My sister’s death made me stare into the blackest darkness, grasping for somewhere I could still find her. Then I learnt the dead do accompany us. She was there inside me, as bright as the red of my blood...
From an author who lost her sister at 46, a rawly powerful account of love, grief and acceptance
MY SISTEr was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, but when death arrived, it was a total shock. She had been in hospital a few days before with a suspected blood clot on her lung, when her consultant called to tell me to come to the hospital, come immediately. She had a day to live. She knew she was dying because she had asked the consultant, who had knelt down by her bed and told her the truth. Nell was a warrior. She wanted the truth so she could go on to the next field equipped and ready. ‘A day,’ she said to my father, looking up at him as he stood, beloved, at her bedside when he arrived at the hospital. ‘I have a day to live.’
I wanted to know what that felt like, to know there was only a day left; I wonder if it gave you a shooting-into-another-universe feeling, as if you could inhabit an entire lifetime in 24 hours. I wanted to ask her what she was feeling so that I could feel it too and become a part of it with her, but instead I held her hands tightly and pressed my face against her chest, my heart against hers. Being in the hospital as my sister breathed for the last time had given me the sense there was another being very, very close to me, close enough to see its strange, beautiful, petrol-blue colours. And that being was death.
Nell died on December 8, 2019, at 4.20pm. She had been in hospital for a few days and we had spoken on the 7th, just a day before her consultant called me with his terrifying news.
‘Don’t worry, Clo, I’m going to pull through this,’ she said to me on the telephone on December 6. ‘We’re going to have lots more adventures together.’ The next day, blood results showed she was in severe liver failure. She was two years older than me — 46 years old — and all my earliest memories are formed from being her sister.
She had her own circus — Giffords Circus — and lived that circus with every atom of her being. She was an artist, and a sawdust ring full of performing people was the vehicle for her art.
In her final hours, a lot of people arrived to see her alive one last time — a whole circus of people walked into her room, tears rolling and rolling — and at one point someone told me that this moment, these hours just before she died, would be the hardest ones. It would never be harder than this, they said. They were wrong. In the days after Nell died, I moved slowly around the house with my shoulders hunched, like someone with an acute illness.
I thought about my relationship with my sister almost constantly. I didn’t know how to imagine myself without her. When I talked about her, I was also trying out new ways to talk to her which might help me reach back across death and communicate with her.
A lot of the time I didn’t hear or couldn’t properly make out the voices of other people talking around me, not even the voices of my husband Pete and my children, Jimmy and Dolly, who were 19 and 16 at that time, and Evangeline, Dash and Lester, who were seven, five and three. Her life is over, so you feel as if your life is over too. In fact, you want your life to be over. You would welcome it.
Often, I felt it would be exquisite to walk out of my house and not to come back. To vanish into the place I was before I was born and find my sister there.
Sometimes I needed to be told what to do, which clothes to wear or what to eat. Loss had been with me since the age of 16, when our mother Charlotte had a riding accident that left her with brain damage so bad, she never spoke again. But when Mum finally died, it was different.
She had been ill and unable to look after herself, or us, or communicate at all, for 22 years. By contrast, we had not seen death coming for my sister. And now she was gone, loss was everywhere and on everything like a black dust smudged over all the surfaces around me and even coating the inside of my heart and the crevices of my soul.
Nell and I were as close as sisters can be. A childhood lived always at each other’s side, twin beds in a room lined with soft toys, an adolescence stumbled through, trauma navigated together while it shaped us into everything that we were.
Something that really scared and confused me in those early days was my uncertainty about where I should save, and protect, the precious times we’d had together. No one else could look after those memories. If I forgot, would that mean our childhood had never existed?
Should I sit Pete down and tell him absolutely everything I could remember so that he would have that knowledge too? Would he understand the feeling of being small children together and how much I’d needed her to tell me when she shut her eyes at night, so that I wouldn’t be in the darkness without her?
How could I properly convey the hot feeling of fighting each other, all the way through our lives, from when we were very small, which is still like thorns caught in my palms when I remember it?
How could I properly explain this to him when I didn’t really understand it in words myself, only feelings?
The responsibility of being the sole keeper of these memories made me so afraid.
At other times it felt as though I was going mad. Five days after Nell died, I walked out onto the cold, wet ground in the field near our house in Oxfordshire, feeling the sharpness of the air like a salve, and I saddled up my horse and rode to the little brown brook which runs alongside.
But when I looked down I didn’t see the twigs and old leaves caught in it, but instead I saw Nell’s face and hands with her palms upwards as if she was pressing from inside the water, trying to get out. I screamed up on my horse because I was very scared, but also, more than anything, because I wanted to go back in time, to before she died.
And yet I also felt as though, if I just looked hard enough, I would find her still here. Alive not dead. One of the many letters that started arriving straight after her death told me they were so sorry I had lost her, and I could feel this opening something in my heart that made it beat faster.
Surely if something is lost, it can be found again? ‘Lost’ holds hope alongside hopelessness. I had lost a gold bracelet Pete had given me when I was 40 but found it in a drawer a year later. Something lost would be found.
And so I looked for Nell, and a lot of the time, even when I was talking about something else, like which train I should catch for work or who might
‘I saw her face and hands in the brook and screamed’
pick the children up from school, the thing my brain really was saying to me was ‘whereareyou whereareyou whereareyou whereareyou’, like an extremely loud and shocking alarm going off.
Mum’s accident proved to me that loss forges you in a crucible into someone different. Even now, in midlife, I have some friends whose parents and siblings are all alive and undamaged by accidents, and sometimes I look at them and wonder: what does that feel like? To have that certainty right into midlife and not feel death and loss hovering all the time, ready to take everything from you?
In February, two months after my sister died, I realised that the days of magical thinking were blotched by more obstinate, familiar emotions. Boredom, regret, irritation. Also anger, rage and fury, which came up out of some place deep inside me, a place I had not felt until it showed itself to me in this new, specific feeling of hatred for the fact of my sister’s death.
Sometimes, when I was standing at the school gate in the wind and the rain, holding a nylon book bag, I thought I could see her figure, in silver-blue or watery green satin (remember, her life was a circus proprietor, so to see her dressed in green satin and ostrich feathers was to see her at work), vanishing way beyond my sight and I had to just fold the rage up flat and tuck it inside me so that it didn’t cover everyone else and stop them breathing too.
Nine weeks after she died, I drove to her house in the Gloucestershire countryside to sort her clothes and organise her most personal possessions. The house was filled with art and objects that had been part of her circus, but which now felt dead. There were tapestries, costumes, sketchbooks, flags, masks, embroideries, but also all the paintings she had created almost incessantly in the last years of her life.
My stepmother and I sorted through racks and racks of clothes: a green sequinned Gucci bomber jacket, a floor-length red Marni snakeskin coat, a black lace Chanel scarf, sky-high Alexander McQueen boots. If throwing money at the problem of life worked, the proof manifested itself in my sister’s clothes.
In her room there was a fine layer of dust on the glass chest of drawers beside her bed. When she was alive, there would never have been dust there. When she was alive, her room would have sparkled. Blondie was playing on the radio as I drove home, and I knew I was pressing the accelerator too hard but I couldn’t help it. It made me feel light and easy in a way I hadn’t for ages. It made me think I might just vanish and that was a relief.
Sex was also a place in my head I could go to where the dark glitter of death had not settled. It was a whole new house full of rooms I could inhabit by pressing my naked body against Pete’s. It was a way of asserting myself against death and the things it had done and what it had taken.
In late spring, just as lockdown was lifting, a friend came to visit from London. I was excited. Evangeline and I made a cake and we sat in the garden, and after a chat, my friend said: ‘How are you?’
There was a sincerity in her voice that scared me a bit. People say this because they want you to really tell them how you feel, but if you answer ‘I feel furious, sometimes insane, very lonely, confused and often unstable, and especially angry with people with fully alive sisters and mothers’, it would be difficult to cope with. So I just said something else that was true: ‘I just really, really miss my sister.’
She looked at me and nodded. ‘I imagine you do... My husband’s granny passed away. But I suppose that was different. I don’t think I could cope without my sister,’ she replied, and in my head a very loud voice said to this woman: DON’T SAY IT. Don’t say what you’re thinking, because I know exactly what the sentence is that’s about to come out of your mouth and I do not want to hear it. DON’T SAY IT.
But she couldn’t hear the voice and so she went on: ‘I can’t begin to imagine how you must feel. There’s nothing like the bond between sisters, is there? I really couldn’t manage life without my sister. We’re so close. I really could not cope without her.’
She smiled a little and I concentrated on the slice of pink and yellow cake on the chipped plate. I wanted to take a knife and mash the piece of cake into the plate and then smash the plate against the wall of my house where the sun hit the cracks. I wanted to slap this woman who could not cope if her sister died — as if there was a choice — very hard in the face. She didn’t stay long after that and I was pleased social distancing rules meant I wasn’t able to hug her when she left.
The truth is that the loss of someone you love deeply is so awful you have to rearrange your brain dramatically to survive it. And as the hot days of that strange summer dripped into one another, despite my dizzying anger, I began to feel the dust slowly start to dissipate. Gradually I was gaining a sense that the death of my sister could possibly force me to create a life that was other than the one that I’d had before — stronger, bolder, more perilous but also more vivid.
Nine months after my sister died, some friends asked us to look after four brown and white Shetland ponies for them, so we cleared out the old barn Jimmy and his friends had used as an indoor skatepark, and turned it into stables. The distraction was like medicine.
The ponies needed me, and crucially they needed me outside the house. They didn’t need me in the way the children did. It’s hard to nurture the lives of young children when you are pressed up against death, and I know the intensity of my grief sometimes scared Evangeline and Lester. I am certain I was a much more difficult woman to have as a mother that year after Nell died. But when I was outside in the barn, there was an elemental clarity to the way I was existing. Filling up buckets of water or mixing a feed, even mucking out, is calming.
Walking around outside in the outdoor world is intensely soothing. And feeling a sense of rightness growing slowly around me over the course of that autumn was extraordinary. There were even days of joy, like little bubbles in the midst of this terrible sadness.
As the anniversary of my sister’s deathday approached, I thought about it all the time. If it had been her birthday we might have been planning a party: coloured cakes and golden champagne. Instead, I called a group of people who had mattered a very great deal to her and asked them to come to my garden.
We laid out a long table and I cooked sausages and trays of baked cheeses, and we drank red wine in the cold. I found I couldn’t really eat, or talk coherently either,
‘I had to fold the rage up f lat and tuck it inside me’
‘I’d got through the year — the biggest task I’d ever completed’
so I just sat quietly and watched the faces of the people I loved, and I tried to feel what the presence of death meant now.
Death, I had learned in the past year, is the invisible everything at the centre of all our lives. Getting through a year to the day since I had last kissed my living, breathing sister had been the biggest and most important task I had ever completed. And although I knew this wasn’t the end, I also knew, as I listened to her best friends talk of her in the light of the fire Pete made, that some kind of spell was over.
Her death had made me stare right into the blackest darkness I can imagine and sent me tumbling through deep time, reaching, grasping, clawing at some kind of certainty of where I could still find her.
But I had also learnt that the dead do accompany us, even though it wasn’t something I could have seen straightaway. I needed to walk through the jagged edges and most painful places of the past year to see the new shape of my sister emerging.
That shape would never be the one I wanted, but there was comfort, certainly, in knowing part of her would be with me for ever. I couldn’t lose something that was inside me, and actually was me, and I knew she was there, as bright as the red of my blood. n ADAPTED by ALISON ROBERTS from The Red Of My Blood: A Death And Life Story, by Clover Stroud (£16.99, Doubleday), out on March 10. © Clover Stroud 2022. To order a copy for £15.29 (offer valid to 24/2/22; UK P&P free on orders over £20), visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 020 3176 2937.