“I didn’t mean to keep count of how many people I’d watched die since Mrs. Heyland thirty- one years ago, but my subconscious was a diligent accountant. Especially since I was nearing a pretty impressive milestone - today the tally nudged up to ninety-seven.”
That’s a passage from Mikki Brammer’s debut novel The Collected Regrets of Clover. Clover is a thirty-six-year-old death doula in New York City. She’s hired to keep company with and give comfort to the dying. Her fascination with death began in first grade after her parents died in China on the same day that her beloved kindergarten teacher died while reading Peter Rabbit to her class. But it’s when her beloved grandfather dies alone while she’s traveling that she chooses death doula as her profession.
She documents each dying person’s life in her three notebooks: Advice, Confessions and Regrets so that in some small way they will be remembered. Except for her eighty-year-old friend Leo, she spends all her free time alone, sometimes watching romantic comedies, sometimes choosing a regret from her client notebook and fulfilling it.
After each death she often attends a meeting of one of the death cafes in the city. It’s at one of those that she meets Sebastian, who hires her to spend time with his mother Claudia during her last days. Unlike most of her clients, she becomes attached to Claudia and helps her erase one of her regrets while she’s still alive. This is a lovely novel with some very real things to say about living a full life without regrets and the realities of the grief process.
If you’re looking for a gentle novel about the taboo subject of death, then you must read The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer.
