Casey Mulligan Walsh
-embracing the full catastrophe-
-embracing the full catastrophe-
Casey Mulligan Walsh
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
-Joseph Campbell
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- Liminal Spaces of Struggle and Not Knowing: An interview with Casey Mulligan Walsh by Camille U. Adams
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Orphaned at twelve and soon the only surviving sibling, Casey marries young and has three children, but her marriage isn’t the dream she envisioned. Ultimately, a divorce and custody trial propel her family into a catastrophe of a different sort, and each of her children suffers.
Struggling alongside them, she draws strength from spirituality. Then the unthinkable happens—her firstborn son, Eric, dies at age twenty—and she’s left to make sense of her family collapse and the loss of her beloved boy.
In a moving testament to the power of love, The Full Catastrophe tells of a life of loss and sorrow transformed into one of hope and redemption.
Motina Books ~ February 18, 2025
Casey needs a family: the joys and sorrows, people who love her, and a place she belongs—what Zorba the Greek called “the full catastrophe.”
THE FULL CATASTROPHE has been named a finalist in the Trio House Press 2023 Aurora Polaris Award!
I’m honored to have made the list.
“Am I not a man? Of course I’ve been married. Wife, house, kids, everything…the full catastrophe!” -Zorba, “Zorba the Greek,” the movie
Zorba embraced “the full catastrophe” of life. Jon Kabat-Zinn describes this as “the poignant enormity of our life experience.” He explains that the full catastrophe “captures something positive about the human spirit’s ability to come to grips with what is most difficult in life and to find within it the room to grow in strength and wisdom…facing the full catastrophe means finding and coming to terms with what is most human in ourselves.”
The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared is the story I was born to tell. We Were the Mulvaneys and The Rules of Inheritance meet Beautiful Boy in this tale of search for family, resilience, and the power of love in the face of a relentless litany of roadblocks and tragedy. Along the way, bullying and isolation, emotional abuse and depression, addiction, ADHD, the poorly made decisions of youth, and the devastating fallout of being in the wrong place at the wrong time are among the factors that alter the course of each of our lives. None of us is as hopelessly caught in this tangled web or pays as dearly as my beloved, adventure-seeking firstborn son, who dies at age twenty, leaving us to figure out how to go on without him.
Facing these obstacles and struggling to find meaning beyond mere survival, I embrace the spirituality I’ve sought in various forms since my youngest years. Relying on my love of music and language and the penchant for seeing life as a series of cinematic moments, I find family in unexpected places and learn to see the world through new eyes.
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