THE FULL CATASTROPHE by Casey Mulligan Walsh
Not long after my 20-year-old son ERIC dies, I begin receiving collection phone calls for a bad check he’d written months earlier. I refuse to send the required death certificate, realizing I finally no longer need to prove anything to anyone. When the calls stop coming, I miss hearing Eric’s name said aloud in the world.
Eric was my first baby, and he led the way back to family for me. Though Eric is not my first loss, it’s his death that marks the end of the family I’d pictured—for the second time in my life.
I’m not yet a teen when both my parents die and I am sent to live with relatives hours away, to a place that never feels like home. Academically successful, I struggle to fit in both at school and with my new family. I decide that staying under the radar and following the rules will help me survive and, with little support, soon understand I must figure things out for myself. I focus on what life will look like when I have my own family, ensuring I will never again be alone.
I meet my future husband, WILL, while still in high school. His parents embrace me, and I leave college early to marry and start a family. We have three children, and despite difficulties with Will, I believe I’ve found the life I’ve been searching for. We spend long days at the lake or on the soccer field, and our home is a gathering spot for the kids’ friends, just as I’d hoped. But verbal and emotional abuse from Will escalate along with his drinking.
I focus on helping the kids with their challenges, including ADD/ADHD and learning issues. Alone, late at night, I find myself crying for the family I lost as a child. Mostly, I want my mommy. Meanwhile, I tire of staying under the radar and covering for Will’s embarrassing behaviors, realizing that, in my relentless quest for family, I’ve created a life where no one values me for who I am. When the kids are seven, twelve, and fifteen, I return to college and earn two degrees, reclaiming my love of learning, finding my voice, and hoping the added income will improve our financial situation and family life.
Our marriage only worsens, though, and I soon realize it won’t last. A hostile divorce begins. I grieve the collapse of the family I’ve fought to build while plodding through repeated court dates and financial worries. Conflict increases between the boys and Will, and we are plunged into a custody trial for my daughter, KATE. As Will lobbies for Kate’s allegiance, she is empowered to act out against me both verbally and physically.
I win full custody, then Will’s efforts to overturn the decision amplify the conflict. None of my attempts to make things better make any difference, and gradually I accept that control was only an illusion. I end the fight for custody, believing it’s the only way to bring peace to our family.
Will has little to do with the boys during this time, and they become increasingly angry. My other son KYLE tries to remain neutral and establish his own identity, but his grades plummet as he rebels against rules of any sort.
Eric, always drawn to the “big air” of danger and risk-taking, is thrown off course by his father’s rejection. Horrified and helpless, I watch Eric begin a volatile, on-again, off-again romantic relationship and fail out of college. Just as he regains his footing, he falls victim to the effects of a bad law that dash all his hopes for the future. He becomes an angry, frightened young man, loses hope, and slips into depression.
Meanwhile, my years of fighting to make things work out the way I hoped for all of us and struggling alongside Eric have led to a spiritual reckoning. When Eric dies on a beautiful June Saturday, the only victim of a single-car crash, I suddenly understand these things had prepared me for that day and I am able to find peace within the deep sorrow of his passing.
Packing up his room later that summer, I wonder two things: When people I meet ask me how many children I have, what will I say? More importantly, anyone new I meet from here on in won’t have known Eric. How can they possibly know me? . I write a letter to state legislators in an attempt to bring to light the way in which the indiscriminate application of an archaic law destroys young lives, as it had Eric’s.
Two years later, I meet my future husband, and we marry. Kate and Kyle create lives of their own. We have ten grandchildren, and I’ve finally found the family I’ve been searching for since my own parents died.
On the twentieth anniversary of Eric’s accident, I grapple with feeling isolated, since most of the people in my current life didn’t know him, yet I know he is still with me. I imagine Eric calling to me from the treetops, where I always picture him, with the joy he had in his younger years. I see that living in the present is what brings me peace and that I have a lot to learn from the way Eric was most comfortable in “big air,” where he felt free. I finally understand that peace lies not in trying to define what I or those I love need but in the wide open space between me and whatever’s next.