Death arrived for Nell Gifford at 4.20pm on December 8th, 2019. Gifford was a celebrated circus ringmistress, 46 years old and – in her father’s words – art. “She was always, always art.” In the hospital room that afternoon, two years her junior and 44 years her sister, was Clover Stroud. Stroud is a celebrated memoirist, and The Red of My Blood is a searing and seeing statement about what death leaves behind when it takes the ones we love.
A chronicle of a year in grief, The Red of My Blood is not exactly an easy read. This has nothing to do with Stroud’s writing, which is crisp, assured and unflinching. (On the idea of revisiting places evocative of her sister, she writes: “[It] felt like taking a small, very sharp, shiny, dangerous dagger and pushing it into the softest place in my throat, so I didn’t do this.”)
Rather, the challenge this memoir presents is, metaphysical. Stroud comes with a story of a quest – a "training in pain" – about how meaning may or may not be wrought from the end of existence. The question asked within the opening
chapter, in which we first meet Stroud – undone by grief and waking each morning to the sound of her sister tapping on the inside of her eyelids – is this: are you prepared to join? Framed another way, the question becomes: why do we read?
Thankfully, Stroud is up to the task of answering the questions her own memoir asks, and those who join her stand to be rewarded by what amounts to a hard-earned affirmation of this world – all the more beautiful for its fragility, all the more mysterious for its malleability.
We are all of us, always, poised to suffer the catastrophe that befell Nell and her sister Clover. From Stroud’s testimony we may draw solace: that the human spirit is capacious beyond our wildest imagining and luminous through the bleakest times. Like Seamus Heaney before her, Stroud writes – and we read – to “set the darkness echoing”.
In life, Nell Gifford championed a good circus as a “sublimely existential thing”. So too is this gem of a memoir on the spell cast by her untimely death. In death, as in life, she remains always, always art.
