The Full Catastrophe - Finding Belonging After Repeated Loss - Casey Mulligan Walsh : 161

What does it mean to truly belong? When Casey lost her father at 11, her mother at 12, and her brother at 20, she began a lifelong search for family. Through this journey, she realized that what she was truly seeking was a sense of belonging, which would shape everything that followed. I find this conversation about her new memoir, "The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared," to be deeply moving. Her story explores how grief can coexist with joy and how true belonging differs from merely fitting in.

Casey Mulligan Walsh is an author nominated for Best of the Net. She is a founding editor of In a Flash literary magazine and serves as an ambassador for the Family Heart Foundation, which has impacted her family across generations. Casey lives in upstate New York with her husband, Kevin, and has more books than she can count.

• Losing her entire family at a young age—father at 11, mother at 12, brother at 20

• The different ways we experience grief depending on our age and circumstances

• Finding a spiritual foundation that provided peace amid profound loss

• Discovering the difference between fitting in and true belonging

• How writing clarified patterns and deeper meanings in her life experiences

• The meaning behind the book title "The Full Catastrophe" is the poignant enormity of life's experiences

• Writing as a way to feel truly seen and heard in an authentic community

Casey's memoir "The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared" is available wherever books are sold.

Learn more at www.caseymulliganwalsh.com

Chapters

• 6:22 Childhood Loss and Patterns of Grief
• 12:30 Spiritual Foundation Amid Suffering
• 19:22 Fitting In vs. True Belonging
• 32:16 Writing as Clarity, Not Catharsis
• 39:48 The Full Catastrophe and Moving Forward

Transcript

Daniela SM: 0:01

Hi, I'm Daniela. Welcome to my podcast, because Everyone has a Story, the place to give ordinary people's stories the chance to be shared and preserved. Our stories become the language of connections. Let's enjoy it, connect and relate, because everyone has a story. Welcome. My guest is Casey Mulligan Walsh. It was absolutely a joy to have her on the show.

Daniela SM: 0:27

Casey's story is a powerful exploration of how grief and joy can coexist and how true belonging is much more than just fitting in. This conversation holds a personal significance for me. It was the final recording from my six month of travel through Europe, morocco and part of the Balkans. It was also recorded with a difficult time, as we knew that my beloved sister-in-law, gabby Kaplan, was losing her battle with cancer. Casey brought an amazing energy to her talk. She spoke with grace and light, sharing a story filled with sadness, love and the quiet strength that vulnerability can offer. Her journey started with a search for family and blossomed into a deeper quest for belonging that has influenced every part of her life. And, of course, we chatted about her moving new memoir the Full Catastrophe All I ever wanted, everything I feared. I found our conversation very serene and lovely. I hope you will too.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 1:36

Welcome, casey to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

Daniela SM: 1:39

Daniela, I am grateful that you're here. I know you have a story, so why do you want to share your story?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 1:46

Well, right at this moment, I'm really interested in sharing my story because my memoir has just released, on February 18th. The story that I have to share today is the story that I talk about in the memoir. I feel like it's important to share is that it's a story of repeated loss and grief and resilience and living with grief beside joy, and I think we all can use stories like that. We all do have loss and grief in our lives at one point or another.

Daniela SM: 2:16

That's true, and many types of grief. So I'm glad that you're bringing that story and also it is perfect for this time, as through this adventure of six months, a few loved one we have lost. My husband and I realized that we are lucky. I'm glad that we're doing this trip now, so I'm glad that you have this subject to share today with us. So when does your story start?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 2:41

You know, when you write memoir, one of the big cautions is not to begin when you're very, very young, otherwise it reads like an autobiography. You know I was born and then, so that was a big struggle for me and something I worked hard at in writing the memoir. Because my story does begin in childhood, when my father died when I was 11. And 10 months later my mother died when I was 12. I had one sibling, a brother who was older than me, and when I was 20, he died. So my story actually does start then, because what I realized after years of writing a story of what I thought was of relentless resilience after repeated loss, I suddenly realized the real through line of this story is the search for belonging, and the search for belonging was set off by the fact that I lost my whole family, and so I spent my life in search of a family of my own. So I think my story starts in childhood.

Daniela SM: 3:46

Wow, and when did you realize what you were searching was belonging?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 3:51

You know it's funny as a writer often you don't put things together until you write. You know you're living your life and you're not always thinking about what are the themes or the threads that tie this all together. And I always knew that. As a teen and a young adult, I spent a lot of time thinking about what my family would look like and how it would be when I had a family. But, honestly, I began writing in 2011. It wasn't until about 2021 that I suddenly realized the thread that tied it all together was the search for belonging. So my story covers a lot of deaths, not only my parents and my brother, and then the people that raised me. After that they died when I was fairly young, before I was 30. But then my 20-year-old son died. I always knew this was a story of repeated loss and resilience and learning to live with joy, but when I realized that the through line was the search for belonging, it kind of changed everything for me.

Daniela SM: 4:57

Yes, a lot of loss, and I'm sorry for your experience that you are so resilient. Thank you. Every time you lost somebody, did you react the same way or was always different?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 5:08

I think it's different. I think that it's different based on the age that you are when you lose someone. I mean, when I lost my parents, I was not even a teen and children just can't process grief in the ways that adults can. When my brother died, I had just gotten married, so I was almost playing at being an adult not quite, I was only 20. And then when my son died when he was 20, I had had three children and a long marriage, but at the time that he died I had been going for several years and still was going through a very contentious divorce.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 5:47

The deaths that happened to me when my parents died when I was a child, I don't think I really grieved them. They had been ill on and off throughout my childhood and I just kind of developed this understanding that you just do what they tell you to do every day. You don't think you have a choice and life just happens to you. Obviously I was sad, but I was sent to live with relatives in another state and I just developed this stay under the radar, don't make any trouble, do really well in school and always look forward. And I would say it wasn't until my 30s that I actually really emotionally reconnected with the fact that I had parents and there were people that I looked like and that I did belong to them until I was 12. When you lose a child after a whole life of adulthood, it's a very different experience.

Daniela SM: 6:45

You're right. It's true.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 6:46

It depends on how the circumstances it depends on the circumstances surrounding the death. It also depends on who you are at that point. So the deaths are different, but the person who's experiencing the deaths are different, based on your age, what you've been through, what your life circumstances are at that time.

Daniela SM: 7:05

Do you feel like that resilience in your personality plays a role?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 7:11

You know, resilience is an interesting thing. Obviously it plays a role and obviously I can look from the outside in and see that I've been resilient. But it's an interesting question whether that's something you're born with or something you cultivate. I write in my book that I never heard the word resilience till I was well into adulthood, Like my early 40s I think is the first time I ever heard the word. But and I write about how I didn't know there was a word for putting one foot in front of the other, no matter what came. But that's what I learned to do.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 7:46

I didn't know I had a choice, and I'll often laughingly say that I spent my teens with relatives who I knew a little. I didn't know it really well, but it wasn't really a tight knit family. They were very different from my mother and father and so they welcomed me, they were kind, but it never felt like my home. So that contributed to that search for home. I didn't think that I knew there was a choice. Like I didn't know, I could just run away and go off the rails. And that's partly my innate personality right is that I like to do well at things and I'm pretty determined, and just the idea of it was the 60s and I could have become, you know, a wild child of the 60s, but I just think I didn't even know that was an option.

Daniela SM: 8:38

That's quite interesting. I really appreciate your story. It's fascinating. So you went through all these loss and what made you decide that you needed to write a book?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 8:49

Well, you know the losses of my parents and brother. Of course, now at my age, many of us have lost people, but for most of my life I was the only one I knew, you know, who had been orphaned as a child and had no siblings and no family really. I mean, I had cousins, but we weren't extremely close. It was after my son died, because my book isn't only about death, it's about navigating uncertainty. It's about being extremely determined to create something, so determined that you don't have perspective and see when enough is enough and maybe this isn't the right thing for you. I had the family I dreamed of. I'm three beautiful children and I was really happy with that and happy in that life. But my husband was. We were just a mismatch and his family embraced me like their own. So it was very hard to decide not to be in that because I was going to lose all my family again.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 9:47

We ended up going through a very protracted, hostile, difficult divorce During that time. That was kind of the dark night of the soul for me. It was when I really had to start to let go of the idea that I could control everything and understand that life is uncertainty and we can't control things. Often we definitely can't control our kids. I developed kind of this new way to see the world or I guess I'd say I embraced a new sort of spirituality. And then when my son died and there's kind of a long story behind what happened to him, but his death was in a car accident I realized that the two years that I'd been going through leading up to his death gave me this spiritual foundation that really helped me navigate that grief.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 10:37

It was almost it was hard to believe how much you know the week that he died, believe how much you know the week that he died.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 10:47

I have a good friend who had gone through a lot of this with me and we just could not believe how the last year and a half to two years, all of the things we've been saying, all of the ways of viewing the world that we've been cultivating, all seem to have been preparing me for the loss of my child and I hate the word preparing. No one is ever prepared for the loss of a child and I hate the word preparing. No one is ever prepared for the loss of a child. But it did give me a foundation that I hadn't had before that and that I would say, is the real reason that I felt like this story could be a book and should be a book, because it would help other people. I felt like my job in writing this book was to bring the reader through who I was and who my son was, and how we became the people we were that day that he died. You know how did I end up in this life and how did he end up where he was that day?

Daniela SM: 11:38

You said you hate the word prepared. Do you have another one?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 11:41

Well, you know, whenever I talk about it, I often say that spiritual foundation prepared me, but it always is jarring to me because I don't think we can be really prepared. I think what I often say as I backtrack is just that it allowed me to develop this spiritual foundation and this new way to see the world that I could sustain to me, and it was something I could go back to again and again during the time that Eric died, and one of the things I'll say is I had a lot of peace during that time, but peace does not preclude sorrow. Of course, I was grieving and sad. You can have peace about something and still just give anything for it not to have happened and so it was an interesting combination and something.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 12:28

I think a lot of people who knew me or knew me I lived in a small village in upstate New York. Everyone knew everyone, and I think a lot of people maybe didn't understand how I could not be the hysterical mother. And so that is another reason and I think another challenge in writing the book was to kind of illustrate how this new way of thinking worked its way in as I was struggling. I mean, there are places in the book where I talk about. I'm laying in bed and I just can't imagine how any of this will ever work out. But there's this other, there's this piece, you know, and I think that's how we adopt new ways of thinking about things. There's not a huge aha moment and all of a sudden we're a different person. I think we fight our way through these things quite often, and I think we have to.

Daniela SM: 13:21

That's interesting and it's true. You see, that's what I want when I ask you that you've reacted different ways, because you know also, when I lost my dad and I was, uh, the night before my 20th birthday, that I was cold, like I lost the best friend. You know, like I adore my dad and I wasn't crying and he took me five months to cry. And now I cannot even mention him after 34 years and still, you know, feeling sad about it.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 13:49

Yeah, I do understand what you're saying and I think for me, as I said, part of the difference is that I was a child when my parents died. What is different for me is that, like, the motherless daughters community is a big, a big part of the grief community, but a lot of what you, what people, talk about in that community, is like what was your father like afterwards? Did he support you? Well, when my mother died, my father had already died right. So I had a very unusual, I would say, experience. And in both of those times, well, I'll tell you one thing so I was very close to my mother. I was close to my father, but I was only 11 when he died and I remember so well feeling so guilty because I was so relieved it wasn't my mother, you know, like how could I ever live without my mother? And then 10 months later, she died too. As I said back then, it was just okay, well, where do I live now and I just go live there? And I cried when my mother died because it was expected. But once I got settled in the next place, I think I cried myself to sleep every night for a year place, I think I cried myself to sleep every night for a year. So there is, I think, that delayed. You know, sometimes you just have it, you can't absorb it. Sometimes, like you, you were an adult but you had a lot of work to do around his death. You know a lot of us as adults we have all kinds of arrangements to make and financial things to settle.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 15:20

When my brother died I was 20. And the interesting thing was my husband then had found me. I was driving on the street and he found me and pulled me over because my aunt, who I was living with, had told him so he could tell me old. So of course instantly was a shock. But then my very first thought after that was not in a self-pitying way, just in a very matter of fact way. Well, of course he died like people die, because that was my experience. My parents died and now my brother died and in some ways it was a shock, but in some ways I think I skip over denial and bargaining and go right to acceptance and that's probably baked in from childhood loss. And then of course, when my son died it was extremely different. Yes, you know, it's your child and I was 44. You know, it was a whole different experience.

Daniela SM: 16:22

So because you have so much lost, are you not always afraid that people are going to keep dying?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 16:27

Yes, Well, I'm laughing a little bit because I just had an essay published in Hippocampus magazine and it's a hermit crab essay, which I don't know if you've heard of those, but it's when you write an essay, but in a different container. So, for example, it's when you write an essay but in a different container. So, for example, it's a recipe. It's really an essay, but it's a recipe or a crossword puzzle or something like that. So this was a Help Wanted ad and the title was Help Wanted, preemptive Griever and preemptive griever is kind of this term I've coined. I haven't found it anywhere else, but it's exactly what you're talking about.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 17:08

I could lay in bed next to my husband and in like two minutes or talk to one of my kids and hang up the phone and think and that was the last time they talked Like I have these whole scenarios in my head and I don't know and I try really hard not to do that. So this essay was all very much dark humor and so many people wrote to me saying you're inside my head, like it's exactly the same thing that I do. I don't. It's never controlled what I do. I mean, we travel all over the world. It's not like I'm protective of my children. But it's always in my head like save the voicemails, because that could be the last time you hear their voice. And again I think that is that's kind of big.

Daniela SM: 17:56

I remember when I said I was young, right, and I said, oh, you know, I want change, and then my mom left, and so then I said it again, and then my dad passed away. So I'm like, okay, I will never ask for change again.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 18:11

I don't want change anymore. Yeah, right, which is tough, because as we learn, as we get older, all life is is change, right?

Daniela SM: 18:20

Exactly Something that I crave and I like change. Sometimes it comes to mind that, oh well, be careful what you ask for.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 18:30

I totally relate to that.

Daniela SM: 18:32

Yes, the part of spirituality. How do you start to become spiritual? Were you religious before or not religious? How did this happen?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 18:43

Well, it's interesting From the time I was a very little girl, I think my mother brought me to Sunday school first, like when I was four. The house we lived in then it was right across from the church. It was in New Jersey, but I had such a connection that we moved quite frequently. That was the other thing a lot of illness but also frequent moves. Everywhere we moved I somehow hooked up with a family who would pick me up and take me to church. I always had this big desire. They were all kind of Protestant Christian churches On one level you could say well, it was like extended family. We didn't have extended family there. They all felt like doting aunts. You know all the people in the Sunday school. But I also did have this deep sense of being connected and when I moved to live with the family big Irish Catholic family they made me a good Catholic girl in like three months flat. So I was Catholic for a little while and then in college I remember being in the basement of the library with this huge comparative religions book, like trying to figure out where I fit. Then I married and moved to this little town and for 25 years I was very involved in a congregational church when things started really getting difficult.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 20:01

I don't often mention where this all came from. There's this thing called A Course in Miracles that a lot of these tenets come from, but I usually don't mention that because there are a lot of faith systems that believe these sorts of things, things like we're all connected, we're not separate. We keep ourselves safe and think we're separate, but we're not. The biggest thing is, for me, is that everything that isn't love is fear, and then if we're not operating out of strength, you know in a loving way whether it's anger, jealousy or hatred or any of that. That's all based on fear, and it really helped me to see how the things that other people did, even though they were hurting me, weren't really about me. You know that they were functioning out of their own fear. Um, it's, it's, uh. When I was talking about changes, um, inevitable, um.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 20:58

I've mentioned a lot lately Pema Chodron, who I really enjoy, or. One of her seminal books is when Things Fall Apart, and that's basically what she's saying in there is that life is uncertainty and so, rather than scrambling to control everything and make it certain and make it the way you want it, we would do much better to lean into all this change and uncertainty and see what it has to teach us, and those were the kinds of things that were helping me get through a really hostile, very isolating situation during the divorce. But a big part of that is that we can't be separated, and so when my son died, he had been going through a lot of challenges too, but I had this peace around the fact that maybe this was just the life he was meant to live and we were just finding it out now, but that he'll always be with me, and of course, it's not the same as having him here in body. I wish he were here. He died almost 26 years ago, but there are things every day that make me know that he's with me.

Daniela SM: 22:09

Were you in this small town and you met somebody. You started to read books. How was this shift?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 22:22

Well, I lived in this small town and I worked in the local bank for like almost 20 years and when I was in my late 30s I knew that if I didn't go back to school or, you know, finish my education or do something different, I was going to be working in this small bank for 40 years and that was not intellectually satisfying. So I went back to school, I drove an hour each way and finished my bachelor's and master's degrees and became a speech language pathologist and then I got a job in a school district about 40 minutes from me. So most of my life at that point was not in this town, it was, you know, with other people.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 22:56

And there was a another woman and she's in the book who I was very close friends with and we both were kind of exploring this together at the same time and we were both going through some very challenging personal circumstances. And that's a really good question, because I think doing this sort of thing or reading these things in an isolated way is very different from when you're kind of have this other person to work through it with, and this is happening to me. Well, let's think about it this way. One of the remarkable things, she actually was with me the day that my son died and was in the emergency room with me, and we just were flabbergasted at how all these things that we'd been working through for a couple of years 100% were the things I needed to hear and think and say at that moment.

Daniela SM: 23:50

Yes, I feel like it's true. When you have like a partner, somebody to learn something is so much more interesting and also you can discuss, get understand it and deeper it.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 24:01

Yes, yeah no, absolutely Absolutely, and I think that you know, in traditional church situations they would talk about that as fellowship and it's important that we all come together. And I also say that this kind of different way to see the world was not instead of what I believed. It wasn't like now I'm not Christian and you know it just made it more functional. It definitely was not an either, or you know, it wasn't like I was had a Christian mindset and suddenly I became Hindu.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 24:33

But a lot of these beliefs are a little East meets West. Right, it's a little kind of Buddhism mixed with Christianity. West right, it's a little kind of Buddhism mixed with Christianity. And it just spoke to me. It just really spoke to me in a way that all the other things I had embraced my whole life, it wasn't different, it just made it functional. It's not a good word, but it just really brought it all alive to me and made me able to find peace and embrace it. Nowadays, I'd say, all these years later, I just have a more expansive view of spirituality. I think it's. We don't live in a world anymore where we can think that our way is the only way. Right at the end of my book, I think my religion now is kindness and compassion, All of those things that are basically, are, or should be, the basic tenets of any faith.

Daniela SM: 25:26

Yes, okay, I agree, I have the same belief as you, for sure. Yeah, that's amazing. I'm glad to hear that you became stronger into what you believe once your son passed away, or the level that you were was good enough.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 25:43

You know that's interesting because as I was writing the book, you know you have to come up with your summary and your log line and, oh my gosh, forever. There's two things that are a little unexpected about my book. One of them is that it's not a book about. There are plenty of wonderful books about. I had this child, he struggled, he died and this is how I. You know what I learned afterward.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 26:07

My son's death comes three quarters of the way through my book, because the book is really about me and the search for belonging and the struggle. But when I would write summaries of the book, I finally realized that the thing that was different is that I found this new belief system and this new way to see the world that gave me strength. And then my son died. So it it isn't like I had this horrific experience, which it was of losing a child and then I learned all these things. It was a little bit the reverse, that I would kind of gone through the fire for those couple of years before he died and then when he died, it was like this is what it was all for and it just confirmed it, I think, affirmed and confirmed it, and also somewhere in all of that, I really began to understand what belonging really is.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 27:07

So you know, a lot of us search for belonging, but what we do instead is try to fit in, and fitting in is kind of being as much like everyone around you as you can be, so you don't stand out, so everybody will just accept you.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 27:24

But belonging is is having the strength to be yourself. And and um, as one reviewer recently wrote that I just loved, is that sometimes people will review your book and they see things or say things in a way that you never thought of, but they're great. And someone said something about how you know all that work at fitting in I'm thinking, I'm trying to, you know, belong that I'm really just fitting in keeps you from having this belonging that you really want, because you're trying so hard to be like everyone else. That's not true belonging. And so I think that there's a time in the book when people are coming to the house hundreds of people the weekend that he died, and I just realized that I'm not alone and maybe I never was alone, and that belonging became much more real and deeper for me then.

Daniela SM: 28:21

Interesting, being from different cultures and living in different countries, I always feel like I don't belong and I've been pursuing these in the last six months, hoping that where is it that I belong? And to me is you mentioned that? No, standing out. I remember my mom always saying be brave and try to be different, and I'm like that's the worst advice.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 28:46

I know, I know, especially as a kid.

Daniela SM: 28:50

Yes, you don't want to stand out, no, no, no. I realized, for example, when we were in Malaga, in Spain, that I was different. But I think people, when people are kind and friendly, that's what I thought. Okay, I belong here because people are friendly and accepting For me. That's what belonging was like. I can be myself, because I am me, because I'm different, is true, but there is a community, people being open, open-minded as well, to accept Other people, having compassion and acceptance, not just you, because you're different.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 29:27

Yeah, you know, we could have an hour-long conversation, couldn't we? Just about fitting in and belonging, because it's sometimes in my life and especially we think about childhood and being teens. The last thing you want to do usually is stand out, and I think it saved me in many ways. But there comes a time when some of those coping mechanisms no longer serve you and it you know. So maybe it helped me get through those very difficult years when we were moving alive and then when I was suddenly sent to this whole new world, really in upstate New York, there came a time midlife where I realized that that behavior no longer served me.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 30:09

And another thing that comes to mind is that people will ask often like why do you write? That's one of those generic writer questions. I feel like I started writing essays, so I have a lot of essays published and then, having written this book, especially when you write memoir, then people, if they choose to read what you write, they're knowing the real you. It's not the same as when you're seeing people in person and there's small talk or whatever, and I feel I think more heard and more seen because of the book and because of my writing than I ever did Part of this writing community, especially people who write memoir or nonfiction, creative nonfiction, are people who all have interesting stories and they all, most all, everyone I know is very open-minded because we're all here to dig as deeply as we can and be as honest as we can for the reader. So I think the writing community is another part of my feeling, that sense of belonging.

Daniela SM: 31:15

That's true, because you found, yeah, a group of people that do the same as you, that's true, but also because you know what you wanted A lot of people don't know what they want, right. They're still looking. Yes, yes, yes. You mentioned that you wrote your book as a catharsis.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 31:32

A lot of people will say, oh, writing can be therapy. I didn't start writing until 12 years after my son died, and then it took me 12 years to write the book, so pretty much 25 years later. That gave me a lot of time to already have worked through the trauma and the loss and the grief although you grieve forever, right, but writing is and can be therapeutic, which I think there's a distinction there. I was not writing for that reason.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 32:00

I was writing for the reader, although I think most of us who write nonfiction, creative nonfiction, will say that you learn things as you write, and people often say I don't know what I think until I write it. Sometimes, as you're writing a draft after draft after draft, or kind of reverse engineering your understanding of what you were doing back when you were a kid or as a young adult, and so the patterns in your life become clear where, if you were just living them and not writing about it, you may never come to the place where you really examine what were those patterns. I don't know about it being catharsis for me, but it was clarifying for me. I think that's the word I'd use. Yeah.

Daniela SM: 32:43

You know you were ready before a situation happens. It's not like you go ready after the situation happens and you wrote a book way after you heal a little bit. Obviously, as you say, you can never stop being, you know, sad about this losing your son, you know talking about your book. You were writing short stories before, and then you decided to write a book.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 33:07

So in 2011, in the capital district of New York, there's a woman who taught writing in a town nearby for many years. Her course was called Writing what you Know, basically memoir. There would be 20 students and you go with a 750 word essay, 20 copies, pass it around, read it aloud, everyone would write comments and she would comment and I had never read my work aloud or written anything for that. I always knew I was a good writer in terms of I wrote diagnostic reports, all those sorts of things, but that does not mean you can be a good storyteller, right. Two completely different things and I just really got hooked in that class. Then I also saw the reaction to some of what I was writing, and if people don't reflect to you what your life is, it's just your life, right. But then I'd write these pieces and they'd be like oh my goodness.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 34:02

I wrote essays from 2011 till 2017, about six years regularly, because we formed a group, we'd meet every two weeks and we had a deadline, so that kind of makes you produce work. And then in 2017, I had heard enough and thought enough about this that I just kind of roughed out the outline of what a book would look like and I took kind of like the best parts of my essays and plugged them in approximately where they would go, and it took from 2017, early 2017 to the end of 2019 to get one final draft which was 40,000 words longer than the book. So I just like wrote everything and then the job becomes what goes, what stays, what needs to be tightened. But, as I said earlier, I thought I was writing a book about relentless resilience after repeated loss and how you can be knocked down again and again and still get up and still seek and find joy in your life, and that would have been a perfectly fine book. But when I realized, through one of many webinars and writing courses that I took, it suddenly hit me one day that it's really about the search for belonging, then it seemed even more like it would be of service to readers, because it is about grief, but it's also about difficult divorce and raising kids who struggle. But I think there are many people who have spent their life searching for belonging for one reason or another. That's how it became a book.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 35:31

And what is the name of your book? Belonging for one reason or another. That's how it became a book. And what is the name of your book. The book is the Full Catastrophe, all I Ever Wanted, everything I Feared. And the Full Catastrophe comes from Zorba the Greek who, boss, asked Zorba, are you married? And he said am I not a man? Of course I'm married. I've got the wife, the car, the kids the full catastrophe. And so what I say is like that's it. John Kabat-Zinn wrote a book called Full Catastrophe Living, and he describes the full catastrophe as the poignant enormity of life's experiences all of it the bills, the deaths, the joys, all of it. And that's what I wanted. I felt like I was in, isolate, I was just alone in the world and I wanted that full catastrophe of life and family life and friends. And I got that and then I sort of had the literal catastrophe. That's kind of a double meaning.

Daniela SM: 36:26

Yeah, that's very original, thank you. And what about the cover? How did you came up with the cover, the cover, so? I can see it, but you have to describe it.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 36:36

Yes, so the cover first. I'll say so. I'm with a very small press, it's a traditional press but I knew that if I wanted a like a professionally designed cover, I'd have to hire a designer. So I did hire a cover designer. He had this concept right away and we went back and forth on details. He said I think your book needs to be ironic or like.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 36:58

Somebody needs to look at the cover and think, whoa, that's not going to go well or that's a disaster about to happen. There's a table, a very kind of cottagey, farmhouse looking distressed table, and there's a vase full of pink tulips pretty little vase full of tulips, but it's been knocked over and it's about to completely go over. You know, what's really funny is it wasn't until the whole cover was designed and the cover is mostly black and bright pink and then the spring green of the leaves. But it wasn't until the whole thing was done that I realized that the vase of tulips has three flowers and I had three children and so that's symbolic as well. But it was really. I found that vase and I loved it and I liked the colors, and so it all worked out the way it should and I really love my cover. I think the colors are striking. It does evoke a sense of something ostensibly beautiful about to go horribly wrong.

Daniela SM: 37:57

Yes, it is actually very sexy. I like it.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 38:01

Thank you. One other thing is that the blurb that I have on the front cover, which came from Claire Bidwell Smith, who's very well known in the grief space, does talk about how all the ways loss yields to love. And it was really important for me to have that quote on the front cover because, while there's a lot of symbolism in the picture, there's nothing about the cover and nothing about the title that tells you it's a book about grief and loss. So I think that pull quote on the front cover does a lot of heavy lifting. It's a searingly beautiful testament to all the ways loss yields to love.

Daniela SM: 38:37

Yeah, that's beautiful.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 38:39

Yes.

Daniela SM: 38:40

I love that you mentioned grief. There's many levels of it, but for me, lately, when your children grow up, yes, they're still there and they are adults, and that's what we want to have independent children, but there is somehow the grief of 20 years that you spent taking care of them, even though I was done being a mom who takes care of kids. Every time I see a picture, I miss that so much and it's, you know, a time that will never come back. And I know when people say, oh, enjoy now because you will go so fast, and so you don't understand that until it has passed and I think not that I would like to go back, that's true, but however, there is this time that is not here anymore.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 39:26

No, it's forever. I totally understand that. Yes, that's so, so true. And I think for me, because of my early losses, I even in those moments I remember looking out my kitchen window. My in-laws lived like kitty corner across the street. They were very close by and it was lovely in a way, because the kids just could go back and forth. The dog went back and forth. It was great. But I used to look out the kitchen window and watch the kids walking across the street when they were little and think someday you're going to wish you could see this again. Now I didn't realize it would be because one of my children would be gone, but I always had that sense that everything is fleeting. But now I look back, I have different reasons too, of course, but I look, had that sense that everything is fleeting, but no, I look back. I have different reasons too, of course, but I look back at the pictures from when they were young and it's very bittersweet, yeah, yeah, I totally understand that.

Daniela SM: 40:26

And people say that it's empty-nester. But I don't feel that two words means grief. I think there's other feelings, emotions perhaps, or maybe because it's too commercialized the sentence it could be.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 40:39

Yeah, I think that a lot of people feel that when you know what they talk about is like when your child or your last child goes off to college and suddenly your role is different because you're not actively mothering anyone anymore. And now, if you're married to their father, now it's like, oh, it's just you and me and what do we do with our time. And I think that there is grief around emptiness syndrome. It's the grief over the loss of a role you know and your identity for all those years. And if you had a number of kids spaced apart, it was more than 18 years, right, it could have been 30 years, you know. And suddenly, who am I?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 41:20

Yes, yes, but yeah, I think there is. I sometimes look at pictures of the kids when they're young and think, like you know, life gets complicated as kids get older and they come into adulthood, and not everybody moves from their teen years into adulthood smoothly. And there's just when they're little. They're just a big ball of potential, you know, and none of the the things that might get thrown in their path along the way. They haven't happened yet, you know.

Daniela SM: 41:53

Yes.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 41:54

We had so much control.

Daniela SM: 41:55

Yes, yes, and I like the way you say. It's true, it's grief for the role that is not there. I mean, I'm not a writer, but I wrote some a piece of that. I wanted to be comical as well that being a parent is actually. It's a contract job that you are going to be let go for certainty. You know you're going to certainly be let go. Oh, that's great. You work really hard, unconditionally, and then eventually you're like sorry, you're fired.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 42:26

Goodbye. Yeah, I like that. I like that. I'd like to read that, yeah.

Daniela SM: 42:33

But yeah, so I like how you put it in perspective. It's true, and again, grief comes in many ways and it's not a topic that people close to my heart and not many people understand that. I don't know, maybe also another word that people don't understand that, maybe because people think belonging, oh, you just want to be with the group, with the. You know, you just want to be in, right?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 43:06

I feel like we can't talk about fitting in versus belonging without mentioning Brene Brown. She wrote the book on that. You know the difference between fitting in versus belonging without mentioning Brene Brown. She's wrote the book on that. You know the difference between fitting in and belonging. Even I'd say when I first started writing the book, I was using those terms interchangeably and then I really learned, like, what the difference is. And I think a lot of times we don't understand things until we have words for them. And if younger people could understand that what you're doing is fitting in, that's not the same as belonging, that could be really helpful as you're growing up to understand, even if there's times that you feel like fitting in is the right thing to do. I don't think it's always the wrong thing to do. Sometimes it's self protective. But having a good sense of what the difference is, I think is really important.

Daniela SM: 43:52

Yeah, that's wonderful. Okay, so we talked about your book. We talked about belonging. We talked about grief. Is there anything else that you think that we should mention? We talked how the book was made.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 44:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I think we've pretty much covered it.

Daniela SM: 44:09

It's been a wonderful conversation. I want to know what is next for Casey.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 44:13

Ah, that question. I want to know what is what is next for Casey? That question, I always get that question. Right now I'm laughing because my book only released a couple of weeks ago. For the last maybe year not quite a year, but the last several months I've said I'm no longer a writer. I'm now a full time book marketing executive.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 44:32

But once I get back to and I have a lot of essays now still that I'm working on placing, when you write a book like this, one of the challenges is where do you stop right? So when I finally decided where this story ends, I have a lot of essays that could go into a new book about living with grief. 10, 20, 30 years later, you know, like living with grief and joy and how you do that. So that's one idea. I also experimented with and really enjoy a lot of unconventional forms like micro flash, like writing essays and 100 words or 250 words.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 45:13

I'm the founding editor of a new literary magazine called In a Flash and we only accept pieces of 500 words or less. And then there are other kinds of essays, like I mentioned, the hermit crab essay or a braided essay. There's all these kind of unconventional forms that I'd love to compile some of the essays I have, alternating with some of these more unusual forms. I have a few pieces in places like HuffPost or Next Avenue that are more media outlets, more mainstream outlets, and I think I'd like to explore some of that too. So I don't know. I've got all kinds of ideas, nothing firm.

Daniela SM: 45:53

Yeah, well, that's good. I mean, you have a lot of work on your hands. Question for you what do you do for fun?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 45:58

Oh, well, we love to travel, so we've done itching to get going somewhere again soon because we haven't traveled in quite a while. We have 10 grandkids. This is the second marriage, happily married for 22 years. So between us we have 10 grandkids, so they provide built in fun. I go in spurts with crocheting or things like that. I would say the number one thing on that list is travel.

Daniela SM: 46:24

Wonderful. So where are you going next?

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 46:27

I don't know. There's a difference between travel and vacation, and I would really love to go on a vacation where you just like lay by the water and you know whatever. But we tend to be travelers, you know, and we tend to not do group things. We plan our own, you know. We get Airbnbs, we rent a car.

Daniela SM: 46:46

Well, we have a lot of things in common too about that then. Yes, yes, we do, we do. Yes, we have traveled the same way. We go on Airbnbs and we rent vehicles, and we've been traveling around. We went to the Balkan countries, traveled for a month there.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 47:01

Yeah, we loved. Yeah, I got a mission to get back out there, though.

Daniela SM: 47:04

Wonderful. It's been a while Well. Thank you so much, Casey, for sharing your story, and all the best with your book. I'm sure it's going to be very successful. Thank you.

Casey Mulligan Walsh : 47:13

Thank you so much. It's been such a great conversation, daniela, thank you so much.

Daniela SM: 47:17

You're welcome. Thank you, hi. I'm Daniela and you've been listening to, because Everyone has a Story. Thank you so much for tuning in to this beautiful conversation with Casey. To me, it's a powerful reminder that joy and sorrow can live side by side and that the need to truly belong is something we all feel deep down. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take five seconds to think of someone in your life who might appreciate what you just heard, or someone whose story deserves to be shared and preserved. When that person comes to mind, send them a quick text with the link to this episode. That's how the ordinary magic keeps going. Join me next time for another powerful story conversation. Thank you for listening. Hasta pronto.