History of a Suicide - Jill Bialosky

History of a Suicide - Jill Bialosky (2011)

In 1990, the authors twenty one year old sister gassed herself in her mothers garage, while her mother slept upstairs.  Years later, Jill Bialosky looks to put the pieces together and try to find out why.  Now grown up and ater suffering her own tragedies, she realises that it really is a life lost and thinks of all the things her sister missed out.

Thoughtful and sad, many of the beginning pages are terribly moving, I did find myself puzzled by the subtitle of the book, - 'my sisters unfinished life' which I found telling in itself.  That the author could not get over that her sister was missing out which is understandable.  Whereas I can see that this was the ending of her life, and although short and tragic, it was the journey she was meant to travel on.

I think that by the end Jill realized that although she was looking for a trail of crumbs she could piece together to find the cause, it in fact was more a deep prolonged sadness, and that seeing suicide as a way out of her problems, was like a switch that just turned on.

Suicide has touched so many families and friends, and it is hard to find reason with the decisions made, and it is the ones who are left behind who always wonder why and what if they had done or said something different.

4/5 - I think I will remember this memoir for some time.