The Mourner's Bestiary

A literary memoir braiding together environmental research and the personal journey of generational healing, grief, and chronic illness.

The Mourner’s Bestiary is a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores. The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf. Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease and raising a child who may inherit that legacy also. The Mourner’s Bestiary braids environmental research with a memoir of generational healing and details the work it takes to get there for the human and animal lives caught in tides of loss.