“Unveiling Grief: Eiren Caffall Reveals the Hidden Wisdom in ‘The Mourner’s Bestiary'”
“I’m a person with a chronic illness. I can’t be on the barricades in the way that I might have been able to when I was really healthy. I can write books.” — Eiren Caffall
AE: I know we come from the same lack of spiritual tradition. Ironically, there is almost something religious and holy about that.
EC: I agree, and it’s actually the first argument I ever had with my husband, when we were early in our dating life. I yelled at him over dinner in a really nice restaurant about how he couldn’t tell me that he wasn’t a spiritual person because the work he did connecting people to their power through the Union movement was absolutely a spiritual pursuit. And he was like, no, it’s collective power, it’s political. I’m an agnostic. I don’t have a wisdom tradition that I follow, and my first agent when we were discussing the book said to me, “This is a stealth spiritual memoir.”
