Jill Bialosky's 12th book, The End Is the Beginning, is a bereavement memoir with a difference: it opens with the death of Bialosky's mother, Iris, but proceeds backward to lovingly spool through the course of an "extraordinary life" marked by tragedies.
In March 2020, 86-year-old Iris died in a Cleveland, Ohio, assisted living facility. The Covid-19 lockdown meant Bialosky (Poetry Will Save Your Life) could only attend the funeral virtually, so she decided to make her own memorial, seeking "to understand and capture the woman behind the mother who was often so unknowable to me." Hereafter, the narrative jumps back in intervals to highlight key changes in Iris's life. Bialosky spends perhaps a bit too much time on Iris's decline with Alzheimer's disease. For Bialosky and her two sisters, actual grief reverts to anticipatory grief as Iris enters assisted living after selling the family home of 50 years.
Effect precedes cause, so Iris's medication-resistant depression heralds her youngest daughter's death by suicide--the subject of Bialosky's History of a Suicide. Iris's first husband, Milton, dies of heart failure, leaving her a single mother of three at age 25. Re-creating Iris's teenage years requires imagination to supplement the details from her scrapbook. At the end (which is indeed the beginning), Iris is born into a Hungarian Jewish community in Ohio and loses her mother by age 10.
This exercise enhances Bialosky's appreciation for her mother's physical and emotional struggles. The reverse chronology is a stroke of genius as tender attention brings a loved one back to life. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck