Jill Bialosky

One narrative that will explain it all because we always need a story, an account, to make sense of the inexplicable. from The End Is the Beginning by Jill Bialosky

My mother was fifty-seven years old when she died of cancer. I was thirty-eight. She had been diagnosed with cancer two weeks before her death. I had just moved back to my home state to be near family after our son was born.

During those two weeks, while Mom underwent chemotherapy and called all her friends and relatives to tell show more them the news, I kept up a face of competence during the day, and at night wrote poems to express my grief. Poems about diagnosis, her medical history, the impending loss of a mother, and finally, remembering stories she told me about her teenage years as the local ‘jitterbug queen’.

When I began reading Jill Bialosky’s memoir of her mother, beginning with her death and years with Alzheimer’s, I wondered if I could bear such tragedy. Bialosky told her mother’s story backwards, and frankly, there was tragedy after tragedy. Until she came to her mother’s teenage years, looking over her scrapbooks and diaries, discovering joy and fun and hope. And I realized the brilliance of storytelling backwards, ending with the promise each young life holds.

Unlike Bialosky’s mother, my mother didn’t lose a child, but she did lose two siblings. My mother didn’t lose a husband to death or divorce. But she did deal with deforming autoimmune diseases, psoriasis that made her embarrassed and psoriatic arthritis that left her crippled. She prayed for an early death rather than endure an old age unable to care for herself, especially for the psoriasis. Death came early, sadly after a new medication had stabilized her conditions and allowed her a more active life.

Bialosky’s memoir is beautiful and heart breaking. We each have a story of loss and grief, and there is something cathartic about reading another’s story.

The book title, she shares at the end, is from some of my favorite lines by T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets, where he writes in East Coker :

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

And from Little Gidding, she adds the lines I once had on my bulletin board at my desk,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all or exploring
WIll be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Mom told stories all my life. I loved looking at her old photographs and hearing about the people. I became a genealogist, researching newspapers and documents for facts and information about family. Understanding our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents helps us to understand them and ourselves. It is a circular exploration.

A beautiful book.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley. show less

Fifty-four years ago on a May morning, I arrived at my high school to be waylaid by friends. They told me a boy of our acquaintance had had an “accident.” Shortly afterward, another friend told me that he was found dead the previous evening, in his family home’s garage, the car running and the doors closed.

Spring of 1968 had seen the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. And now, this boy, the step-son of my favorite teacher, a boy I admired, was dead. Add to this show more mix my mother’s entering the hospital, and finding her medications were harming her, she was taken off them, resulting in illness, weight loss, hair loss. Summer found me depressed.

Some years later I realized that every spring I was haunted by those deaths and near deaths. And in 1986, I wrote a poem about this boy become a ghost, “who could not rest nor resurrect,” rising each spring to “melt my fortress forgetfulness.”

such an act will always remain…up to the ones left behind to…yet the hauntings…could be prevented in the first place. XXXIII

Every April, a requiem, a re-awakening of dawn, the same chorus & players. The garage door sealed, gas turned on & the girl… XXXV

from Asylum by Jill Bialosky
Jill Bialosky’s poems deeply affected me. The loss of her younger sister to suicide permeates these poems.

“Why couldn’t I save her,” she asks in CII. As I had wondered about this boy, who would come into the school newspaper room and argue and talk with our teacher, holding his camera. He was older, smarter, outgoing. A friend asked him if he would date me, and he said he would consider it if he didn’t have a girlfriend. Could I have saved him if we were together? Two years later I had another class with his stepfather, a brilliant, progressive teacher. I could not connect the suicide with this man. I had heard that the boy and his dad argued. Could my teacher have prevented his death?

XXXII
Like just awaking
drenched, they persist,
ghosts in our poems,
ghosts in our imaginations,
ghosts in our waking hours, ghosts
who elude philosophers, poets,
scientists, psychiatrists,
therapists & doctors, ghosts
who perpetuate,
who guileless,
will not keep quiet,
who preside over the populace,
& unknowingly rob
the living, ghosts,
who made their own house
their gallows, Dante says,
will never rest.

Asylum by Jill Bialosky

I left my ghost behind after naming it. Then, I hardly knew that boy. Bialosky lost a sister. They shared a life. Her ghost remains. “What if it is those who survive who never rest?” she asks in LXII.

Other ghosts haunt her. Those lost in the Holocaust. George Floyd. The immigrant children in pens, those seeking asylum and safety finding cages and no sanctuary. Winters become a memory. A baby dies in a fire. The virus and quarantine.

And yet life persists. Pollen thickening the air. The diseased tree cut down sends up sprouts. “things hidden from us,” to which “we mist surrender our trust, the flap of a butterfly wing, for instance, could change the balance of the universe.” (X)

IXX describes listening to a concert that included Johann Strauss II’s waltz Artist’s Life, “composed after Austria’s defeat in battle,/the melody meant to infuse breath into bleakness, elegy into declaration/creation into harmony,/even in a time of ravage & war.”

I listened to Artist’s Life, the hesitation and flowering into happiness and joy, the drama of it, the pure joy of it.

There is pain in these lines. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” stands at the gates of Dante’s hell, but could also refer to being alive. And yet…life persists, and that alone gives us hope.

I received a free book from the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased. show less

Incredible novel about living in words, being inspired by Greek and Roman mythology, living with centuries of Western civilization's male-centric hierarchy and fighting to be one's own true self, all told within the story of a middle-aged teacher awaiting the publication of her latest book of poems and a promised review in the New York Times. That her book is centered in the myth of Leda and the Swan displays the author's willingness to confront nuance, more than one way of looking at show more something and the lies people tell themselves as well as others. show less

This book has some very interesting things to say through poetry. It's a really interesting mix of the poet's personal tragedies mixed with those of others, as well as a larger connection to collective memory and inherited trauma and sometimes the tiny lights of hope in that dark. I love the way she mixes nature imagery with human storytelling, and how she switches between nature and civilization. It almost feels like it mirrors an epic poem. Also, I really enjoyed the Bialosky's use of show more dual/multiple meanings of words (as in bodies for both water and people, or the multiple meanings of asylum).

I'd recommend this for anyone who is interested in nature poetry, personal histories and language with the caveat that the subject matter is heavy and includes infant mortality, suicide and the holocaust. show less