Dropped Threads 3 (24 page)

What I learned about my sister I had a profound need to share. For years now, I’ve spoken about Sarah at book clubs and conferences, at high schools and women’s clubs. I’ve talked about Sarah’s life and how we can change our thinking, our behaviour and our laws to allow women like my sister to live with dignity. When I talk about her, I try to keep Sarah’s spirit close—I wear the earrings she gave me fifteen years ago, gold-plated hearts with a pearl dangling from each one. I read her poems, her letters and her journal entries aloud to audiences; it is almost as if she speaks through my mouth. I bring a large photo, my favourite, in which she grins broadly, glowing with beauty and love of life, and ask people to look at her instead of me while I read her writing. Some do. Others close their eyes.

When I give these talks, I’m able to inhabit my relationship with Sarah fully, to honour her with each word I speak. Each time I’m drained, but I receive something precious all the same. And only now, as I write this, am I able to define what that something is: I receive Sarah back again, Sarah at her strongest and most loving.

•    •    •

Until recently, even though I talked about Sarah extensively and embraced every opportunity to meet someone who knew her or to hear another anecdote about her life, I kept myself as far away as I could from the circumstances of her death. I can see now that, right from the beginning, I was trying instinctively to protect myself. When Victim Services first contacted me several years ago, I was mortified. I didn’t
want to hear from them. I was not a victim, I thought, Sarah was the victim. I still feel a twist in my stomach if someone uses the word “victim” with reference to me.

When I speak to an audience, someone often asks me about my anger. Where is it? they want to know. Over and over again, I have told groups, calmly, that I cannot feel it, it’s too big to feel, I would not be able to bear it. I’ve also said that I do not plan to attend Robert Pickton’s trial, read the reports in the newspapers or watch the clips on TV that will describe what was discovered on the Port Coquitlam property. “I don’t want those images in my head,” I say. And I move on, calm and cool and in control.

Or I try to.

At one event recently, I was calm enough, but an elderly woman with a long braid wrapped around her head was not. She was seething with her own rage when she asked me about mine. When I said I didn’t want to know the horrors of my sister’s death, she cried out, “The truth will set you free!” and glared at me. She went on to say that we need to face up to the fact that the world is a sewer. I didn’t take her seriously, not at the time. I’d seen her before at another event, witnessed her anger, her seeming irrationality. She was a person to be “dealt with,” not listened to—just like the others who wanted to talk about the details of my sister’s murder.

No matter how outraged people seemed to be when they said such things as, “How could someone do that?” or “So, what’s up with the trial?” or “I heard that …” I felt that their words trivialized my sister’s death and my insides recoiled. My response actually had more to do with me than with them.

I understand now that each of those people speaking about Sarah’s death had been unwittingly pushing me closer and closer to the truth held out by the braided lady. Each of
those times, I recoiled because I didn’t want to look, because I was afraid to know who killed Sarah, how they killed her or how they disposed of her body after she was dead.

In the weeks that followed my encounter with the braided lady, her words rang inside my head and whispered in my ears. The trial is coming, I thought to myself, and suddenly the idea of keeping at bay all the gruesome details that would be revealed in that courtroom made me tired. I wasn’t going to be able to do it, I realized. I remembered that in the Bernardo case I tried not to take in what was being reported, but I didn’t succeed. I didn’t succeed then, and I wasn’t going to succeed now.

I decided I couldn’t bear the prospect of waiting for the trial to learn, along with the rest of the world, how my sister died. Such deliberate ignorance was exacting a cost. I was using enormous energy trying to keep at bay knowledge related to her death, but really I did know. Instead of keeping it at bay, I was actually keeping it buried. I had taken the bits of news that had been reported over the years and packed it in a deep dark place within me. Along with that information were all the thoughts and feelings it evoked—my anger at Sarah’s murderer, any anger I might feel toward Sarah herself, and all my grief about the manner of her death, all the horror of not having her body, of not knowing for more than four years what had happened to her.

•    •    •

Recently, with the help of my therapist, Patrice, and my husband, Roland, I have been easing up the protective lid of denial and peeking at the pain inside of me. I now know I must feel my anger and my grief. Patrice told me that the only way to the other side of all this pain is through it. There
is no other way past. I can either live my whole life on this side, using much of my energy to keep pain locked in and locked out, contorting myself to avoid feelings and thoughts that I don’t want to have, or I can let myself learn and feel in a supported way.

That is the key—the support, the talk.

Support can come from unexpected places. Recently, I read an interview between Oprah and Bishop Tutu. She asked him how he could hear all the testimony that was shared after apartheid ended and then go home and eat dinner with his family. “We were told not to be like vacuum cleaners,” he said, “taking in dirt and keeping it in a bag, but like dishwashers, taking in dirt, then passing it out. Otherwise we would have been traumatized.” That image has stayed with me.

Patrice, who is trained in helping people deal with vicarious trauma, is leading me to an understanding of how to approach what I kept buried for so long. She told me I needed to speak the terrible thoughts in my head, to speak them to someone who could reflect back to me what I was saying, someone who would not try to take away my pain, to diminish what I was saying, but who would be able to stay with me as I go through this in the coming months and years. That someone is Roland, my husband.

I must face not only the hard, cold fact of Sarah’s death, but also the details of the findings at the Pickton property. During Robert Pickton’s preliminary hearing in 2003, many of those details were revealed in the courtroom in Port Coquitlam, with the accused sitting behind glass and family members of many of the victims in attendance, along with two or three dozen journalists. I stayed only for the first three hours of the first day and then left, not prepared to hear what was going to be revealed in that room. A publication
ban kept the words that were spoken there from reaching the public. But the people who were present heard them, and the journalists recorded them.

At first, I thought I’d ask one of the journalists to pass on to me the written material from the preliminary hearing, but Patrice warned against that. The learning needed to be shared, she cautioned, spoken and heard in the same moment, talked about. So I arranged to meet with one of the journalists, a man who agreed to do that sharing. We were both afraid: He didn’t want to hurt me, and I didn’t know what he would say, how it would feel. But I had to trust him and trust the process that Patrice and I had discussed. Piece by piece he told me what he knew. Piece by piece I repeated it back to him and recorded it in my journal. The details were gruesome, explicit, and the implications were monstrous, but the two of us kept on going together until we were done.

After our meeting, I took a break, as Patrice had suggested, and then wrote about what had happened. I also wrote a letter to my sister—not recognizing that, once again, I was skirting something by bringing her to life for myself. I felt relief, a sense of completion. I had done what I feared for so long, and had survived. And really, hadn’t I known most of what the journalist told me all along? Hadn’t I, at some level, been working on assimilating this information for seven years? Now I had taken the last step—I thought.

I told Roland all that had happened, told him of my sense of relief, of completion. And really, I said, whatever happened to Sarah’s body after she was dead has more to do with her murderer than with her or with us. I went to bed and slept soundly that night, no nightmares lurking anywhere near.

The next day I went to see Patrice. I still felt jubilant. I opened my journal and told her everything, explaining why
I felt it would not be that difficult for me to move on. It took her all of three minutes to return me to reality, to have me sobbing in my chair. And I realized that I had been trying to do, once again, what I had been doing for seven years—pack away the horror of Sarah’s death, keep from facing it fully by focusing on her life.

That night Roland rented the movie
Troy
. It was not the best movie I’d ever seen, but we both found the story compelling. Toward the end, Achilles, in an act of grand vengeance, comes to the gates of Troy to engage Hector in single combat. Achilles triumphs, killing Hector. He then ties a rope around Hector’s ankles and drags the body behind his chariot back to the Greek camp. Under cover of darkness, the Trojan king slips into the Greek camp and into Achilles’ tent. “Please,” he begs, “return my son’s body to me.” At that moment I began to weep. By the time the movie was over, half an hour later, I was sobbing openly.

When I saw the Trojan king beg for his son’s body, I recognized the extent of my own loss for the first time. I understood that when Sarah’s murderer killed her, he committed a heinous act against us, against everyone who loved her. And when he disposed of her body in such a way that we would never see it, never be able to confirm her death through her body, never be able to bury her or scatter her ashes or place an urn containing her ashes in our family plot, he not only dishonoured her, he took something infinitely precious from us.

For seven years, I had tried to convince myself that what happens to a body after a person is dead does not matter. Now I know that it does. Now I can no longer separate Sarah’s murder or her murderer from myself.

So, this is what I know: It’s better to feel our feelings, no matter how painful, than to lock them away. Now my mind
and heart can turn to Sarah’s death, but I don’t need to force that. I may regret the seven years, but seven years is how long it has taken. I now know that our minds and bodies and hearts can guide us, but we need outside help as well. We must never try to face the horrors in our lives alone.

•    •    •

I am trying desperately to make meaning out of all that I have learned from the last numbing seven years. Someone killed my sister. That same person may have killed many other women and disposed of their bodies in such a way that even their bones are gone from us. Now, that murderer is my litmus test. When I hear generalities about human nature, about spirituality, my mind flies to him first. Yet I believe that the world is essentially a good place. When I was ten or eleven, I wept at Anne Frank’s words: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” I want to believe her words even now.

I don’t know if the game Mastermind is still available. I played it a lot as a kid. It involves trying to match a row of four or five coloured pegs to a hidden row of pegs with the help of clues from the opponent. It requires rigorous logical consistency. That’s a metaphor for how I try to live my life. I want rigorous, logical consistency. But sometimes life refuses to reveal its logic or to abide by logical principles. People are capable of the most terrible acts against one another, and people are capable of transformative acts of love. No explanation of the world that does not accommodate both of those truths is adequate. Sometimes, we try to make meanings that trivialize or ignore the range of human experience. I must reach some understanding of what someone did to my sister and of what she may have suffered, and in that
understanding, I must not diminish or shirk the possible truths, nor must I lose sight of love.

I’ve turned the dishwasher on, but it could be a long cycle, and I may have to stop it now and again to load in another item or two.

For seven years
I typed Informations—criminal charges—on multicoloured carbon paper. The yellow and pink copies were for our office, the white for the Court Registry.

Sixteen years later, I can still recite the section numbers for a variety of Criminal Code offences as if I were saying the alphabet: Section 267(1)(a), assault causing bodily harm; Section 348(1)(b), break and enter to commit theft, and Section 235, murder.

I began my stint at the Nanaimo Crown Counsel Office over a handshake and a promise that my part-time hours would grow into full-time. They did. Crime was on the rise. Back then, if I told anyone that I worked for the Crown Counsel they’d think I worked for a crown corporation—not the prosecutor’s office. We were invisible to law-abiding citizens; most weren’t aware that we existed. But the inmates at Wilkinson Road jail knew us well—our telephone number was written on the wall above the public telephone. Our small office included prosecutors and secretaries, and our clientele was the common criminal—mother, daughter, father, son—predator and prey.