Jill Bialosky, THE END IS THE BEGINNING: A Personal History of My Mother
[0:00]Hi, I'm Zivi Owens. Welcome to Totally Book, where I get to talk to my favorite authors
[0:07]and hopefully yours too. Today, we have Jill Byloski, who has already been on my podcast
[0:14]and is back this time with the end is the beginning of personal history of my mother. And
[0:21]here is a little bit you should know about Jill. Jill Byloski is the author of five
[0:29]acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently The Silent. Her poems have appeared in the
[0:35]New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, among others. She is the author of several
[0:40]novels, including the deceptions and two other works of nonfiction. History of a suicide
[0:47]and poetry will save your life. In 2015, Jill was honored by the Poetry Society of America
[0:55]for her distinguished contribution to field poetry. She lives in New York City. Find out more.
[1:01]Jill Byloski.com. Welcome, Jill. Thank you, Zivi. Thanks so much for having me. It's my pleasure.
[1:11]Your book, Oh My Gosh, I like kept tearing up reading this. It is so poignant and I don't want to
[1:18]scare people away by saying it's so sad because it's so beautiful and the way we love the way
[1:24]we love things that we've lost is just so moving. So talk a little bit about the book and
[1:30]what it's about. And then I want to read a short section of it if it's okay. Great. Thank you.
[1:35]I'd love to. So my book is called The End is the Beginning and a personal history of my mother.
[1:43]And what I wanted to do in this book is tell my mother's story from the end of her life to the
[1:50]beginning. And what happened that really encouraged me to pursue this book was that I lost my
[1:59]mother during the first month of COVID. I was in New York and my mother was in Cleveland.
[2:07]And of course, if you remember there were restrictions at that time where you had to quarantine
[2:13]for 14 days before you could leave the state even. So I was not able to be by my mother's side
[2:22]when she passed away and she had been in a care home where she was suffered for 10 years. I slowed
[2:28]the climb from Alzheimer's and I so wanted to be with her at the end. And the funeral was,
[2:38]I was not able to go to her funeral which was really just a grave side because of the pandemic
[2:45]and the quarantines. And I witnessed it by a FaceTime with my sister who lived in Cleveland.
[2:52]And there was something about that experience of not fully being able to process my mother's
[2:59]death and loss inspired me to really want to write her story because she led quite a remarkable
[3:06]life for a woman who grew up and she was born in 1933 in a very modest Jewish home. She was raised
[3:16]by her aunts and her father because her mother died when she was nine years old giving birth
[3:26]to her brother and her brother survived. And so my mother was coddled by her aunts and her father
[3:34]who adored her and she was really brought up to be a beautiful wife and mother and that was her dream.
[3:44]And she met my father when she was 21 and in that era they quickly got married and quickly had
[3:54]three daughters all under the age of were 15 months apart. And then my father sadly died suddenly
[4:04]when he was 30 and my mother was 25 of a heart attack and my mother her entire world was shattered
[4:13]because she had no livelihood. So in some ways I see my story also as a tale about the
[4:23]what it was like in that era for women and how difficult it was if your life suddenly became
[4:33]something else you were not prepared for. But I tell the story from as I said from the end to
[4:40]the beginning and we see my mother's slow decline through her Alzheimer's and living in a sister
[4:48]living in then a care home and then I go to her FaceTime burial and it progresses through the sort
[4:58]of five or six pivotal periods in her life where after my father died as women were want to do
[5:06]she really wanted to meet a new man to take care of all of us and she was very beautiful and she
[5:12]was brought up to really value that aspect of herself and sadly she entered a marriage that was
[5:22]very spontaneous and you know they fell in love and my stepfather was Irish Catholic and we were
[5:33]Jewish and it was a very different world and so I also write about that period of her life and
[5:41]they had another child another daughter so my mother had four daughters to raise on her own
[5:48]and the marriage only lasted for five years and then sadly I write about the the wonderful periods
[5:58]of raising our sister Kim because I was 10 and my other sisters were nine and 11 so she was like
[6:08]our baby and some of the parts I love most about my book is is the family life and also when I
[6:17]narrate the story of my mother meeting my father and how in love they were and I think
[6:23]you're right that my book is sad at times but I also feel that it is such an inspiring story
[6:31]about love because to the very end my mother really felt she put back on her wedding ring after
[6:39]her divorce and she changed her name back to silosky and she really believed that she would be
[6:49]reunited with my father and that really kept her those memories were really precious and important
[6:57]so you know through through tragedy also comes some kind of joy and beauty that's how I see it
[7:08]I had to read the whole book to get all those details but that's okay now everybody else has them
[7:12]no I'm sorry for some of these losses in your life you also in the book write about your sister
[7:20]Kim the youngest daughter who ended up dying by suicide which was so devastating in the reaction
[7:28]of your mother oh my gosh and you and your sisters and it's just so heartbreaking and then
[7:34]George your former stepfather who was abusive and pretty just terrible to all of you and how
[7:42]awful that period of time was I love how at the end you're like and then I just figured I would
[7:48]just maybe google him to find out what happened and you hadn't even known and just how you have
[7:55]weathered one thing after another and your mother has too and how you put yourself in her shoes
[8:01]this is just so beautiful oh thank you sippy it was so interesting for me when I got to the
[8:09]parts in the book where I had to imagine my mother's life before I was born and of course I relied
[8:18]on stories and photos and things my mother told me and my relatives told me and I did some research
[8:25]into the those periods but it was really magical for me to see my make my mother come alive
[8:34]in the book and I recognized how much we really don't know our parents outside of being their daughter
[8:44]or their son and one thing that I wanted to do in the book was to think about what my mother's
[8:51]life was like before I was born and what informed her life that she passed down to me and obviously
[9:01]the early loss of her mother was quite significant but I really loved those last chapters I think
[9:09]are my favorites in the book you had a term you had a term at the end about this that I hadn't
[9:14]heard before I want to say like reciprocal trauma some type of no no reciprocal what's the
[9:22]call when do you experience inherited trauma it wasn't inherited trauma that I've heard but there
[9:28]was another word well anyway it doesn't matter but um my curious trauma by curious trauma what is
[9:35]that is a form of inherited trauma in a way I think so I definitely feel that that we inherit
[9:43]our parents' traumas because they're the way that they relate to everyone to family other
[9:54]family members is so informed by who they are right and our losses
[10:00]do inform us. I mean, the beauty is that my mother was, she went through these terrible
[10:06]losses, but she was such a kind in loving and warm person. And to be able to maintain that
[10:13]without bitterness, I mean, there was one period where she was a little bitter after the divorce.
[10:20]But that to me is a triumph. And what I feel my mother passed on to me. Yeah. Well,
[10:29]you also wrote just so eloquently. And it's no surprise that you are a poet, because
[10:35]that is how this memoir reads as if it's so lyrical and poetic every step of the way.
[10:42]And when you write about how much you're missing your mom, and I just want to read
[10:47]this one section, because I was tearing up as I read it. Is that okay? Yes, please. I would
[10:53]love to hear someone else read it. You wrote, I hear my mother's voice when I put
[11:01]on a sweater and feel an itch, because the label is still attached. When I scold our puppy who
[11:06]is barking, I hear myself say, shot, something my mother used to say when she wanted quiet.
[11:12]When I set the table for a dinner party, I remember how carefully she set her own table,
[11:17]choosing the right tablecloth, linen napkins, never paper. I boil noodles, and when
[11:22]draining them, remember always to run cold water over the noodles, to stop them from continuing
[11:27]to cook as she taught me. Never wash your face with soap. She told me it will dry your skin,
[11:32]wash your underclothes by hand, never put them in the washing machine. When I drive in the car,
[11:37]and hold up my hands to view my nails, I remember my mother doing the same gesture to
[11:43]admire her manicure. When I break suddenly, and a passenger is in the seat next to me, I shoot my
[11:48]arm out, the same way my mother used to, to protect me from hitting the dashboard. I call my
[11:53]son, honey, as my mother used to call me. I remember to smile even when I'm sad. I choose kindness
[12:00]as my mother always did, and I imagine too that some of what she had taught me, she may have learned
[12:05]from her own mother, those precious nine years of her early life she had with her, and reflected
[12:10]upon what I now bequeathed to my own son, and marvel over how we are shaped by those we love.
[12:16]How beautiful is that? Thank you, thank you. Now I'm tearing up a little.
[12:23]In a good way, in an appreciative way. Thank you. No, your relationship is so special, and of
[12:30]course we can all sort of see ourselves in the passage, the things that we do that remind us of
[12:35]our loved ones, and that once they're gone, we remember them in the gestures and the moments
[12:41]where we feel them sort of coming back in a way, because the imprint never leaves, so it's just
[12:47]so poignant. Thank you, Siffy. I'm glad that I did very much want my story to to reach others that
[12:57]other readers could feel their own emotions and experiences. I think there's this misconception
[13:05]when a parent dies at an older age, or due to Alzheimer's, a long battle, or whatever,
[13:11]that it's okay, and it's not like sad, or you're not, it's not okay to have the same sort of
[13:18]trauma response, but it's so terrible no matter when it is, not to make it sound like it is,
[13:24]but it's tragic, and I could feel your loss in this book so tangibly, so thank you for that.
[13:31]Thank you. No, I was so lucky to, as I write in the book, the ways in which my mother
[13:40]did not, was not able to sort of fulfill her individual goals. I feel so lucky from her,
[13:50]I knew at a very young age that was very important for me to find my own way, in my own
[13:57]livelihood, and then I found literature and poetry, and my work as an editor and writer,
[14:05]and I do feel that that really has saved my life from sadness. I mean, you feel these sad emotions,
[14:13]but you also are deepened by them, and I think as my mother was, there's more empathy,
[14:23]and you have the role as editor at one publishing house, and then you write yourself,
[14:30]novels, and memoirs, and poetry, and everything else. So how do you, when you're writing something
[14:35]so deeply personal, how do you put on the more analytic editor had to your own work and your own
[14:43]family and some of the hardest moments of your life? That's a great question. How do I do it?
[14:49]You know, writing for me is, it's like you go down a rabbit hole, you tunnel in, and you don't
[15:00]quite know what's going to surface, and it's almost like a second language to me, maybe because
[15:08]I began writing when I was in college, I started out as a poet, and so I always felt that
[15:15]writing was a way for me to understand and express myself in a way that I couldn't really do
[15:24]with other people, that somehow through storytelling, through going down this rabbit hole,
[15:31]I mean, I always have an intention. It's not like, you know, it's a blank slate. I have
[15:36]have an intention that I really wanted to tell my mother's story as honestly as I could,
[15:43]and the only way that readers would appreciate it is if I didn't sugarcoat it. So that was something
[15:51]that I really set out to do, and as my wonderful editor, Peter Borland, who's here today, knows I
[16:00]went through various drafts to get where I needed to be, and then, you know, I'm very good at
[16:06]compartmentalizing. I've been told, and I think that I am, and also I'm very good at focusing,
[16:15]so when I'm working on my own writing, I'm extremely focused, and I really like to do it for one or
[16:24]two hours, and then leave it alone, and then I begin my day with the other responsibility,
[16:32]responsibilities of my life as an editor, working with colleagues in publishing, and my life
[16:41]as a mother and a wife and friend, and yeah. So for me, they all sort of connect into one hole
[16:52]in some strange way. One of the things that distinguishes this memoir from others is the fact that
[17:00]it is told in reverse, and that your mother's life, we start at her death and end at the very
[17:05]beginning, although there is a short epilogue at the end as well, and I was wondering why, why do
[17:11]that? Was that from the outside? From the outset, was that your intention, or did, was it in the
[17:17]editing where you thought, wow, this would actually be much more powerful this way? Yes, I'm glad you
[17:23]asked that question because people have started asking me that, and what I remember is that
[17:32]I had written some of the early, some of the chapters where I lost my mother and
[17:43]and the funeral and some of her living in the care home, and I went to a residency for,
[17:51]I like to do this when I have working on a new project, and I went to the T.S. Eliot house in
[17:59]Massachusetts, and of course, his books were everywhere, and so I was reading his wonderful poem,
[18:09]the Four Quartets, which has this refrain that keeps going about the end as the beginning,
[18:16]and how our endings are our beginnings and our beginnings are our ending, and I was thinking
[18:26]about that with my mother's life that it's all circular in a way, and so then I decided that,
[18:36]why don't I try this, let's see what happens if I could try to tell her story from when she was
[18:45]86 years old until she was born, but just through these pivotal periods and see what would be revealed.
[18:55]So it was sort of, I was interested in trying to tell a story in a way that would unfold
[19:01]for me in an interesting way, and I didn't know if it was going to work, and Peter helped me
[19:09]I think it worked, I'm giving it a check, yes, thank you, I'm very proud of it now,
[19:17]you know, I feel like it's the idea of seeing somebody disappearing through Alzheimer's and then
[19:24]slowly coming alive until she's a young child just felt to me like it was the right way to tell
[19:33]this story, the way by the way that you wrote about the end of her life, even the last couple
[19:38]decades of her life, and elder care in general and once she moved into a home and the people that
[19:44]you would see is waiting there with her, all of that was quite poignant. You wrote that she actually
[19:51]had sort of a midlife onset major depressive disorder and wrote through a breakdown that she had,
[19:58]which so precipitated and a change of
[20:00]parent diagnosis. Can you talk about that moment as well?
[20:03]Yes, you know, I think that what is so difficult about when a parent or I suppose a loved one
[20:14]begins to lose some cognitive abilities, it's not always a parent right away.
[20:21]So my mother was living in Cleveland and
[20:28]slowly I began to figure out that something wasn't right and so me and my sisters went back to
[20:35]Cleveland and we took her to the Cleveland Clinic where she underwent a neurological testing
[20:45]and the results and she had been experiencing depression and then the results of that
[20:56]they concluded that she had something called pseudo depression and that that what she needed to do
[21:07]was to deal with depression through medicine or through ECT and she became resistant to medication
[21:18]but what was really going on was that she was losing her way, she was losing her cognitive abilities
[21:27]and you know she for instance would drive she drove to the store millions of times and then
[21:36]found herself lost and when I came home one day there were posts at everywhere about things
[21:43]for her to remember and where this was and where that was and I was sort of thinking well maybe
[21:47]that's you know because she's getting older she was in her 70s but things began to become more
[21:56]difficult and my sister and I went to Cleveland to see her we felt like she wasn't doing well and
[22:05]and I write about this in my book when she came when we came there she really was in bed and was
[22:13]totally not able to get up and we didn't know what was happening so I called the Jewish family
[22:23]services and asked if they had a nurse that could come over and evaluate her and this nurse came
[22:31]to the house and I was so grateful because she said that the minute that she saw my mother she knew
[22:37]that she was experiencing dementia and so she told us to immediately take her to the emergency
[22:45]room at Lutheran Hospital a psychiatric, geriatric hospital and then she was there for three weeks
[22:55]and they did all kinds of testing and one of the ways that you can be diagnosed with
[23:03]Alzheimer's is through calcification in the brain through MRI plus she did a lot of other testing
[23:10]the good news was that that once she was in the hospital and was being taken care of she came to
[23:19]life again and the doctor told us that she was experiencing what they didn't see when they said
[23:26]that she had this pseudo depression was that the medications that she was taking were
[23:34]exacerbating her cognitive abilities so you know she was misdiagnosed but as I said the
[23:46]wonderful thing was that you know at this point she could still you know walk and
[23:52]have you know conversations and relate to people and she was ready to move into assisted living
[24:02]and she for those five years that she was an assisted living before more progression happened
[24:10]she was really happy and she fell in love a few times and you know she she loved the painting
[24:18]classes that they had and she would go to every lecture and it just made me feel so happy because
[24:25]I think she really wanted to be taken care of her whole life and so now she was in this environment
[24:32]where she was well just just to end on a note that I found so beautiful is when she was thinking
[24:41]more and more about reuniting with your father in the afterlife or whatever and she was reflecting
[24:48]more and more in their beautiful relationship those short lived and she was beaming to you one day
[24:53]and just said you know he chose me and that was so beautiful and then you said but mom you chose
[25:01]him too and then she like blushed and it was just this beautiful beautiful moment oh thank you
[25:08]maybe thank you for ending with that oh yeah thank you Jill thanks for coming on yeah thank you
[25:13]it's great okay another big round for Jill again