‘DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME, I’M GOING TO BE A LEGEND,’ NELL SAID. SHE WAS RIGHT

diagnosed with advanced cancer in 2015. As the cancer moved through her body, Nell turned to face life – and death – straight on with a clear-eyed courage that was breathtaking for everyone around her.

Nell had her darkness; that trauma we carried could not be escaped but an incurable cancer diagnosis made her more alive than ever, not less.

She adored her children more than anything and there was the circus, of course – her passion – but her creativity crackled like something hot, burning fast and hard at the end of her life. Nell was an artist and writer as well as circus boss, but she started creating huge embroideries, and was always painting and drawing.

On holiday in the summer, we lay on the salt marshes together as she sketched all seven of our children as they fished for crabs. She was always turning life into art.

Nell was with me in those years of being a single mother, but as her cancer became more advanced, I supported her. I was with her on the day of a very bleak prognosis in 2017, which Nell reacted to by going to a jeweller and buying herself a huge gold ring. I was with her again a year later when we were told she had secondary cancer.

Death had stepped into the room with us now, a third figure in our relationship as sisters, but there was light, too. On the day of her secondary diagnosis we went to one of the meadows near where we grew up. We lay among fritillaries and bluebells, unable to find words to explain what was happening. Instead we laughed, looking back at our childhood, the times that had made us. I slept in Nell’s bed that night, and again at the end of last summer, when more results showed that the cancer had spread again.

‘I love the days of bad test results because you always come to stay,’ she said, then we both fell asleep under eiderdowns we’d slept beneath as children.

Sometimes, in my life, I have felt like a cut-price version of Nell. I am smaller, my voice less deep, my hair less bright blonde. Nell liked to buy very expensive clothes and could easily drop a lot of money at Gucci, while I like a bargain in a second-hand shop. In the last few years of her life Nell started to look almost otherworldly. She wore circus costumes all summer but off-duty she sometimes looked like a hip-hop star wearing gold jewellery, extravagant floor-length furs, outrageous trainers and massive shades. Once, when we were skirting around the issue of death, she said, ‘Wrap my children in your love and look after you, but Clo, you don’t have to worry about me at all. I am going to be a legend. A dead legend.’

She was right. It’s almost a consolation, when the pain of missing her becomes too acute, to remember the way she laughed right in the face of death. She died very suddenly and her death was powerful, beautiful, profound and dramatic – just like her. She is a legend, although she’s my sister first. I am learning to be less scared of the darkness without her.

Clover’s memoir, My Wild and Sleepless Nights, is published by Doubleday, price €20.99. Follow Clover on Instagram @clover.stroud

…STEPHANIE SOFOKLEOUS’S

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