As a young boy, Jim Bale's mother told him that his paternal grandfather had died in a shotgun accident while running to save piglets from a large hawk. As it turned out, her story was a lie. After his acceptance to medical school at the University of Michigan in 1971, his mother, a registered nurse, decided that since he was going to be "in medicine," he should know the truth - that his grandfather had most likely died by suicide, but since she had never asked her husband how his father had died, she had no further details to share. Haunted by the death his entire life, when Jim retired from the University of Utah and found himself in a world in which every aspect of life was on hold on account of the Covid-19 Pandemic, he finally found himself with the time to dig deeper into this tragic piece of family history to discover how his grandfather had died, and to try to understand his mother's reasons for withholding the truth from him for such a long time.
To this day, suicide remains a serious health concern in the American West, in general and in the state of Utah, in particular. The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that a suicide occurs every eleven minutes in the America and, not surprisingly, firearms are the most common means to that end. The Hawk on the Western Sky is a deeply personal memoir that the author hopes will help both people who are at risk of suicide personally, or others, like the survivors in Jim's family, who live with the aftermath.
Join us in welcoming Jim Bale to The Printed Garden Friday night, June 13th, to read from, answer questions about, and sign copies of his new book The Hawk on the Western Sky. This event begins at 7:00 p.m.
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