Hold On to Connection: A Conversation with Casey Mulligan Walsh

The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared

by Casey Mulligan Walsh

Motina Books (2025)

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Casey Mulligan Walsh, author of the memoir The Full Catastrophe (Motina Books, February 2025), is an essayist, founding editor of In a Flash literary magazine, board member of the Family Heart Foundation, retired speech-language pathologist, mother, and grandmother. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Split Lip Magazine, HuffPost, and more, and she’s been nominated for the Best of the Net. She lives in upstate New York with her husband. Together, they have five children and ten grandchildren.

After being orphaned and then losing her sole sibling, motherhood was the answer to Walsh’s deep need for belonging. She married young, consumed with creating the perfect family, but a contentious divorce and custody battle threatened to destroy her quest to create the perfect family. Her oldest son’s death in a car crash at only 20 years old became a final test for Walsh. 

In an interview with Tess Clarkson over Zoom, Walsh spoke about how loss and motherhood have influenced her and her writing. The conversation has been edited for content and clarity.

Tess Clarkson: In The Full Catastrophe, the reader gets a real sense of how death touched every area of your life. How did your many losses impact your path in life?

Casey Mulligan Walsh: My parents died, one after the other, leaving me parentless at 12. I was sent to live with family hours away, while my brother, who was 19, remained where we’d grown up. Then, just after I married at 20, he died suddenly. While growing up with sick parents, then throughout my teens, my one stability was academics. I was an avid reader and an excellent student, and the family that I lived with after my parents died had high hopes for me. I could have pursued whatever I wanted, but all the loss left me in a place where I needed my own family more than I needed an education. I regretted my choices for many years, but eventually, I realized I’d done the best I could at each point in my life. The losses were what drove me to want to be a mother. They also made me incredibly devoted to my own children.

TC: Can you share how early losses impacted motherhood for you?

CMW: When my first child was born, I feared losing him. He was healthy, but I’d already lost my entire family of origin. I’d put him to bed at night, he’d fall asleep, and in minutes I’d be in tears, imagining his funeral. On the heels of my parents and brother’s deaths, I took all the love meant for family and plunked it down on this first baby. From then on, as my other children were born and throughout most of my adult life, I’ve engaged in something I think of as “pre-emptive grieving,” as though rehearsing the unthinkable will keep it from happening. Though everything is fine, when I say goodbye to friends or family, I often think, “This could be the last time I see you.” It doesn’t control what I do, it’s more like a script always running in the background. It’s part of my DNA.

TC: Can you share about your search for belonging?

CMW: Even before my parents died, they were sick a lot, and I often stayed with other families. We moved frequently, so I was always the new girl. But I was determined to fit in . . . to make myself so much like everyone else that I didn’t stand out. I learned how to smile and be nice, and I thought that if I was nice to everyone, they’d be nice to me, but that’s not really the way life works. That thinking carried on through my marriage when I folded myself into my husband’s family. It took going through a lot with them and my children to understand that belonging is feeling comfortable with who I am and behaving in the world as my authentic self so that I have the confidence to stand alone. 

TC: In The Full Catastrophe, the divorce and custody battle extend over a major portion of the narrative. Can you speak about this?

CMW: My focus was on my kids and finances because it was a very difficult situation, and I had no visible means of support. I had a couple of close friends, but I had zero close family. Sometimes I used to think, “Why didn’t I get out earlier?” But I had no family support and worked at a bank part-time for eight dollars an hour. Then I went back to school and became a speech-language pathologist. I worked in a school and had a beginner teacher’s salary. I wish for my kids’ sake . . . [that my first divorce] had happened earlier, but I don’t think there was a way. The unfortunate truth is sometimes you are in a situation you just can’t get out of. If I could go back and tell myself, 25 years ago, what to do, I would say [to] trust myself more and have more compassion for myself.

TC: Can you share your path of recovery from your marriage and divorce to your second marriage?

CMW: I don’t think there’s one formula for recovering from trauma. For me, I didn’t need to recover from losing my marriage. I was happy for the conflict to be over. But there was a recovery from all those years in an abusive relationship. I needed to get myself to the point where I could see that I was worthy of having a healthy relationship. I also had a lot of worries about my kids and money. Wishing I had a relationship was not even part of it. After a few years and some dates that were absolutely not right, I was finally at the place where I thought somebody would be lucky to have a relationship with me. When I met my husband, I quickly saw that he was the person I was ready for. I believe that things don’t come to us when we think “that could never happen.” Things come to us when we can see them and feel like they totally should be part of our lives, that they’re a real, viable possibility. 

TC: In The Full Catastrophe, you speak about learning to let our children go. What do you mean by this?

CMW: When you have babies, you take care of them and do everything you can to keep them safe. As your kids get older, they become themselves and maybe even become rebellious teens. They’re not going to live their lives exactly the way you would have designed it, and there’s going to be a lot that’s outside of your control. You either become a raging ball of anxiety and regret, or you begin to realize the control was only an illusion, that change and uncertainty are a part of life. The more we learn to navigate that in-between spot, the more peace we’ll have. That doesn’t happen overnight, and you don’t get to that place and then stop caring about what happens to them. Letting them go to school, letting them have a tantrum, letting them make their own choices about who they’re going to be in their lives as they get older—these are all steps we take along the way.

TC: In The Full Catastrophe, you write about not letting Eric’s death define you. If you could rewind time, what would you tell your younger self after he died, after the experience you’d been dreading since he was born?

CMW: People used to say to me, “How did you survive losing all your family?,“ and I’d respond, “Well, I don’t really know, but if it’s ever one of my children, just put me to bed and don’t expect me to get up again.” But by the time Eric died, there had been so much difficulty and uncertainty that I’d had to come to a place where I could imagine living in a world without one of my children. I didn’t know it would be through death. There were so many other things happening and so many ways that I could have been separated from them, even emotionally, that I had to face that demon. When the police came to the door to tell me there’d been a crash, the very first thing I thought was, “This is the day you knew was coming. This is how it ends. The last page of the script is already written, and your job is to walk through it gracefully.” The fact that I had all of that peace when Eric died does not mean there wasn’t terrible grief for a long time. Peace does not preclude sorrow. So, I don’t have a lot of advice for that mother. I do have all kinds of advice for the mother I’d been two years earlier.

TC: Can you share how your book came to life?

CMW: I didn’t start writing the book until after my ex-husband died suddenly at 57. Then while I was writing, both of his parents died, so it was only my children that I had to think about. Nobody in my family read the book as I was writing it, other than perhaps short passages, and I wrote with complete honesty. Obviously, one of my children has died, and my two other children are living. I ran [the memoir draft] past both, and both were fine with it. There were 10 drafts of this book over 12 years. The events never changed, but the themes that I saw, the overall structure, and the ending of my book evolved through all those versions. The ending has much more perspective and forgiveness than it had in early drafts. I think often, as writers, we begin writing our stories, and we don’t really see threads of forgiveness or understand what all the glue is until we get them on paper. 

TC: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

CMW: One hope for my book is that it would have the power to transform someone else’s life of sorrow into one of joy and redemption. I hope my book can help them understand how you can have grief after grief after grief, and you can still have joy. Both of those things can exist at the same time, and one informs the other. It all boils down to this: life is short. Everyone dies at the end. All that matters is love. I’ve also come to believe that everything that isn’t love is fear. A lot of the things my ex-husband did and Eric did that probably led to his death came from fear. We all act out of fear at one time or another. We need to remember that we’re all going to be gone, so soon, really, and we must hold on to our connection with each other. It’s what matters most.