Embracing the "Both/And"

On cumulative grief, living in the contradiction, and remembering how travel never fails to bring us back to ourselves

Loving the interplay of dark and light in this photo we took in Noto, Sicily, June 2026.

To everyone just joining: Welcome! I hope you’ll pop over to my website or scroll through the archives and get to know me and what Embracing the Full Catastrophe is all about. If you’ve been here for a while, it’s good to have you back. I’m honored you’ve chosen to be part of this community.

If you enjoy this post, a ❤️—or better yet, a comment—lets me know you’re reading. That you’re out there. That I’m not writing into the void. Let’s connect.

Also: Pop down to the bottom of the newsletter for some writing updates, including a podcast appearance, a recent essay, and a new award for The Full Catastrophe!

Inspiration Everywhere

I must begin with a confession.

Though I’m devoted to posting monthly, June 30 turned to July 1, and still no post. Yes, I was busy, with travel and preparations for talks in connection with books and grief, not to mention supporting my amazing friends and their fabulous new books.

But here’s the truth: I’ve been avoiding writing to you, my friends. Procrastinating. Can you relate?

Perhaps because there’s so much I’ve been mulling over, I’ve had a hard time with focus and initiation (a dear friend will tell me that’s a sign of ADHD, but I remain stubbornly unsure). Perhaps because I have oodles of new subscribers and feel a little extra pressure to write something brilliant.

Instead, I think I’ll simply show up as myself and hope you’ll find something that speaks to you in your grief, in your journey to navigate uncertainty, in your determination to hold the both/and of struggle and joy, dark and light, right there, side by side.

Back in May, as I was again procrastinating (then, about packing for the three fabulous weeks in Sicily and Malta we had ahead of us), I came upon this post from The Grief Table - Jamie Herzog. I’ve saved a number of her pieces in recent months—she somehow seems to be reading my mind—but this one about cumulative grief really hit home.

I was struck by the way she described what I’ve often felt in the 60 years since losing both parents, a few years later, my only sibling, then much later my eldest child. The way she names what feels so familiar to me—emotional accumulation and “the last straw” phenomenon—really hit the nail on the head for me.

I’ve been studying all things grief for a long time, certainly during the years it took to write my memoir and the essays that preceded and followed it, not to mention the lifetime I’ve spent majoring in grief here in earth school.

But this year, I was trained as a grief coach, attending a four-day in-person training and following that up with hours of webinars and endless reading that helped me define for myself how I would support others who grieve all sorts of losses. Death loss, of course, but also the anticipatory, ambiguous, cumulative, genetic, identity, chronic, and disenfranchised grief that sneak up on us in life.

Jamie’s post reminded me of this passage from The Full Catastrophe. Though my parents had died more than two decades earlier, I’d focused on building a family that would return me to a place of deep belonging, looking ahead with a level of focus and determination that’s almost frightening (yet completely understandable) to me now, almost 40 years after this scene. Here’s a glimpse into how cumulative grief showed up for me at a time when I had no language to help me understand it.

In another story, I might have grown up with my doting dad, my loving mom, and who might I be then? Imagining parents and a brother in my life—people who look like me, who love me no matter what—is more than I can bear. Best to avoid that altogether, though when I watch sad movies late at night alone on the sofa, Will and the kids in their beds asleep, I find myself sobbing for my parents, for Tommy, for Esther and El, all of them lost to me. 

I cry for all the goodbyes, all the grief of the world. I cry for soldiers who die and lovers who part, for pets that pass. I cry for the weight of all I’ve lost, even as my babies lie sleeping safe and warm in the rooms above me.

By day I’m the responsible adult in more ways than I expected or desired, but during these lonely nighttime waves of grief, I mostly want my mommy. I’m seven again, and I can feel her arms around me, hugging me in the kitchen and rubbing my back, telling me everything will be okay. Next I’m eleven, in another kitchen, and it’s me comforting her now, her body shrunken and weak, ravaged from the cancer that will soon win. I remember our last year together, the twelfth birthday party I organized, doing the limbo with my friends in our basement. I dissolve into tears, only now understanding that while we danced she was surely resting upstairs, fighting the pain, happy that I was happy.

Gina Moffa, LCSW, author of Moving On Doesn’t Mean Letting Go, a dear friend and wise, shining light in the grief space, calls this compounded grief and offers guidance for understanding and navigating reawakened grief. She ends this article with gentle, compassionate advice:

“You’re not broken for feeling everything at once. You’re not broken if your loss feels like it happened yesterday. You’re not broken if everything is piling up on you. You’re finally giving yourself permission to be with it all.”

While you’re over there, be sure to click through to explore the gold mine of posts she’s written about grief and loss of all types.

Litsa Williams, author of What’s Your Grief, is the founder of a popular website and community by the same name. Her explanation of what happens when we’re overwhelmed (which I certainly was as a child by loss after loss, something that carried into young adulthood) was enlightening and freeing for me:

“Though avoidance, denial, and shock may seem like a really bad thing (and it can be if it is never resolved), it can be our body’s way of keeping us functioning in the short term. When we are overloaded with multiple losses, this avoidance allows us to maintain our day to day activities. What becomes important when losses have become cumulative is an awareness that we may need to make a concerted effort to begin the work of facing the reality of the loss, as this avoidance can’t continue indefinitely.”

In this article, she notes: “…time is not the only factor in cumulative grief. Though it may be tempting to assume that bereavement overload only occurs when deaths occur in immediate succession, this is not the case. A loss that was never fully attended to years before can be brought back up by a new loss and can be overwhelming.”

Clearly, I’ve found this to be true.

Yet. I’ve also seen that experiencing repeated losses across my lifetime—and, over time, processing them as the adult I’d become in ways the child could not—has helped me gain a deeper appreciation for all of it. For the many challenges of living with grief, yes, but also for all the ways we can hold and honor our grief and those we have lost as we move through life.

When I look in the mirror these days, it’s my mom and dad I see, after so many years of feeling as if I grew from the earth without any parents at all. When a friend tells me how much she values the relationship she has with her brother (a stellar human), I feel closer to my own, who died when I was 20. And when I see my two youngest grandsons obsessing about the World Cup, calling me to report a spectacular play, my son Eric—a step-uncle they never knew—is there in the room with us, wearing his #10 jersey and shouting at the TV. These could be sad moments, and for a moment maybe they are, what with the yearning for him, the wishing he and all the others were all still here with us (or in my parents’ case, wishing I’d at least had them for far longer than I did).

But mostly now, they’re moments of gratitude for me, for what was, for the relationships I had with them while they were here, and for the connectedness I still feel today—in some ways, more than I did at the time they died.

These continuing bonds allow us to grow in our relationships with our people long after they’ve left the earthly plane. (More on this in a future post). I hold gratitude that has gradually come right alongside the grief.

This is life in the contradiction, in the “both/and” of loss and love. The two work in tandem, neither negating the other, each reminding us of the love we continue to share.

Wanderlust

Under the umbrella of “holding both,” our recent trip to Sicily and Malta was more restful and fabulous than I can begin to explain. As always with travel, we saw the most amazing places. Here’s a quick glimpse of what those three weeks in late May and early June brought our way:

But of course, the people we meet are what make every trip special. Everywhere we went, from our Mt. Etna tour guide and fellow travelers, to people we met on the street and on ferries, to the best apartment host we’ve ever had (and that’s saying a lot!), such a warm welcome.

Thanks for reading Embracing the Full Catastrophe. Please share this post if you think it will resonate with someone you know.

News of the Day

WRITING NEWS

• On June 9, I had a beautiful conversation with Lisa Keefauver on her podcast, Grief is a Sneaky Bitch about, in part, how early grief beliefs can trap us in survival mode, the importance of curiosity and compassion in rewriting our stories, and the role of tragic optimism in embracing life's uncertainty without losing hope.

• The Full Catastrophe was recently named a finalist in the grief category of the National Indie Excellence Awards.

• My essay, “Maybe It’s All Fairy Dust,” appeared in Open Secrets Magazine this month.

• On June 26, I had the pleasure of speaking at two locations of The Spinney, a local independent living community, on grief coaching—what it is, why we need it, and what it has to offer us—and shared information about my grief coaching practice, Holding Both. For more information, click on over here.

• On July 25, I’ll be speaking at the Family Heart Foundation HoFH gathering in San Antonio, TX, on Life, Risk, and Resilience in Families with HoFH, touching on the components of genetic grief that affect families with medical diagnoses and focusing on tools and strategies to help us live more intentional, fulfilled lives.

HEART HEALTH NEWS

On Wednesday, June 17, our bimonthly Empower FH Meeting was held on the topic of “From Early Diagnosis to Empowered Adulthood.” We were joined by Dr. Amy Peterson, pediatric cardiologist, along with Family Heart Community Member Kylie Olsen and Ambassador Sydney Phillips, both individuals diagnosed with HoFH in childhood. Watch the replay of this exceptionally enlightening and educational discussion and all of the many webinars on FH and elevated Lp(a) the Family Heart Foundation has to offer here.

Our next meeting will be held on August 19, 2026, at 7 pm EST, with Dr. Daniel Soffer, on the topic, "The Role of ApoB in Cardiovascular Health." The registration link for this webinar will appear soon here.

That’s all for now. Thank you so much, each of you, for reading this far, for sharing, and for joining this growing community of folks who believe in the importance of holding each other up through all life throws our way. As the sticker on my car’s rear window proclaims, “You Matter.”

• A brief request: If you’ve read The Full Catastrophe (or plan to), please 🙏🏼 leave a brief review on Amazon. Simply select the star rating and write a few lines. If you’ve already reviewed it on Goodreads, click “edit review” and your review should appear. Copy and paste that into Amazon and, voila!

• If you know of book clubs or grief groups/workshops on topics relating to navigating loss and uncertainty that might be interested in The Full Catastrophe, or college courses/common-read programs that might benefit from assigning it as a lived experience book—I’m all ears. I’m eager to continue reaching people at colleges, in classrooms, and at bookshops, libraries, or other venues as well.

• In a Flash Lit Mag opens for submissions on August 1 on the theme of SURPRISE. If you write flash creative nonfiction (500 words or less), we’d love to see your work. Please check out our submission guidelines here.

• In the meantime, check out our most recent issue on the theme of HEART. I had the pleasure of lead editing this issue, and was excited to share “What is Held,” a flash essay by our featured author, Adhara Mereles. Mereles brings us skillfully into the nearly universal experience of holding the pain of loss beside enduring love.

• If your LDL-C cholesterol is over 190, doesn’t change with lifestyle modifications, and you have a family history of early heart events, you could have FH. And ask your physician to test your Lp(a) (say it: “L-P-little a”), since it’s elevated in 1 in 5 individuals yet is hardly ever checked. Feel free to get in touch with questions or for more information.

• Remember: All grief is valid. Yours, too.

Till next time,

Casey