The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer is a lovely debut novel about thirty-six-year-old Clover Brooks, who lives in New York and is a death doula, spending time with people at the end of their lives.
Clover met her new neighbor and eventual friend Sylvie, and then Sebastian, who she met at a death cafe meeting. Sebastian's grandmother Claudia was terminally ill and he hired Clover to spend time with her. Claudia had been a photojournalist in the 1950s, and was to marry someone in the U.S. after returning from holiday in France. She met a local, Hugo Beaufort, and sailed to Corsica with him for ten days. She then still came back to the U.S. and got married, largely because she was expected to.
Clover and her new friend Sylvie researched and found there a Hugo Beaufort born in France in 1931, listed as a resident of Maine. She went to try to find him, only to discover he had passed away a couple of months prior, but she met his grandson, Hugo. Upon hearing about Sebastian's grandmother, Hugo guessed that she Claudia, who his grandfather had talked about her right before he died, and said she was the reason he moved to America. He and Claudia each requested their ashes be scattered in Corsica, where they were together.
Hugo found letters his grandfather had written to Claudia but not sent, the last one saying he had seen her with her husband and she looked happy, so he's going to leave her be. Clover gave to Claudia the letter, and others Hugo wrote which said Claudia the love of his life. She died content and her final words to Clover were "learn from my mistakes, my darling. Don't let the best parts of life pass you by because you're took scared of the unknown. Be cautiously reckless." Clover then came upon her neighbor Leo in the last moments of his life after a heart attack and he said to her "the secret to having a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life. Promise me, kid, that you'll let yourself live."
Clover received a package that Claudia had arranged to be sent, with a digital camera and several lenses. She embarked on a three-month trip traveling the world, documenting her time in a notebook from Hugo. The two then met in Corsica and scattered together in the sea Claudia's ashes and Hugo's grandfather's ashes.
It's a nice read and Brammer closes with "you can find meaning in anything if you look hard enough; if you want to believe that everything happens for a reason. But if we completely understood one another, if every even made sense, none of us would ever learn or grow. Our days might be pleasant, but prosaic. So maybe we just need to appreciate that many aspects of life - and the people we love - will always be a mystery. Because without mystery, there is no magic. And instead if constantly asking ourselves the question of why we're here, maybe we should be savoring a simpler truth: we are here."
