Therese Marie Crutcher-Marin Watching Their Dance. Three Sisters, a Genetic Disease and Marrying into a Family At Risk for Huntington.s

Therese Crutcher-Marin’s world was turned upside down when she learned that her fiancé, along with his three sisters, were all at risk for Huntington’s.Huntington's disease is a devastating inherited condition that produces a combination of neurological, motor, cognitive and psychiatric symptoms. It’s been compared to having Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS all at the same time. There is no cure.In her new memoir, Watching Their Dance, Crutcher-Marin shares her deeply personal story of marrying into a family at risk for Huntington’s. “Some lives seem to move smoothly along a natural continuum, with one event or decision seeming to slide into the next,” she writes. “Such people seem to have faced no dramatic forks in the road, had few life-altering choices to make. Other lives, at least in hindsight, travel in a particular direction at one particular life-changing moment. That’s what happened to me, when, at age twenty-two, I suddenly had to confront the most complicated decision of my life.”Crutcher-Marin tells of her soul searching and her fears as she contemplated a life of unpredictability: her fiancé and each of his siblings had a 50-50 chance of developing a fatal wasting disease that had no test, no treatment, and no cure. She shares the great happiness and joy she experienced when she took a leap of faith and married the love of her life, along with the tough choices and pain that became part of her life as one by one her sisters-in-law slowly succumbed to the dis...