The Murmur of Everything Moving

When Maureen and Steve met in their twenties, he'd left behind a difficult marriage and she had ended a troubled relationship. In each other, they found a passionate love and shared a dream of a living off the land in rural Michigan. Three years later, when Steve, at twenty-nine, was diagnosed with cancer, they embarked on an all-out effort to save his life. When Steve's childhood friend, Joey, a drug addict, learned that Steve needed money for experimental cancer treatments that insurance wouldn't cover, he offered to sell Steve's pain medication, a synthetic opioid with a high street value, to help pay the costs; only one of the friends would survive.

The Murmur of Everything Moving chronicles a young, working-class couple's odyssey through the medical mileu, as they navigate the terrain of illness and caregiving, of compassion and loss. This beautiful and aching memoir is ultimately a story of love—romantic, brotherly, and spiritual—in all its challenging but exquisite complexities.