Tower and Town, September 2022 (view the full edition)Clover Stroud - The Red Of My Blood
Stroud has done so. The Red of My Blood is a visceral account of her struggle to survive the first year of mourning her sister, described with characteristic emotional honesty and intensity. Gifford's death opened up the hairline fracture in Stroud's life. As with the riding accident in 1991, which left her mother profoundly brain damaged and Stroud effectively homeless at the age of 16, the death of her sister "shattered the globe of my life... Blood was everywhere, all over the floor." In the first days of bereavement colours flash before Stroud "as signs of messages to watch for when words were inadequate and... emotions overwhelmed me". Red was the colour of the undertaker's velvet chair, the ruby-coloured stones studding the silver box where Stroud wanted to hoard memories of precious times with her sister, the wine "soft like velvet to hide within", and the burgundy dress Gifford wore to perform at her travelling circus. In contrast, petrol-blue was the colour of a bird's underwing, the colour of death that engulfed Stroud. But as the year progresses, Stroud reassembles her world, facing down her fear of "what the darkness would reveal". She comes to realise the small miracle that she "couldn't lose something that was inside me, and actually was me, since I knew she [Gifford] was there, as bright as the red of my blood". Death remains incomprehensible but also "the invisible thing at the centre of all our lives". Visiting her sister's grave on the first anniversary of her death, she writes: "Walking through a year to the day since I had last kissed my living, breathing sister had been... the most difficult thing I had ever done." But as she leaves the grave, the feeling of living close to petrol-blue death disappears. "I am living and walking close to life - closer, I now see than I have ever walked before." Stroud cannot answer the question "Why is my blood so red?" but she can comprehend that: "To see pain, to feel pain, to be present to pain and then to alchemize pain into beautiful life seems to me to be something deeply important for a human being to learn to do. Maybe it's the most important thing any of us can learn." Mary-Vere Parr |
"Write a book about this," was one of the last things Nell Gifford said to her sister Clover Stroud as she lay dying of breast cancer in December 2019.