Embracing the In-Between

Revisiting a timeless essay. Also: Five hundred subscribers—such gratitude—and Love in the Archives by Eileen Vorbach Collins

Welcome, welcome to all my recent subscribers. If you’re new here, maybe you found me through a social media post or a Substack recommendation. Maybe you agreed to be on the launch team for my forthcoming memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, and if I haven’t said it enough, I’m beyond grateful for your support.

News of the Day

Five hundred subscribers! That’s a benchmark I’ve been shooting for since I moved my newsletter over here in February, and a couple of days ago, I reached, then surpassed it. Next goal: 1,000.

Though numbers of followers on social media platforms don’t necessarily translate to engagement, here—among folks who’ve taken the time to subscribe, most of whom my stats report tells me actually open and read what I post—I feel differently.

When I think about having 500 of you interested enough to subscribe to my monthly newsletter, whether it’s because you’ve read my published work, have read or are reading an early copy of my memoir, want to learn about other writers I feature here, or are interested in topics of grief or genetic lipid disorders—I’m deeply honored.

Looking Back to Look Ahead

Here’s another piece from the wayback machine, published first in my defunct blog, then in the Good Men Project, both in December 2020. Because of the pandemic, which took us entirely unaware, uncertainty had worked its way into virtually every corner of our lives.

It seemed like the perfect time to discuss this topic then, but now, four years later, embracing life in the in-between is no less pertinent. Aren’t we all in a place of uncertainty in at least one area of our lives, pretty much all the time?

Embracing the In-Between

Some languages—Icelandic among them—have names for more than four seasons. Those cultures do a better job of labeling the in-between, the “not still summer, not quite fall,” the “almost spring.”

If there were ever a time when we were collectively navigating the in-between, it’s now. As the pandemic drags on, the holidays approach, and we gradually understand this won’t be over anytime soon, many of us struggle to find comfort in an inherently uncomfortable place.

I hate the thought of waiting—waiting for nice weather to return so we can be outside again, waiting for a vaccine, waiting for leadership that guides more of us to wear masks and wash hands and remember we are indeed our brothers’ keepers.

Yet there are deeper losses, ones that, like most loss, are wrapped up in fear of the unknown. We worry we will never return to the life we knew.

Stephen Sondheim’s musical, “Into the Woods” explores what happens when we stray from the path, triumph over fear, learn there are no guarantees or absolutes, and come out of the woods wiser, yet changed. The implications of that story are far beyond my ability to summarize or interpret here, yet each time I’ve watched I’ve been left with the same sense of having learned something I can’t quite put my finger on.

Maybe what it sparks is the memory of the first Christmas after my mother died, when I was twelve, only a year after my father’s passing. My first Christmas as an orphan. Surrounded, in this new life with my aunt’s family, by the trappings of their holiday, I perfected the art of looking perfectly comfortable on the outside while I was sad and lonely on the inside. The carefully decorated Christmas tree my big brother had helped my ailing mother set up, the lovingly selected gifts only they would know I’d cherish, these were replaced by someone else’s tree, someone else’s holiday. I’d ventured into my own formidable woods, and I had no idea how I’d ever find my way out.

I stumbled through my teens, looking for the path and sometimes finding it. At twenty, I married and set about creating a family of my own. Later, when considering whether to have a third child, I imagined future holidays: When two come home with their families, it’ll be fun, but three will be a party! With the hubris of a young mother, sure things would work out just as she planned, I was certain I’d ensured I would never again feel alone.

Then my oldest child died, only twenty himself. A contentious divorce further altered the family I’d pictured. Now I was deep in the muck of the worst sort of in-between, where fear and grief collide.

Continue Reading at The Good Men Project

Inspiration Everywhere

It’s been nine months since Eileen Vorbach Collins’s memoir, Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss hit the shelves.

Here’s a summary:

When her fifteen-year-old daughter Lydia ends her life, Eileen finds support in a community of bereaved parents who understand her pain on a level others cannot. No one in the group places a time limit on this grief. As the years pass, Eileen finds ways to honor the memories. She even learns to laugh again.

In Love in the Archives, a collection of linked narrative essays incorporating themes of surviving suicide loss, Judaism, interfaith marriage, and mental illness, Eileen walks us through those difficult years.

And here’s the cover, in beautiful gem tones with a section of patchwork Lydia’s Aunt Beth stitched years after Lydia’s death.

I met Eileen on Twitter (RIP), probably in early 2020. Though we met briefly at HippoCamp (a creative nonfiction writers’ conference once held yearly in Lancaster, PA—and hopefully returning one day) in summer 2021, we’ve been dedicated writing partners since the following fall. Together with Karen DeBonis and Mimi Zieman, we’ve learned so much about the craft and business of writing, finding a publisher, navigating the sometimes-bumpy road to publication, and the all-consuming work that is book promotion together. We’ve traveled to conferences and each other’s homes. As I’ve said before, we know each other’s stories intimately.

Eileen is truly one of a kind. Her ability to write about the devastation of losing a 15-year-old daughter to suicide, struggles within an interfaith marriage, and mental illness with depth, grace, and even humor, sets her apart from so many others who take on these topics.

Here’s a snippet from my review of Love in the Archives, published in Atticus Review on November 6, 2023, the day of the book’s release:

Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss by Eileen Vorbach Collins evokes the visceral grief of the suicide of a fifteen-year-old daughter, the most tragic and gut-wrenching of losses, while also leaving room for hope and even humor. As the mother of an almost-adult who died at age twenty, though not by suicide, I deeply related to the sense of one’s world having ended in a single moment, one we mothers relive with the hope of rewriting again and again.

A prolific essayist, Collins brings readers through these moments with skill and care, never plunging us so far into her own at times all-consuming despair that we abandon reading. Instead, in each essay she finds new pathways into the truth of her experience, by turns sad and funny, despondent and bursting with life. In every case, love is the underpinning that carries her—and us—through to a satisfying and genuine close, though of course her grief has no end.

Continue Reading at the Atticus Review

Don’t miss this beautiful, heart-wrenching, humorous, insightful book. It’s a gem. A diamond. It shines. Like Lydia. 🩷

Book News

The clock keeps ticking! In exactly six months—February 18, 2025—my memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, will be released from Motina Books. I’m so happy you’re with me on the journey to publication and look forward to engaging with you, my readers, in the coming months.

IF YOU’RE ON THE LAUNCH TEAM: Digital ARCs went out in July. If you didn’t find one in your inbox (sent from Diane Windsor), please let me know right away, and I’ll resend the link. Check your junk folder first! I’ve had reports of launch team emails ending up there, so this may have happened here as well.

I’ve been blown away by the emails and messages from folks who have read the book. I’ll share some of these on social media and in future newsletters.

As one reviewer reminded me, Hemingway famously said, “There nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

If you think any writer isn’t interested in your personal reaction to something they’ve poured their hearts into—sometimes for years, think again. It means everything. It’s maybe the primary reason we write.

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 educating and supporting and sometimes holding each other up through all life throws our way.

As the sticker on my car’s rear window proclaims, “You Matter.”

• If you’re a launch team member, please remember to click “want to read” on Goodreads and post a review when you’re finished reading. Both are so important for helping new readers find my book. I’ll share the link for preorders here and in a launch team email when it’s available. There will be bonuses!

• Though I haven’t discussed FH or elevated Lp(a) this time around, don’t worry, I’ll be writing about that again soon. For now—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—I’m happy to chat with you and point you in the right direction to get the information you need.

• Check out Eileen Vorbach Collins’s beautiful memoir, Love in the Archives. You’ll never forget it.

Till next time,

Casey