“Unraveling Desires and Dread: A Deep Dive into Casey Mulligan Walsh’s ‘The Full Catastrophe'”
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.
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