Notes In The Margin: ‘The Collected Regrets Of Clover’ – Mikki Brammer
I was given ’The Collected Regrets of Clover’ by a total stranger in a spontaneous act of generosity and trust. I was wishing her Eid Mubarak when we were interrupted by someone returning this book.
he saw me look at it with interest, she handed it to me. I was so taken aback by such unheard-of generosity in Mumbai, that I forgot to ask her if I could make inscriptions in pencil. And this book asks to be pondered. So instead, I make my notes in margins here. (Read my Goodreads review here)
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Grieving is life-affirming.
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How can there be compassion before there is patience to sit with a situation and people as they are being in that moment? People are in a hurry to dump off the responsibility to break bad news, to comfort someone or even just bear witness. Why is this so hard?
“The most important thing is never to look away from someone’s pain.”
‘THE COLLECTED REGRETS OF CLOVER’, MIKKI BRAMMER
Yesterday I finally said bye to a friendship with someone who either doesn’t want to or can’t do this anymore. It hurts. But it must be done. Maybe accepting that is a version of being willing to sit with their pain because what else but fear of pain could make a once loving person turn cold?
It is easier for me to do this in this situation now than it is in my 20 year old memories of the people who forced me to break the news to a child about her father’s passing at her school bus stop. I’m an adult now but inside the rawness of that memory I’m still too young and it feels impossible to bear the cowardice of adults who should have been better. And so I must carry their cowardice as unprocessed pain years after they have passed too. Survivor’s rage is real.
I wonder if like some kind of ghoul, I’m addicted to grieving as a way of being affirmed in my existence. I did after all, write a poem about a woman dying of brain tumour when I was 8. I had to ask my parents what was something that could make a person die.
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I keep breaking off to look at my phone. I spent half an hour reorganising my TBR list and now all my borrowed books (including this one) fill one shelf. It’s a cheerful bookmark in this depressing journal of life I’ve been writing for weeks, feeling like this city that I’ve romanticised so much is dying, being consumed by greed & ugliness. This shelf is now my reminder of the communities, friends and strangers trying to keep it alive with generosity and trust. After all, like Ruskin Bond says in the book I was discussing this morning, “People don’t mind stealing books and flowers.”
Now I’m even okay with not reading conscientiously “with concentration, without distraction” as my school teachers would have put it. Really reading, and reading a good book is a conversation. It deserves the idle pauses of staring into thin air, of random interruptions of bathrooms and burps and giggles and excuse-mes. Life, like a good book or a compassionate person, can’t be curated all the time. It demands its mundanity and messiness.
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A death cafe, what a concept. I roll my eyes at the Hollywood New Yorkiness (yuckiness?) of it. I sit with the Virar local of thoughts that scream that this would never work in India because we see so much death and too much life and we have no space to call our own, let alone to escape to. All my intelligence is intrusive thoughts. All my taste and politics is reactionary.
And then I read. I’m reminded of Fight Club. The book, of course, and the support group junkies. And on cue, this book says,
Is that what I do and what is done to me? Indians don’t know boundaries. Even as we struggle to survive the lack of personal space, we cling to others. I must hop community discussions with more discernment. And I must be more disciplined in how I engage during and afterwards. All of it is a death cafe of a kind, after all.
“I usually avoided going to the same death cafe too frequently. Though each session attracted newcomers, there were inevitably regular who would latch on to any familiar face.”
‘THE COLLECTED REGRETS OF CLOVER’, MIKKI BRAMMER
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The air of confidence that came from knowing you were well loved.
‘THE COLLECTED REGRETS OF CLOVER’, MIKKI BRAMMER
That thought doesn’t sit right with me. I’m very confident. I am not well-loved or even loved at all. And most Indian men are deeply beloved to a fault but are poster children for low self-esteem.
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I don’t usually like self-identified introverts especially in my reading. They come off as so superior and entitled. Starting up conversations especially with strangers is hard for everyone. Public speaking is one of the most common fears in the world. Socialising drains any human being. I hate when people like these act like they were denied some special gift that was handed to people like me and because of that it becomes everyone else’s job to endure their rudeness and misbehaviour.
But Clover doesn’t feel that way. I inherently mistrust her because of the above and I feel like she’s silently judging me under the guise of “I’m an introvert.” But there’s a calm impersonal tone to her judgements of the people at the cafe that is reassuring. When it’s impersonal, it doesn’t feel malicious.
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I think that’s true of anytime people in this narcissistic city ask how you’re doing, not just after a loss. Because something somewhere is always dying. We’re in mourning permanently.
It feels like most relationships are nothing more than accidentally getting in the way of someone else’s wild rampage through disappointment. I don’t want to get dumped on or run over either. I’ve seen too much of grief misbehaviour.
So I don’t ask how people are doing. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I cannot afford anymore for other people to weaponise that care against me.
“I’ve learnt the hard way that when people ask 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.”
‘THE COLLECTED REGRETS OF CLOVER’, MIKKI BRAMMER
If you’re doing okay, you won’t talk about it. Even the braggarts are really screaming at you to rescue them. But if you are anything less than stellar, you will air it to everyone and I just can’t get in the way anymore. I have no FOMO about other people’s trains of thought. I just want to avoid getting run over by them.
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Clover often talks about Western society’s need to quantify grief, to see a finite end or failing that, treat it as a problem to be solved. Indian society has the opposite problem. I think we are addicted to grief.
Photographs of ancestors are hung forever in homes handed down through generations. The ravages of time are blamed on every subsequent generation and that guilt used to keep them indentured to long dead people’s memories. We may have banned Sati (which if you’re not Indian, was a practice that forced a wife to climb onto the funeral pyre of her husband and be burnt alive with him).
But we continue to self-flagellate as a society. Of course at an individual level, the instinct for survival kicks in so we punch down and push it onto others who can’t hand it away. Passing the grief parcel. Worshiping something is not the same thing as respecting or processing it well.
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I don’t want to live forever. That feels burdensome and boring. Humanity doesn’t truly change. And technology may morph but it’s not really new. More money, power, connection, more mores.
But one shift that this book caused in me was how I think about my own death. And yes, I think about it a lot, have my whole life. I wanted to die alone, quietly and of my own choice. It’s why I have pondered the ethics of euthanasia as well as suicide. Why do we owe the world survival, no matter how gruesome it may be? And because of the way the world attacks you if you disagree, I designed a story of my death in my mind. Of walking into the sea at night and never returning. No footprints, carbon, legal, spiritual or otherwise.
But very early in the pages I had a thought that crumpled that story in my brain and threw it away. I want to die in the company and knowledge of being loved. Of course, not a single one of us can plan our deaths. But the way we think about it, might inform the life we live.
I’ve lived from fear, trading pieces of my self-esteem, hoping for love in return. No wonder my scripted end to my story had me depleted and escaping from the endless one-way demands. I would not want to think of any of these people on my deathbed. I wish I hadn’t wasted my time on him is a regret too. No, I’d like to say bye perhaps with a little sadness for having to do so. And that can only be if I’m leaving a place that has been happy and loving.
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I don’t think this is always true. Some people don’t need stuff. It’s like suggesting that labels are the only way to respect a person (an idea that makes Indian men refer to you as ji while imposing menstrual taboos, gendered labour and street harassment at the same time).
People are overwhelming. Too often they live messily, vomitting their feelings onto others, cluttering up spaces with messes in lieu of conscious love. And this book is about people who are too scared to acknowledge death.
We are just about willing to admit that funerals are for the living, left behind. What nobody says is that they’re also ways for the community to help share the burden of cleaning up after a person. There’s a reason that most cultures in the world bring food to the homes that have lost someone. It saved the bereaved the daily labour of eating, eases the guilt laid on them for surviving and offers a communal ritual which is an invitation to share.
“I’d often watched as lifetimes of memories were unceremoniously discarded by bereaved family members eager to sell the home of the recently departed. The promise of a chunk of money often robbed people of their scruples.”
‘THE COLLECTED REGRETS OF CLOVER’, MIKKI BRAMMER
When my grandmother died after a long illness, peacefully, I felt grim but not bogged down. I had gone through this before with other family members (and sadly some friends too). Late that evening, after the cremation and the visitors had left, there was a knock on the door. A young man, a stranger, stood carrying several packaged food trays.
He said he lived in a building nearby and had heard that an elderly lady had passed away. He apologised for coming so late and said that he had just returned from work when his mother told him she had heard about it. It was just the two of them and she was not able to move out alone so she had had to wait till he came home.
I put food trays down on the table gently as he continued speaking to my uncle. Then, he suddenly turned to me and said,
“I know you are South Indians. This is all vegetarian food. It was bought outside, not cooked in our house.”
That was his way of saying, perhaps you may not want to eat food cooked in the house of a Muslim. Or perhaps you are vegetarian and would not like to touch food that comes from a non-vegetarian home.
I have never forgotten that act by a stranger, offering up condolences and support in the most respectful form of all – by taking their own ego out of the equation. I did not think I could be surprised at another funeral.
Grieving is life-affirmation, after all.