"I Thought the World Would End (If It Happened, Which It Wouldn't)" by Jo Senecal

“I’m coming, Mom. Hang on. I love you IloveyouIloveyou.”

It would match the electric energy inside as we bumbled and fumbled with new information gathering as furiously and ominously as the roiling storm. 

Jo McElroy Senecal has been a member of the Lunas, six actors-turned-writers, for two decades. One of these days she’ll prove it.

In the meantime, a published piece in the NYT, a story in Personal Story Publishing Project collection Foiled, and several essays longlisted and considered in the final round for various publications are cranking things up bit by steady bit. Jo is a member of Sullivan’s Island’s Poe Library Memoir Group.

Author’s Talk

Jo Senecal on The Camino de Santiago

I write stories that push at me until I give in. It’s the connective tissues of relationships that continue to shape my life, even when the relationship has morphed because of a death.  

And death is a thing that keeps me on my toes. I am both in awe of the thought of it and also dismissive of it. Too big to properly grasp the concept as reality; to significant to flippantly ignore. 

My mom was a hospice chaplain at Mercy Hospital in San Diego during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. She led with a compassion that cracked open and healed many hearts, and it fit the shape of her beautifully. 

She didn’t tell us; we found letters from grieving humans who insisted she’d changed their lives during a brutal time. 

So, on one hand, she was a leader for me into a world that can only exist well if steeped in compassion and connection. My teacher of “How To Pay Attention to Things That Matter So That Life Is Full of Meaning.  

The other hand? She was my mommy. She was at the birth of me and I was at the death of her. And in between those 39 years, she guided me into a life I could call my own, with so many tools I need a bigger shed. 

And the irony in having her hand in my journey of discovering the layered mysteries of life and death, of lives and deaths, while being Completely and Utterly Thrown when she had the nerve to be a human who had to die? She’d laugh at me, while understanding that it’s just part of life paired with grief, the other missing sock and a basket of mixed fabric. 

One of the “fun” things about paying attention to grief is that I am able to stay deeply connected with my folks, especially in the hospitals and memory care facilities with my palliative and hospice volunteer work. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons I’m compelled to work so often and consistently with end-of-lifers is because I am buoyed by gifted souls who continue to teach me well beyond the construction site of this wonky earth. I do not ever feel alone in this work, and I continue feeling like their daughter, and still a niece, a granddaughter, a friend, to my brilliant network of beautiful humans turned spirits.—Jo McElroy Senecal