Reviewed by Melissa Greenwood
Casey Mulligan Walsh makes a stunning authorial debut while teaching us how to live and love through loss in her new memoir The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted…Everything I Feared (Motina Books; February 2025).
When Walsh is 11 and 12 years old respectively, she loses both of her parents to chronic illnesses ten months apart from one another (Dad followed by Mom), at which point she’s sent to live with cousins in another state. Not even a decade later, her only sibling, an older brother, dies when she’s twenty. As if that weren’t enough for one person to hold, Walsh’s firstborn child, whom she loves “with a love bigger than any [she’s] ever known,” is killed in a car crash when he’s twenty — information she graciously leads with, lest it might also be too much for us to hold.
Readers, if you’ve been searching for the next great early loss book, look no further. (This one rightly earned well-known author and grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith’s praise.) But even if — like me — you’ve been fortunate enough to make it through your formative years without losing those closest to you, you will still appreciate this memoir for its rich language, its humanity, and especially its searingly honest and relatable narrator who is, she tells us, “…determined to live the life I have and not the one I fear,” while refusing to be defined by the “relentless march of deaths” that have followed her — even her son’s. Writing, “[I won’t] let mother of the boy who died become all that I am,” Walsh makes room for multiple truths and “a pinpoint of joy.”
I first became acquainted with the author’s work from her viral essay “Still” (Split Lip; June 2022) — a breathless, present-tense masterclass on flash nonfiction that earned Walsh a Best of the Net nomination and was long-listed for SmokeLong Quarterly’s Grand Micro Competition 2023. Remember how the narrator generously frontloads her son’s death? Well, that introduction is an excerpt of the already bite-sized “Still” — a two-sentence-long, comma- and em-dash-happy paragraph that’s anything but.
In Walsh’s deft hands, we’re placed squarely in the heart of the action: at the hospital, “on the other side of the window” from Eric, who’s lying “on a gurney in the center of the room” on the day when “he didn’t make it” — the day when “there was no time…a few hours ago. A lifetime ago.” But knowing that he doesn’t make it won’t make it any less heartbreaking when Walsh, who rewinds to tell her story chronologically — beginning in the mid ‘60s, when she’s orphaned, and filling in the details of her early life through flashbacks — works her way back to 1998: the year that appears in her mind “like a pixelated film, out of focus…[when] life blurs at the edges…[then] implode[s].”
Implosion is nothing new when you live “in a world,” as Walsh does, “where your whole family can die and leave you…[ — where] everyone dies at the end.” Yet, as much as I ached for the narrator and her “cataclysmic grief,” I also saw her as an “other” of sorts — as someone separate from myself. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I felt relieved not to come from her world.
Then, ten days before The Full Catastrophe’s February 18th launch date, I was cast into that very world of woe, when — consummate planner that I am — I found myself funeral planning. For Walsh, one truism is that “our time here is short.” In my case, the funeral was not for anyone taken too soon — not for a parent or sibling or child — but for my 103-year-old grandfather, whose stay on earth was blessedly long but whom I still wasn’t ready to lose. Despite knowing that Papa’s end was near as we ushered him through the hospice care process following a succession of falls, and despite understanding on a cognitive level that death is the “inevitable, grim conclusion” that awaits us all — even immortal-seeming centenarians like my grandpa — I wasn’t emotionally prepared, not fully, for that moment when his heart stopped beating.
So, while the idea had been for this review to come out in advance of Walsh’s book release, life (and its counter: death) happened; my timely synopsis and analysis did not. As I navigated doctors’ visits and oxygen machines and protein shakes and family group chats and 911 calls and concerned neighbors and prescription refills and Amazon orders and around-the-clock care and even an unexpected fire evacuation, I — the self-professed control freak — finally learned a lesson that Walsh has known on a cellular level since childhood: “life works out as planned,” until it doesn’t.
Perhaps it’s the narrator’s belief that death is “the only outcome that has ever made sense,” or perhaps it’s her motherly intuition — an inexplicable knowing that “it might all lead to this,” but when it comes to Eric, she describes living with a “vague sense of doom…[with] visions of him dropping…[with] voices in my head…that wake me up at night.” Somehow, strangely — she’s been preparing for this moment since her very first loss.
“They don’t understand — how can they?” Walsh writes of the well-meaning nurses who treat her like some fragile thing she’s not. “They may never grasp how fully I understand this loss…[this] oddly inevitable…farewell,” she says, adding, “I was already planning the funeral while Eric was still in the womb.”
And though she tells us that “deep within I sense…how today will end” — in the kind of full catastrophe, both tragic and final, that’s everything she’s ever feared (per the book’s title) — she can’t help but hope, against all odds, for a miracle. I did too. Maybe a bedridden 103-year-old man who just recovered from four broken ribs can recover from a fractured hip and be mobile again. But when, after “quiet praying…everything is suddenly quiet,” Walsh is left — as she puts it — with “the sadness I always carry,” with the “weight of loneliness that never leaves,” and with a deep and lasting “melancholy” to which her firstborn was also prone. I, meanwhile, was left staring at a gaunt and grey, open-mouthed man who’d once been my grandpa as a horrible keening sound escaped from my own open mouth.
Shortly after Papa’s day-of-rest death, while reading on the treadmill — where I likewise sweat and cried my way through most of Walsh’s book — I stumbled upon the simple sentence, “On Shabbat, we still.” And I thought: Yes, we do. Yes, he did. And then I thought back to Walsh’s perfect piece of flash, where I first “met” her, or at least the narrator-version of her. That still-praying, still mama-bear woman who completely eviscerated me was honoring Eric’s memory even then, as he (her boy who could never sit still) lay still in the center of the room, where everything — especially time — went still. It undid me to know that Walsh’s dearly departed son was still with her, still shouting from beyond or “the tops of the trees” — even as those standing-still minutes turned into hours, days, weeks, months, and eventually decades — and it will undo you too if it hasn’t already. In fact, to read it again, I am still simultaneously gutted and buoyed by the knowledge that Eric — her lost boy, her heart, her “traveler who’s lost his way” — is, more than a quarter century later, “closer to [her] now, in many ways, than he has been” in years: her shining star, with her everywhere. Still.
And that is the power of both beautiful people and words — they stay with us. Like my grandfather of blessed memory, Eric remains in my thoughts, even though I’m no longer turning the pages of his mother’s book. “Life doesn’t stop, even when we think it should,” Walsh writes, and “our connection to those we love doesn’t end with death,” either. The best way to honor our dead then, she says, is to “keep the best of [them] alive.”
Walsh, in her infinite “I smile through my tears” wisdom, chooses the life her free-spirited, vibrant child doesn’t get to have — “a life of joy…pure joy…light and joy” — and we, in turn, choose the “all that matters is love” Walsh. Whether her writing connects us to our own incongruous selves or to a lost loved one whose spirit (like Eric’s) is “catching big air. Flying free,” it will leave a lasting impact, staying with us the way a granddaughter loves her grandpa or a mother loves her son: “to the end of the earth” — to their last breath and beyond.
Melissa Greenwood has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She’s been published in Brevity, The Los Angeles Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Manifest-Station, Jewish Literary Journal, Longridge Review, and elsewhere, including in the award-winning Awakenings: Stories of Bodies & Consciousness anthology and in the journals that have nominated her for literary distinctions: Meow Meow Pow Pow (Best Small Fiction), Kelp Journal (Best of the Net), and Gold Man Review (the Pushcart Prize). This is the four-time contributor’s second book review for Hippocampus Magazine.
