By Eileen Vorbach Collins

In Casey Mulligan Walsh’s recently released debut memoir, The Full Catastrophe, All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, (Motina Books Publishing, February 2025), we read the full story behind her impressive body of work that preceded it.

Walsh has built a reputation as a writer who knows grief. Since 2019, her essays, flash nonfiction, and micro memoir have been widely published in literary journals and mainstream publications including Barren Magazine, Huff Post, Hippocampus Magazine and the New York Times. One of my favorites, “Still,” first published by Split Lip Magazine, was nominated for Best of the Net. I’ve read it countless times. Each reading leaves me breathless.

The Full Catastrophe is a skillfully woven tapestry. In often beautifully lyrical language, Walsh tells her poignant but redemptive story of multiple losses and a search for belonging that will have the reader cheering her on while holding tight to their own loved ones. She shows us her flawed marriage, fraught with conflict. She allows us to see her children with all their charm and all their failings. She reveals her hopes, her fears, frustrations, and thwarted dreams.

From the little girl who’s lost her parents to the young woman who loses her only sibling, and later her marriage, we feel these losses. But it’s with the death of her oldest child, her beloved, vibrant son, Eric, that we wonder how she’ll survive the unfathomable grief and the cumulative effect of it all. We know of Eric’s death going in. It’s right there in black and white on the back cover. Yet, when part one ends with Walsh pacing the floor with her colicky baby as she sings, Build me up, Buttercup, don’t break my heart, we brace for our own heartbreak.

Part two begins with two-year-old Eric belting out his favorite song along with the TV. The irony of the lyrics, I’m going to live forever, is not lost on us. That same year, at Casey’s insistence, their pediatrician checks Eric’s cholesterol level. It’s twice the normal value. A lipid specialist finally gives a name to the genetic disorder that claimed Walsh’s father and brother and which she herself has inherited — familial hypercholesterolemia (FH). Often asymptomatic in the early stages, if left untreated, FH can lead to early cardiovascular disease. Both Eric and Walsh’s youngest child are diagnosed with the disorder. She worries they’ll die young too.

As her marriage and her dream of having a stable family of her own start to crumble, all three children begin showing the effects of the stress. Anyone who has experienced a contentious divorce and custody battle will find familiar scenes in those chapters as well as lessons learned, such as when Walsh realizing her marriage is not salvageable, writes, “Determination, I see now, is not always a positive quality. It can spur you to great things. It can also make you blind, unable to see when enough is simply enough.”

As often happens, the children take sides in the parental war, and chaos ensues. With their paternal grandparents, and now their father living across the street, it’s all too easy for them to play one parent against the other. Walsh, concerned about the children’s schoolwork, curfews, and their ability to cope, rapidly loses any authority over them.  Her relationships, especially with her young daughter, suffer. Walsh suffers too.

“Now nothing is sure,” she writes. “There are things vastly bigger than I am, so many forces beyond my control. What I can’t imagine is how this all works out, and the more I worry over it, the more frightening it is.”

Then, as Eric transitions to post-high school life, everything begins to unravel for him. The loss of a close relationship with his father, the stress of his parents’ divorce, and finally the threat of a legal battle over consensual sex. The girl was not quite sixteen. When her parents discover the relationship, they press charges resulting in a future for Eric that’s uncertain at best.

Even after Eric dies at twenty in a single-car crash, Walsh’s stalwart belief that the world still holds for her a place of joy, gives us a glimpse of her strength. To read of her resolve to allow grief and joy to coexist is a message of hope to the bereaved everywhere.  Her missive though, contains no trace of the Hallmark platitudes and toxic positivity so prevalent in our grief-denying culture. She allows herself to fully feel the pain of her grief but does not allow it to consume her. Similarly, we feel her pain, but she does not allow it to become the focus of her work.

Walsh looks at grief head on, unflinching, even welcoming it as tangible proof of the love she shares with her dead. She’s spent years, since her own childhood, exploring religion, getting to church on her own or sidling up to families who are happy to take her. When she’s in a dark place, about to lose the family she’s worked to build, she embraces a new perspective on spirituality which helps her approach life with more love, less fear, and a deeper understanding of her connection to a higher power and to others. Through an eclectic blend of music and faith, verve and magic, Walsh’s hope and determination shine through.

This is not a finger-pointing memoir in which the author seeks sympathy for all the wrongs done to her, naming the villains, laying out all their flaws for readers to judge. In the final section, part five, Walsh concludes her story with grace.

“Sometimes I wonder if our souls all agreed to come here together long ago. I picture us negotiating the terms:

I’ll be the mother; you be the son. You be the husband who teaches me to be strong, to forgive. You be the man who shows me what real love looks like. We’ll teach each other what we came to learn, and when that’s done, we’ll leave.”

She writes, “And Eric? He’s with me always, the oldest treasure on the shelf, those we love nestled in around him. There he is, with that smile so bright it lights the room, teasing us, urging us to take the adventure. Reminding us to love each other.”

As a bereaved parent, I’m smiling too. These words are a balm to my broken heart.