The Collected Regrets of Clover

by Mikki Brammer

I’m talking about that other scent, the distinct smell when death is imminent. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like that imperceptible shift between summer and fall when somehow the air is different but you don’t know why.

Grief plays tricks on you that way—a familiar whiff of cologne or a potential sighting of your person in a crowd, and all the knots you’ve tied inside yourself to manage the pain of losing them suddenly unravel.

It wasn’t that I was opposed to the idea of friendship; it’s just that if you don’t get close to anyone, you can’t lose them. And I’d already lost enough people.

To die, I knew, meant you were never, ever coming back. From that moment on, you only existed in people’s memories.

But the thing is, we all know we’re going to die—that’s guaranteed. So shouldn’t we be making the most of our lives anyway?”

After more than a decade, the pain had dulled slightly, but my grief hadn’t diminished. It had just taken a different shape.

I’d learned the hard way that when people ask you how you’re doing after a loved one’s death, they don’t really want to know. They want to hear that you’ve moved on because they can’t stand to look at your pain.

“If you want something you don’t have,” he’d said, “you have to do something you’ve never done.”

It felt unfair to hold someone’s pet allergies against them, but that would definitely make a relationship with him harder.

“I mostly regret putting the needs of others ahead of my own. But as a woman, that’s what I was taught to do. Your husband, your children, your parents—their happiness all mattered more. You were always someone’s wife, or mother, or daughter before you were yourself. It’s like I didn’t live my life for myself, as myself. Like I wasted what I was given.”

It’s easy to glamorize the path you didn’t take.

Respond, don’t react, Grandpa had always said.

“The truth is, grief never really goes away. Someone told me once that it’s like a bag that you always carry—it starts out as a large suitcase, and as the years go by, it might reduce to the size of a purse, but you carry it forever. I know it probably sounds clichéd, but it helped me realize that I didn’t need to ever get over it completely.”

‘While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.’

I wondered how long it would be until that look of wonderment in their eyes dulled and their curiosity stopped burning. When living became a habit rather than a privilege and the years ticked by unnoticed.

It’s funny how you don’t notice how significant someone’s presence is until it’s no longer there.

It’s so easy to see your parental figure through that lens alone, to think that their existence has always revolved around yours. But before they were parents, they were simply human beings trying to navigate life as best they could, dealing with their own disappointments, chasing after their own dreams. And yet we often expect them to be infallible.

Even though he died alone, he didn’t die lonely.

Grief, I’d come to realize, was like dust. When you’re in the thick of a dust storm, you’re completely disoriented by the onslaught, struggling to see or breathe. But as the force recedes, and you slowly find your bearings and see a path forward, the dust begins to settle into the crevices. And it will never disappear completely—as the years pass, you’ll find it in unexpected places at unexpected moments. Grief is just love looking for a place to settle.

And instead of constantly asking ourselves the question of why we’re here, maybe we should be savoring a simpler truth: We are here.