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.

Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician based in Chicago, Illinois. Her writing on loss and illness, oceans and extinction has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera, Literary Hub, Minding Nature, and The Rumpus. She has been the recipient of a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship in environmental journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and a Frontline: Environmental Reportage residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts. She is the screenwriter for the short film Becoming Ocean. She lives in the Logan Square neighborhood with her husband and son.