Not many of us have to endure for years the disappearance of a loved one. To discover that the loss was due to horrendous murder is even rarer. Yet, in places like Kosovo or Kurdistan this experience is something of a commonplace. The anger, indeed fury, can reach out to strike down whoever or whatever is deemed responsible. Justice is not always easy to be done. Killing is easier. So the cycle continues. Feuds have not yet gone away. Marian began the exploration of her experience in an article 'Salvaging the Sacred' for The Guardian three years ago (published 18 May 1996). Here she continues her quest, believing that through the writing she can help us all. We support her in her endeavour. Eds
Lucy Partington, my sister, "disappeared" in December 1973. In March 1994 we learnt that she was one of the, at least twelve, young women and two unborn children murdered by Frederick and Rosemary West. The implications of this trauma for my own family, and for the society within which this crime manifested, are serious and deeply challenging. It leaves me with huge questions.
What are the roots of this human behaviour that has caused so much pain and destruction? How could it continue undetected for so long in a society that claims to be civilised? Is it possible to find a way forward that leads in the direction of healing for everyone who has been affected by this crime, including the perpetrators?
At a time in our world when the cycle of violence and abuse rages on, towards the end of a century when many millions of people have murdered, tortured, and abused each other or themselves, it feels vital to work towards understanding and transforming this cycle that erodes self respect and promotes cruelty. We must travel from a state of ignorance into a state of understanding. We must help each other to understand the violence that festers and erupts in all human beings, and to know the way towards compassion that heals.
If we do not know ourselves, how can we understand or know one another? How can we move in this direction if we have no guides, no experience of anything else? Ignorance involves the disease of separation, the pain of isolation, the destruction towards others or oneself that comes from this state which is focused on self-concern.
The way towards understanding takes risks. It stands through the seasons, the cold, the dormant, the rain and sun, swelling into a fruit that will be picked and eaten by others. It is there to be picked and shared. It grows with the knowledge of its picking, its rotting, its return to earth. It grows in the soil that feeds us all, the humus, our common humility in the face of death. The rotting piles of our mistakes, that led us to turn our backs, lock our doors, wallow in complacency, watch the violence and suffering of others on a screen, must be investigated. If we can experience the fact that this behaviour separates us from a real understanding of the enormity of our connectedness with all forms of life, we can aspire with passion to know and live a real progress that is manifest in acts of kindness and compassion.
In December 95 I began to write. Writing became my way of searching for meaning. I began a painful inner journey which involved going into the basement of 25, Cromwell Street and carrying Lucy's truth to the top of a mountain. Writing became a way of allowing myself time and solitude to experience my grief, by finding words and images as a structure for my own healing.
Sometimes I felt that I was risking the disintegration of myself without the assurance that a new whole would emerge. But I did not seem to have the choice to turn back. I knew that I would have to spend days when the words were nowhere to be seen and the sky was dark. But gradually I found trust in this as part of the process of creativity and healing. I was rescuing and reclaiming Lucy's truth and finding a depth of compassion that I had never known. I felt that I was being given an enormous gift that I must share with others.
Five weeks before Lucy was murdered she was received into the Roman Catholic church. Her teacher was Jesus. During her terrible crucifixion did the words "Love thine enemy" hold any truth for her? Could she pray? I feel as if she has left me with that challenge.
There are many degrees of response to violence, abuse or insidious acts of disrespect. Expressions ranging from bitterness and the desire for vengeance to the less overt, but crippling emotions such as suspicion, lack of trust, anxiety and perhaps worst of all a complacent indifference. Everyday we see examples of individuals, races and nations wriggling in this vicious trap, struggling to heal a legacy of profound abuse: the parents and friends of Stephen Lawrence, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, South Africa, Kosovo. I am learning that forgiveness involves moments of hopeless despair, rage, grief, fear and yet significant insights that leave an encouraging glimpse of freedom. Forgiveness has its own pace and direction. I am learning to yield to its wisdom.
During my work as a homeopath I have observed many times that unresolved grief is often at the root of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dis-ease. The need to face and experience the parts of our selves that we would prefer to edit out, because they are too painful, the need to be listened to, are vital parts of this journey towards knowing who we are and being able to express our fullest human potential. Suppressed pain has two extreme outlets in our society: suicide or murder.
My work is about reclaiming my relationship with myself, others and all forms of life so that I can experience a deeper feeling of being alive in a way that connects me with the intensity of the present moment in a more spacious, encompassing, compassionate way. I am reaching towards a deeper understanding of the huge love and grace involved in that realisation of my spiritual potential, which comes in the nurturing of myself and those whom I need to forgive and be forgiven by.
This journey involves sitting with the darkest nooks and crannies within me, that are revealed as I hold myself in the light. I have to try and deal more honestly with the conflicts and painfulness of coming into real unity with myself and others. I am learning about true ignorance in the Buddhist sense of being unskilled.
I was born three years after the end of the Second World War. As a child my nightmares raged with images of fear and human demolition. I inherited an undigested legacy of human atrocity. The karma of denial has to have an outlet one day. Had these pictures entered my blood through some strange inter-uterine process of osmosis? It is easy to define one's life with a drive towards order, routine and comfort; to construct a devotion to the perfect home, free from the threat of bombs and Nazis. How does my heart carry a residue of destruction, like the grain of sand in the heart of a pearl?
April 1994 my daughter Marigold wrote: "When Mum arrived with my grandparents it all seemed so false and unreal. The purpose of their visit was because Mum was getting anxious that we would be disturbed by the media presentation of the event. It was lucky that she came when she did because Lucy's picture and an interview with my granddad were on the 6 o'clock news. They had also dug up four more bodies over the weekend. They told us that they had spent two hours in the police station that day and that it was very likely that Lucy was one of Frederick West's victims. That night I had the worst nightmare I had ever experienced. I dreamed that I was trying to find someone's house and people kept directing me to 25 Cromwell Street. When I got there I opened a huge black door and fell down these concrete steps into a cellar which was pitch black. But I could just about make out the bones of the four skeletons. They weren't frightening, they were just lying down. Then two people with no faces turned on the light and tried to kill me. The fear was immense. I had this dream every night for the next week. I was constantly imagining horrifying things in 25 Cromwell Street. I took an obsessive interest in newspapers and television. It was in the headlines for weeks. Every day another body was being dug up."
Marigold was 16 years old.
Lucy and I used to enjoy reading and discussing T.S. Eliot together because we loved the concept of "the still point of the turning world" (The Four Quartets), the exploration of the intersection of time with eternity. Lucy's focus was on truth and beauty. She was single-mindedly and passionately exploring the deeper meaning of life; immersed in art, literature and religion. Somehow she was untouched by the impact of the 60s and yet very much in touch with deeper values which she expressed in a way that was "indelible" (to use a word chosen by one of her friends). She was emerging into adulthood with a powerful inquiring mind and a sense of vision.
During her last free evening, 27th December 1973, Lucy visited her physically handicapped friend in Cheltenham. She left in time to catch the bus back to Gretton. Her satchel contained my last present to her. It was a Victorian cut-glass jar, the right size to hold a night-light candle. It was the colour of amethyst, and could be hung on a Christmas tree or in a window by its wire handle, casting a soothing, pale-purple glow, resonant of sunlight shining through stained glass in a place of worship, meditative; or maybe the colour of the air at dawn, just before the sun appears. Lucy had been delighted with it, and talked of using it as her nightlight when she was back in her hall of residence after the Christmas holiday. Also in her bag was a book called 'Pearl'. This mediaeval allegory about the premature death of a pure maiden traces her father's grief and his journey towards the consolation in knowing that she was redeemed and saved, and that he can rejoin her only by resignation to the will of God and through death. Finally there was the letter of application to the Courtauld Institute of Art to do a postgraduate course in Medieval Art.
It was never posted. This is where, for me, it all goes into slow motion. The moment when Lucy, satchel swinging on her shoulder, hurried through the darkest of nights. There was a national power cut due to the fuel crisis. She was intending to post the letter before the bus came. The moment when Lucy's life met its opposite.
I have learnt to value and respond to my dreams. In April 1994, several weeks after Lucy's bones were removed from Cromwell Street, I had a dream. In the dream, I had asked the pathologist what was left of Lucy. He told me to go and look "in that pink sack over in the corner". In my dream the sack looked like a present. I opened it and found what looked like a toy. It was a skeleton kit. Each bone was numbered like a pool ball, a coloured digit floating on a white disc. Next, the 'kit' assembled itself into a full size skeleton which stood before me. I felt the need to embrace it. As I began to put my arms around it I knew I was holding Lucy. The skeleton became Lucy, a palpable being. She moved closer and gently rested her head upon my shoulder. I awoke with the feeling of the joy of finding her, of being reunited, of being there for her. I knew that I had to find a way of acting this out, of cherishing what had survived of her physical body.
I arranged to go to Cardiff with two close friends to perform another ritual. It was time to rescue and protect, in some way, what remained of Lucy. We went in the spirit of love with a need to make the experience more real and personal. The Investigation Team at Gloucester kindly made the practical arrangements.
I would like to thank the dear man who allowed us to go beyond merely sitting in a chapel of rest next to a full sized coffin covered with a purple cloth fringed with gold tassels. I will never forget the look of understanding that came into his eyes when I emphasised that I actually wanted to place some special objects in with Lucy's bones. He unscrewed the coffin to reveal two cardboard boxes. The larger of the two was exactly like the boxes I keep my A4 files in, pale grey DIY 'Archive system', about 12" deep, 15" wide and 20" long. I felt a moment of panic. I pointed to the smaller of the two boxes, which was plain brown with a hinged lid, and asked, "Is her skull in there?" As he nodded and began to lift the lid, I was filled with the knowledge of what to do. A feeling of strength came over me. As we drew nearer I gasped at the beauty of her skull. It was like burnished gold and it was something that was part of Lucy that had survived to tell the tale. At that moment I was full of the joy of finding something that had been a part of Lucy after all these years. Not a glimmer of fear, not a morbid thought entered the experience. I lifted her skull with great care and tenderness and kissed her brow. I marvelled at the sense of recognition in its curves and proportion. I wrapped it, like I have wrapped my babies, in her "soft brown blanket", her snuggler. I pressed her to my heart. Before I placed her skull back I laid a branch of heather entwined with sheep's wool from the top of Plynlimon in the bottom of the box. I visualised the space and beauty of the wild mountain top, the brown peat, the sheep, the warm wind, the distant range of receding mountains, the top of the world with its feeling of freedom, close to the sky, a place Lucy would have loved, a place that evokes the Welsh roots of our ancestry, offering it with so much love.
When Lucy was 11 years old she had given me a little woven, woollen bag. It says a lot to me about her qualities then. In order to make the bag she collected pieces of stray sheep's wool from the fences and hedges, probably from a field known as "the top ground" where we kept our pony. Then she made the carders to tease out the wool by breaking off individual thorns from rose bushes and pushing them through two rectangles of cardboard. Next she spun the wool with a spindle made from a pencil and a cotton reel. Finally she made a small loom and wove the spun wool into my much treasured bag. The whole process must have taken days of intense concentration, patience and a determination to follow an idea through in practice. It speaks of her gentleness and her generosity, and her desire to get back to first principles. The bag is one of my most treasured possessions, I keep my embroidery threads in it.
During that Cardiff visit a step towards peace had been made. Through that experience I had the opportunity to transform the language from the crude butchery of the basement towards a poetry that we shared in our childhood. We were united again within the "still point of the turning world". Something had been shifted.
After many rituals and the passing of time, I have laid Lucy to rest. I then found myself turning towards the basement and the Wests again. It was time to face my own potential to "write off" the Wests as inhuman monsters. After a Buddhist retreat I made a vow to try and forgive them. Yet, later that day, rage rushed up from my navel, dashing its heat and power against the inside of my skull, swilling, scouring, eroding like a river in flood. It had no logic, no reason, no means of expression. It was a murderous fury. Its energy was terrifying in its involuntary seizure. I pulled my hair, banged my head on the bed, screamed, rushed outside and stamped and clawed at the earth. I dribbled with impotence. I had experienced the meaning of apoplexy but while I was in its grip I had no words, just a roar that tore the membranes of my throat.
When words returned, anger and contempt riddled my mind. Why should I waste a second further on these monsters who were responsible for abducting, molesting, raping, killing, and chopping Lucy up and hiding her from us for twenty-one years? The enormity of the burglary and demolition of my sister and the suffering that followed in its wake, spreading its pain with the indifference and terrible destruction of an earthquake, ruptured the defence of my logic's premature compassion.
My heart turned away. An image of my mother entered. She was standing by Lucy's open grave, small and frail in her black coat with her white hair short and stiff like a skullcap. Her hands were holding a small posy of flowers from her garden, picked earlier in the morning. She moved towards the grave as if it wasn't quite her and it wasn't quite happening; this moment that we had all dreaded and longed for; laying Lucy to rest after 21 years of not knowing where she was nor what had happened to her. This business of forgiveness had to go on hold. It almost seemed obscene in this context. To think about forgiveness then would have been a betrayal of our need to grieve, to rage, to find a way forward. I had to find a place for my own grief and anger before I could open myself to the possibility of forgiving those who caused this terrible pain, for so many people. But the way forward that takes us out of the cycle of violence involves forgiveness. I must learn to be patient and trusting.
A few months later I had another dream. In the dream I had decided that I must forgive Rosemary West. We met on the edge of a park, by some railings with spiked ends. It was night, and dark, apart from the greyish orange of streetlights giving the sky a sleazy glow. We faced each other and I said (without looking at her face), "I forgive you". The words came out limp and monotonous as the litter that blocked the drain near my foot. It was a meaningless moment of misguided, arrogant hypocrisy. There was no response. She evaporated into the drain. The railings were spears of ice. The skin on my hands froze and tore as I tried to loosen my grip. How could I have been so patronising and pretentious, so premature? Forgiveness, what does it mean and how will it come?
In the next scene of the same dream I was sitting in a basement with Rosemary West and another woman who said that she was a mediator. West was scooping handfuls of flesh from a glistening pile of meat, as bloody and fresh as chopped placentas, on the floor by her feet. She was pushing it into small polythene bags. She lined up the bags. They looked like chicken giblets from the innards of frozen supermarket poultry. On the wall behind her there was a black space like a window with no glass in it opening onto a blackout night sky. She picked up each bag in turn, tossing them one by one over her shoulder into the black rectangular frame. She didn't turn her head to follow her actions once. Her eyes were all pupil that strained towards me like a sharp point trying to burst through a bin liner. She repeated a sentence to herself, the tone was matter of fact, like a chant without heart:
"I keep throwing them into the sea, but the waves keep bringing them back."
I looked at the mediator with triumphant illogic. Rose must be mad if she thinks that the sea is outside the basement. How can I speak to someone who is so mad as to think that the sea is outside the basement. I simply cannot understand or relate to anyone who is so mad as to think that the sea is outside the basement. My sense of reality has nothing in common with hers.
"I keep throwing them into the sea, but the waves keep bringing them back."
She could not see us. Her face was white and cold as china clay. She had no fire left. Her fingers clawed and stuffed, clawed and stuffed. The bags of flesh, purple, putrid. Over her shoulder, into the hole, one after another. But as I looked closer, sure enough, the number of bags was simply increasing. The words guttered on, jaws bared to seize the tail, jolted back on themselves, a tight loop, tightening like a noose.
"I keep throwing them into the sea, but the waves keep bringing them back."
The mediator had gone. I didn't see her leave. My focus was drawn towards the power of the sea. I couldn't hear it, but it wasn't swallowing those bags of flesh. The sea knows the rules. It would not absorb nor accommodate the rotting flesh. It would not allow it to disappear. There was nowhere for it to hide. Soon the room would be full of these neat transparent bags that refused to follow the rules of waste disposal. Rose was intoning a universal law. The words didn't seem to touch her, but they came out of her mouth. I could not know how long she must stay in this abattoir. Was I supposed to wait? What would I be waiting for? If I waited what would I learn? I did not have to stay there waiting for her to see me. But I was listening, witnessing her soul trying to break through. She could not hear herself, but I could hear her. She did not know who I was. She didn't know who Lucy was. What was there to discuss? I had witnessed her profound state of ignorance and denial. What did I want to happen to her? Did I have to be there in order for it to happen?
"I keep throwing them into the sea, but the waves keep bringing them back."
What does this mean for me? Maybe this moment in my dream is a chance to investigate my own need to run and hide and attempt to destroy the evidence of my own potential for violence and denial. It is a chance to face the fear that makes me want to leave. This monster is also me. If I can understand and accept this truth, maybe I can be with Rosemary if she reaches a time of wanting that. Maybe one day I will feel strong enough to stay with her and pray. The fire might come back and her eyes might be able to see. But the realisation of the effects of her actions might destroy her. The sea will know when to stop retching and vomiting. I can trust its rhythm and its discernment. Forgiveness may come, it may not. All I have to do is to learn how to float like a gull; to scrape letters in the sand and watch the sea eat my words.
There came a time when I had to look at the reality of my own death again. This time it was presented to me in the context of my 'interconnectedness' with life. I found myself standing in a shallow stream, in the silent rhododendron forests in the Himalayas of Nepal, writing down these words:
"As a granddaughter, as a daughter, as a mother, as a sister, as an aunt, as a niece, as a cousin, as a lover, as a friend, I totally accept my death."
All the weight of my life fell away into the stream. I left it behind in Nepal. I just didn't need to carry it any more. At that moment, I could hear the roar of the silence around me. It released me to be no more than a vulnerable human being knowing the grace of love seen in that moment. I had tasted fulfilment. Maybe Rosemary West will find a glimpse of the fire in the setting sun before she dies.
At times I would like to be able to help her move out of the abattoir that led to the gangrene of her heart. I would like her to know the beauty of a smile, a tear, a tender gesture, a song. Maybe she has more time to listen to the birds in prison, more time to listen to herself? I would like to know what she does with her life now. How is she being helped? Will she remain in denial for the rest of her life? Is it possible for her to be redeemed? Is it time for me to listen to what she might want to say? Would she ever want that? Am I strong enough? Is it possible?
Buddhist retreats allow me to sit with my self in all of its endless preoccupations with selfish thoughts and investigate the roots of my anguish, until, mysteriously and unexpectedly, I experience the sacred reality of who I am. Grace is unveiled. I move into the larger self of the whole universe, where I experience the fact of my interconnectedness with all forms of life. In this place, I reclaim the depth of being that is all embracing. Here, forgiveness is spontaneous. May all beings know this place. I know that we are all part of a vast, shining silence (1).
Lucy is standing above us on a cloud with her feet astride. Her bare feet are visible and grounded, not swirled about by the cloud. And yet the cloud is not solid. She is wearing a knee length, white toga. Her legs and feet are bare. She appears like a mixture of an Amazon and an angel. Her hair is gold and frizzier than ever. In one hand she is holding a long flaming torch, swung away from her hip like a shepherd's crook or a staff. Her face is smiling and she is no longer wearing spectacles. In a way that could only be her, she is telling me, firmly and clearly: "Just get on with it, Marian."
Acknowledgements
In October 1997 I was given a generous grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust to enable me to continue my inner work and to write. I am most grateful to the Trust and also to all those who have written to me since the publication of my Guardian article in 1997.
Note
1. The term 'shining silence' is a translation of the Chinese term for Silent Illumination - a meditation method. Yiu Yannang on a recent retreat pointed out to us the verbal nature of the term chao in Mo Chao and that it could be used as a gerund governing mo. The silence is not so much to be illuminated - but rather allowed to shine.
