“Unraveling Desires and Dread: A Deep Dive into Casey Mulligan Walsh’s ‘The Full Catastrophe'”
Implosion is nothing new when you live “in a world,” as Walsh does, “where your whole family can die and leave you…[ — where] everyone dies at the end.” Yet, as much as I ached for the narrator and her “cataclysmic grief,” I also saw her as an “other” of sorts — as someone separate from myself. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I felt relieved not to come from her world.
Then, ten days before The Full Catastrophe’s February 18th launch date, I was cast into that very world of woe, when — consummate planner that I am — I found myself funeral planning. For Walsh, one truism is that “our time here is short.” In my case, the funeral was not for anyone taken too soon — not for a parent or sibling or child — but for my 103-year-old grandfather, whose stay on earth was blessedly long but whom I still wasn’t ready to lose. Despite knowing that Papa’s end was near as we ushered him through the hospice care process following a succession of falls, and despite understanding on a cognitive level that death is the “inevitable, grim conclusion” that awaits us all — even immortal-seeming centenarians like my grandpa — I wasn’t emotionally prepared, not fully, for that moment when his heart stopped beating.
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