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.

Even though I spent my days looking death in the face, I still couldn’t seem to accept that his absence from my life was permanent.

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.

When you grow up as an only child, you learn to inhabit your imagination almost as frequently as you do reality.

The new neighbor was here.

I really hope its sebastian

A stunned half smile was all I could offer. Sylvie was like a bee buzzing erratically around my head—perhaps if I stood really still and ignored her, she’d leave of her own accord. But the clumsy silence didn’t seem to bother her and she maintained her expression of mild amusement.

As a pair, we probably looked like a question mark seated across from a comma.

He reached for a box of the diner’s promotional matches next to the condiments. Singling out a green-headed stick, he struck the box’s flank and a small flame sprung to life. I watched the stick devolve from a crisp, pale yellow to a disfigured black as the fire slid toward his fingers.

This is such an impactful way to describe death

Gazing up at Grandpa’s towering physique, I felt a small pang of panic in my stomach. How much longer would he burn for?

I always had the best intentions of putting away my clean laundry, but those intentions usually dwindled somewhere between the laundry room and my front door. So for the past week, the basket had sat in its usual place in front of my closet, ready to be cherry-picked.

there was something beautiful about the tenuous reality of being human.

Sliding them on was like escaping to a private space of my own, observing the world rather than participating in it. I loved how the city moved at simultaneous yet contrasting paces.

“Wait, could we maybe—

this poor dude

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. And when I didn’t move on, the emails gradually trickled to nothing.

“The saddest part, my darling,” Claudia said, freeing the gold bracelet that had been catching her cardigan sleeve, “is that most of us are guilty of that with our loved ones. We get stuck in a routine and we look at them as we’ve always looked at them, without seeing them for the person they’ve become or the person they strive to be. What a terrible thing to do to someone you love.”

since Sylvie would likely demand details tomorrow.

If she doesnt end up with sylvie im gonna be so mad

“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 surprised me how Sylvie seemed to get me in ways that I didn’t even get myself.

Theyre in love

“And I’m coming with you.”

I wondered how much time would pass before he’d pause to elicit a response from me. When he finally did—exactly three hours and forty-seven minutes after we’d hit the road—it took me by surprise. “Want to listen to a podcast?”

HAHAHAHAA me core

“Do you think you could come back and pick me up?” A staticky pause. “Look out the window.” I looked from the Pringles to the gas pumps. Leaning against the rental car, Sebastian waved at me.

“What a beautiful thing, to help someone die with dignity,” Hugo said. “It reminds me of that Leonardo da Vinci quote, what is it again? Something like, ‘While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.’ I bet you’ve learned some pretty great lessons from it all.” Sebastian coughed and stared hard into his beer. My face glowed pink.

I already missed Claudia’s wit and warmth.

As I walked home, I began to realize that this was the first time I’d encountered a woman whose approach to life I could aspire to.

Closing my eyes, I breathed in the comfortably familiar blend of smoky pretzels, rotting trash, and car exhaust, and let the auditory chaos beat against my eardrums. I was still here, still living. But was I just existing out of habit?

“And I remember getting so angry about people trying to comfort me. They’d say things like ‘she’s in a better place now,’ or ‘at least you had the time you did together,’ or ‘she wouldn’t want you to be sad.’ And I just wanted to scream at them. It was like they wanted me to get over my grief so they didn’t have to deal with it.”

Don’t let the best parts of life pass you by because you’re too scared of the unknown.

“Promise me, kid,” he whispered, “that you’ll let yourself live.”

People who were complete strangers to me less than a year ago had forever shifted the trajectory of my life.

The fact that all of us were entangled—that everyone on the planet somehow shaped the course of one another’s lives, often without realizing it—felt like almost too much for me to comprehend.

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