The Collected Regrets of Clover

by Mikki Brammer

“Well, my dear, just as we don’t know how long a match will last until we light it, we never know how long a life will last until we live it. And often there are factors that we have no control over.”

“Whenever I moved to a new city or started a new relationship, I’d always change my perfume,” she’d told me. “That way I’d be able to look back and relive my best memories from that time whenever I smelled it. So whenever you feel a shift or start a new chapter in life, find a new scent to go with it.”

“That’s because hummingbirds rarely stop moving. Their wings beat up to eighty times a second, which creates the humming sound that their name comes from.”

It frustrated me that society was so determined to quantify grief, as if time could erase the potency of love. Or, on the other hand, how it dictated that grief for someone you knew fleetingly should be equally as fleeting. But while a mother who miscarries might not have ever had the chance to hold that child, they had plenty of time to love them, to dream and hope for them. And that means their grief is twofold—they’re not just grieving the child, but the life they never got to experience. Who are we to tell anyone their pain isn’t worthy?

And that’s what photography is all about—making people feel seen. Of course, we look at people every day, but we rarely stop to really see them for who they are.”

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.”

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

“Just because no one’s there to witness it, doesn’t make it okay.”

“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.”

When someone has always been there for you, it’s easy to assume they always will be. And then, one day, they’re not.

“But the secret to a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life. Putting your heart out there. Letting it get broken. Taking chances. Making mistakes.”

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.

The secret to a beautiful death is living a beautiful life.

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. But perhaps that’s the point. Do we actually need to understand the world and all its patterns? You can find meaning in anything if you look hard enough; if you want to believe that everything happens for a reason. But if we completely understood one another, if every event made sense, none of us would ever learn or grow. Our days might be pleasant, but prosaic. So maybe we just need to appreciate that many aspects of life—and the people we love—will always be a mystery. Because without mystery, there is no magic. And instead of constantly asking ourselves the question of why we’re here, maybe we should be savoring a simpler truth: We are here.