Clover Stroud - The Red of my Blood: A Death and Life Story

The Wild Other

My Wild and Sleepless Nights

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First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Doubleday

Copyright Clover Stroud 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Anna Morrison

This is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some limited cases names of people and places have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

ISBN: 978-1-473-58971-1

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For Rick and Alexandra.

Walking through this time beside you has shown me we are Argonauts,

we are astronauts, we are deep-sea divers.

In October 2015 my sister was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. She was given chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but after being given the all-clear in 2016, she developed breast cancer again. She had more treatment, but after clear scans in 2017, the following year she learned the cancer had metastasized and spread to her bones. She continued to have treatment throughout 2019, and by November, despite her secondary diagnoses, her oncologist was cautiously optimistic about her future. He hoped shed have at least another five, possibly even ten more years. Ten days later, in early December 2019 she was admitted to hospital with a suspected small blood clot on her lung. She was expected to stay in for a week. Dont worry, Clo, Im going to pull through this, she said to me on the telephone from hospital on 6 December. Were going to have lots more adventures together.

On 7 December 2019, her blood results showed she had advanced liver failure. She died at 4.20 p.m. on 8 December 2019. She was two years older than me and forty-six years old.

Words. So many words to deal with in the days after death. Many of them were senseless to me. Sometimes they would seem to materialize from nowhere. Suddenly I would hear a voice: Mind yourself, theres a van, the lights havent changed yet. A womans voice, her hand touching my arm, to stop me stepping out in front of traffic on a kerbside in Oxford. I was walking through a city Id known all my life, but I was entirely lost.

Can I get you anything else? Would you like anything else? I thought I knew what the woman behind the shop till meant, but I couldnt make sense of the sounds coming from her mouth.

If you do decide on a burial in a portion of the land where she lived, you will need to find out if a watercourse runs through it. Its certainly complicated burying someone on private land, but not impossible.

That was at the undertakers, three days later, where I had gone to make plans. We were discussing an idea, and this one was that my dead sister might be buried in the field she owned beside her house. I was finding it easier to concentrate on the colours around him than on the words he said. They were a simpler place to exist within than the words he said to me, which landed in my head like dark rooks. These colours were better things to think about than his words: his black suit with a royal blue tie and the brown mahogany polished table in his office with its red curtains, the yellow roses, possibly synthetic, in a golden jug with a black pattern around it that looked Greek. And the tight, reassuring buttons of the red velvet chesterfield where I sat as we talked about the arrangements for her funeral. They were the only things I could make out that felt real and physical. My sister must be in a refrigerator somewhere in this building, I realized, as I ran my hands between the buttons, concentrating on them and pressing the tips of my fingers into the indentations in the red velvet where the buttons sat. I forced my thumbs into the material so that I could feel my body, and when I did that, I noticed that the ends of my thumbs went very red too, although my hands looked quite pale. And it was easier to concentrate on the shiny red velvet since it was too unbearable to think about either the watercourse which might run across her coffin buried deep underground, making her body disintegrate faster, or the shape of the refrigerator she was lying in, although that was the thing my brain kept circling back to. I wondered how cold it was inside that refrigerator. What temperature was the refrigerator she lay in? How long was it? How wide was it? Could I have fitted beside it if I lay down with her? How long could I have lain there stretched beside her?

Also, the golden jug with the geometric Greek pattern. As I thought about the refrigerator, I realized the golden jug was then the only thing I could see in the room.

I had tried to put make-up on before going to the undertakers. Mascara and eyeliner normally make me feel like a more clearly defined version of myself, and I needed this definition since I was aware I might be vanishing. Most of the time I moved slowly around the house with my shoulders hunched; if you had seen me, you might have thought I was sick. I moved like someone with an acute illness and had the outline of a very old person. A lot of the time I did not hear or could not 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 nineteen and sixteen at that time, and Evangeline, Dash and Lester, who were seven, five and three. When someone dies, there are so many voices and you dont know who they belong to or how to identify them. Sometimes you dont care who they belong to because what does it matter if the car insurance thats in arrears is cancelled, as the voice on the phone reminds you, or the back pain from that slipped disc you thought was so bad a week ago before she died or was anywhere close to dying does actually put you into a wheelchair, which is what the chiropractor you know quite well says will happen if you dont do the Pilates she is always talking about? 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. Mostly, the only voice you are listening out for is that of the one person you most certainly could identify, but which you now cannot hear anywhere. You are worrying what it might feel like to lose the memory of the sound of that voice amongst the noise. You wonder if it is possible to preserve the sound of the voice of the dead person in your head forever. You think of the many, many, many things you should have said to her, all through your lives together, to be completely sure, utterly sure, that she knew how much you loved her. If you really ask yourself the truth, you know she knew. But you still wish you had the chance for that conversation one more time. So all the other voices around you mean nothing.