Sister, where are you? – Clover Stroud mourns her beloved sibling

‘CERTIFICATE IS NOT EVIDENCE OF IDENTITY,’ the freshly issued death certificate read. In the craziness and shock of grief for her beloved sister Nell Gifford, who died at 4.20 p.m. on 8 December 2019, aged 46 (‘Cause of death: metastatic breast cancer’), Clover Stroud found herself clinging to those capitalised words.

‘Yes, the certificate was wrong… My sister was not the deceased and the very certificate I was holding was telling me that.’ She started searching for her everywhere. ‘Whereareyouwherareyouwhere-areyouwhereareyou’ she asks for one whole page of this book in an enlarged typeface denoting the din in her head. She feels as if she’s setting out into the evil depths of a forest, but what will she find? It becomes clear that her sister is not present in the ‘killer robin’ pecking away beside her as she does the gardening; nor in a twinkling star that is nothing more than a star.

This terrifying memoir of the first year of grief takes us deep into the emotional and physical wreckage caused by the premature death of a beloved. ‘What does missing her feel like?’ asks the kind therapist on Zoom in the summer of 2020. Unable to control the contortions of her face, Stroud explains that ‘it felt as though someone had scooped out the entire inside of my body’.

She’s a vigorous and fearless writer, grabbing us by the throat to describe life’s horrors and her responses to them, filling her pages with the magnetic force of her own life as wife, lover and mother of five which somehow has to go on. Wild swimming, cooking, mucking out the Shetland ponies, dragging the children up to the Ridgeway in the howling wind, sex, masturbation, smoking, drinking and taking Valium all have their various anaesthetic effects: Stroud likes to blast herself and us with physical sensations.