THE END IS THE BEGINNING asks the question that any grown child might ask following the death of a parent: Who were they? We know tidbits or morsels of their lives from stories they shared or from anecdotes that families laugh about at gatherings. But do we --- can we --- know them as a whole person, not just as our mother or father?

There is no denying that Jill Bialosky loved her mother, Iris Yvonne Bialosky. Iris’ death, in a care facility during the pandemic, was a blow to Bialosky and her sisters. Unable to attend the funeral because of lockdown, she was forced to watch as the weather cut the ceremony short. It felt symbolic somehow.

"The writing of this beautiful memoir helped Bialosky answer questions about who Iris was, what she knew about her, and what she needed to discover."

When Iris died, Bialosky wanted to know more about her. “I am,” she wrote, “cognizant that there are things I will never know about mother.” But she forged ahead to write a book “made of impressions, memories, and stories, some of my own, others told to me. I depended on photos, intuition, research, and my own imaginings.” Bialosky filled in the blanks as a tribute to her mother.

The result is a stunning memoir, told backwards, from death to birth. Bialosky writes a breathtaking recollection of witnessing her mother’s decline, interwoven with her mother’s movement from one care facility to the next. At one point she writes, “I’m filled with panic and sorrow for what’s to come.” As a reader, we already know what is to come --- what has transpired in earlier chapters --- but there is still something so poignant in Bialosky’s admission that even in the beauty and passage of time, there exists the “cruel ripples of savage.”

With each passing chapter, Bialosky treats us to more revelations about her mother: the early signs that something wasn’t right with her memory, the loss of one of her daughters, her second marriage, and her first short-lived marriage. We see the home where Iris raised her girls, or, as Bialosky describes it, “[t]he house we wanted to escape, and then come running home to…a place to come home to when we were directionless, a pit stop between college and being grown-up.”

We meet the various caretakers who journeyed with Iris in her senior years. And we become acquainted with Kim, Iris’ youngest daughter, who “was like a locked safe, unwilling to open up or share, not wanting to burden anyone” and who ultimately took her own life. During shiva, Bialosky shares, she “is proud of my mother. It must be so hard to face her friends, Kim’s teachers and peers --- a mother is supposed to protect her child --- but she does it with dignity. All she wants now is to honor her daughter.”

The next chapters reveal a woman battling depression, and Bialosky compares her to female literary characters who are “weakened by desire, diminished by the patriarchy, with no real means of their own.” She wants her mother to be stronger and serve as a role model, but at the same time, she recognizes that much of this was not by choice, but rather by societal dictum. As we meet Iris in earlier years, Bialosky uses journal entries to introduce Iris the ingenue, who always seemed to have dates. And we can begin to see some of her disparate characteristics arise. Iris was the product of loss herself, losing her mother at the age of eight.

In the end, Bialosky sees her mother as the heroine of her own story, even if she didn’t always see that earlier in life. The writing of this beautiful memoir helped Bialosky answer questions about who Iris was, what she knew about her, and what she needed to discover. Like her mother’s own tribute to the daughter she lost, THE END IS THE BEGINNING is Bialosky’s tribute to a woman who survived the tragedies and joys that formed her and lives on in her family.