“All That Matters is Love”: A Review of Casey Mulligan Walsh’s The Full Catastrophe: all I ever wanted… everything I feared
I’m a huge fan of flash writing. I’m even an editor of a flash journal. Over the years, many short pieces have moved me, deeply, but there are only a handful that will stay with me forever. One of those is “Still” by Casey Mulligan Walsh, published right here in Split Lip Magazine in 2022. The 500-word flash captures the gut-wrenching moments when Walsh learns her son Eric has died in a car accident. The piece is breathless, brutal, and beautiful.
“Still” has found yet another home—this time at the beginning of The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted… Everything I Feared, Walsh’s full-length memoir that expands on Eric’s life and death and movingly chronicles Walsh’s search for family and belonging after a childhood filled with devastating losses, the dissolution of an abusive marriage, and the healing paths she still travels of spirituality and acceptance. When I heard Walsh was writing a memoir, I immediately reached out and asked if she would send me an advanced reading copy for review when one became available. While I waited, a certain skepticism began to seep in—would Walsh be able to write as movingly and memorably in longform as she did in flash? The answer came as soon as I began reading the prologue: The Full Catastrophe grabs the reader from the get-go.
In the prologue, Walsh recounts receiving calls from a collection agency. They want to speak with Eric about his $60 check to Price Chopper that has bounced. His debt, due to interest, is now $82. “He’s dead,” Walsh tells the bill collector.
“We’re sorry for your loss… Just send us a copy of the death certificate.”
“No,” she says.
Walsh then turns her attention to the file cabinets in the room “overflowing with the bills, family court documents, and school records lawyers insisted I produce during our protracted divorce and custody battle.” She finds that saying no to the bill collector feels surprisingly exhilarating. Walsh is done: “There is at last nothing left to prove.”
While there is no way to truly measure pain, Eric’s death is probably the biggest heartbreak Walsh has had to bear in her life. That says a lot, as Walsh’s heart has both literally and figuratively carried heavier burdens than most of us can even imagine. Walsh’s father died from a heart attack when she was eleven, her mom, from cancer, when she was twelve. Uprooted, she was sent to live with her Aunt Esther, three hours north from her home in New Jersey. Tommy, her 19-year-old brother did not come with her.
There is no easing into her new life in rural Upstate New York. Esther, because of her own woundedness, provides little support for young Walsh’s overwhelming feelings of loss. Walsh feels alone at home and is taunted at school. She quickly learns to keep quiet, stay under the radar, get good grades while picturing a future where she fits in. She dreams of creating her own family, making sure her kids feel loved, always, and are always safe from life’s pain. Reading this, I wished I could take that little girl in my arms. But when she meets Will, falls in love—with the fairytale she’d been telling herself all those years—I wanted to shake her, wake her, do anything to stop her from leaving school to get married. There was nothing anyone could have done to dissuade her: “Resting our tightly clasped hands on the stick shift, a cigarette glowing between Will’s fingers, we drive away… I ride beside Will toward what feels like a whole new life. I can’t think of a single reason I’d want to look back.”
For a while, it seems Walsh had, in fact, said goodbye to the pain of the past. Shortly after they are married, however, Walsh receives news that her brother Tommy has died suddenly. (She will learn later that many in her family—including herself and Eric—have inherited familial hypercholesterolemia, an often-silent disease that can lead to early heart attacks.) “I’m running out of loved ones,” Walsh thinks. “The last of my own family has slipped away just as I’m slipping into this new one. I almost believe they’re mine… Yet sometimes … a fleeting, unsettled feeling passes through my body in waves. Something is missing, it whispers. I shiver, tense, and will it to pass.”
Walsh and Will start a family—first Eric, then Kyle, then Katie, a daughter. It feels like a miracle, a chance to “complete that mother-daughter cycle broken so long ago.” But the “unsettled feeling” Walsh had tried so hard to will away turns out to have been a prescient warning. The marriage falters: Will drinks—too much—has terrifying late-night rants, plays the kids against her, and becomes extremely controlling. The kids struggle in school and at home. One day, while sitting in the waiting room of a neuropsychologist who monitors Katie’s ADHD medication, a poster catches Walsh’s eye: “Do you constantly worry about your partner’s moods? Do you change your behavior to deal with them? You could be the victim of domestic violence.” The poster lands. Hard. She recognizes the signs in her own marriage but remains confused. “Physical abuse feels much clearer; maybe that would make it easier to draw the line.” And then she has a fleeting thought: “I wish he’d hit me. Just once.” It’s here where Walsh captures so masterfully a pattern that many readers will recognize in either themselves or in people they love: the desire to disregard difficult truths, even when those truths stare us in the face; our inability to see what may be visible to everyone else, until our eyes and hearts are ready.
Walsh finally draws the line. We follow her through long, frustrating years of custody battles and torturous arguments with the kids. It is all very painful to read, and yet, throughout, we also bear witness to Walsh’s strength. She goes back to school to become a speech-language pathologist, develops supportive and long-lasting friendships, and finds comfort in music and religion. As challenging as her circumstances are, she fights for her kids at every turn.
Then comes the biggest blow: Eric is killed in a car accident. Walsh is shocked but not completely surprised. She’d been worrying about Eric for years. She writes about thoughts she had before his death: “Sometimes they torment me with the fear I’ve had since Eric was small, visions of him dropping from a sudden heart attack in his twenties like my brother did. More often, the nightmare is less clear, something about a boy with unrealized potential, a traveler who’s lost his way, and me helpless, powerless to guide him home.” Eric had been spiraling. As hard as she tried, Walsh could not stop his fall.
The many traumas Walsh has faced in life leave the reader with questions. Many might ask why. As someone who has lived through several sudden and unexplainable losses myself, I do not find the word why particularly helpful. For me, the more useful question is how. How does one individual carry such a heavy load? How does Walsh move forward—much less get out of bed in the morning each day? Walsh shows us by example. She walks with great courage and grace, determined to learn and grow with each step. I can’t imagine anyone reading The Full Catastrophe without feeling a deep respect for the way Walsh has traveled through these fires and made it to the other side. The Full Catastrophe is a riveting story, but it’s also a great teacher about what we can—and cannot—control. We will all inevitably suffer losses, experience grief. But Walsh shows us that we can control how we hold our grief, so grief won’t keep hold of us. I’ll let her have the last word:
Since I was small, I’ve struggled to make sense of one senseless loss after another—a relentless march of deaths, the collapse of our family, the years of feeling so alone in the world. I’ve found meaning, not in the losses but in the way I choose to see them. And I’m struck this week by the simplicity of the things I’ve come to believe.
Our time here is short.
Everyone dies at the end.
All that matters is love.
Diane Gottlieb is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness and the Prose/CNF Editor for Emerge Literary Journal. Her writing appears in Brevity, Witness, River Teeth, Florida Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Colorado Review, Identity Theory, and The Rumpus among many other lovely places. She is the winner of Tiferet Journal’s 2021 Writing Contest in nonfiction, longlisted in 2023 and 2024 at Wigleaf Top 50, and a finalist for Hole in the Head Review’s 2024 Charles Simic Poetry Prize and The Florida Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Find her at dianegottlieb.com and @DianeGotAuthor.
Casey Mulligan Walsh (@caseymulliganwalsh.bsky.social) writes about life at the intersection of grief and joy, embracing uncertainty, and the nature of true belonging. Her memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, was released from Motina Books on February 18, 2025. She has written for The New York Times, HuffPost, Next Avenue, Modern Loss, Hippocampus, Barren Magazine, and numerous other literary magazines. Her essay, “Still,” published in Split Lip Magazine, was nominated for Best of the Net. She is a founding editor of In a Flash literary magazine. She also serves as an ambassador for and on the Board of the Family Heart Foundation. Casey lives in upstate New York with her husband, Kevin, and too many books to count. When not traveling, they enjoy visits from their four children and ten grandchildren—the very definition of “the full catastrophe.”