Cadence of Vanishing | Alice Jones | Memoir

In this luminous memoir, psychoanalyst and poet Alice Jones weaves together love, loss, and the profound work of witnessing human trauma. Set against her Bay Area practice, Cadence of Vanishing follows Jones through four transformative years as she accompanies patients through their deepest wounds while navigating her own encounters with mortality.

With clinical precision and a poet’s heart, Jones chronicles her work with a young teacher facing terminal illness and a patient emerging from decades of psychic death. Interwoven with her own experiences of death and birth, she explores the delicate choreography between presence and absence that defines human connection.

From Berkeley swimming pools to family columbariums, Jones captures the cadence of vanishing that marks every life — how we arrive, love, and leave. Cadence of Vanishing reveals how deep listening becomes its own form of love, and how even in loss, we discover what endures.