processed the experience and tried to make sense of what happened to me, but also understanding that it was nothing unusual—that this is happening to millions of people all over the country all the time, and that I could both........

© Mother Jones