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.

Alice Jones is a physician, psychoanalyst, open water swimmer, and is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Verse, and Best American Poetry. She has been awarded fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the NEA, and other literary prizes.

"Alice Jones's Cadence of Vanishing is a meditative memoir in the form of diary entries in which many of the passages have the delicate feel of poetry. This is a penetrating exploration of the inner life of a poet through perceptive observations of the ordinary, reminiscent of Lydia Davis. It is an experience to be savored." — Thomas Ogden, author of Aunt Birdie and Other Stories and The Parts Left Out

"A mesmerizing blend of memory, imagination, adventure, poetry, and, yes, medicine, this remarkable book takes us to intriguing geo-cultural terrains and introduces us to many endearing characters as they traverse through life, illness, old age, and death. In both its organization and language, the discourse is simultaneously earthy and erudite, sparse and stylish, and plebian and poetic. Short quotes from the world literature, author's own poems of which Glyn Maxwell would be proud, a few photographs, and psychoanalytic insights are sprinkled throughout the book and make its reading a sensually sumptuous experience. Jones's book depicts memoir writing at its poignant and literary best!" — Salman Akhtar, author of Psychoanalytic Listening and Keys and Caveats

"As it happens I began reading this memoir on Veterans Day, on the official Monday holiday that now obscures the memories themselves — painful events replaced by sales and ceremonies. What Alice Jones has to offer through this work is a searing, searching memorializing, informed by professional medical competence and further formed by her poet's ear and eye and nerve. This entire document is a faceted poem consisting of physical and emotional events adding up to a life lived fully consciously, fully aware of oblivion awaiting us but a living determination to hold onto the knowledge and even wisdom also lying in wait." — Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth