Grief and the memory of my sister Beth — you were like magic dust

My sister’s name was Beth. Beth Margaret Tomlinson. She was 30 years old when a man gained entry to her home, raped her, stabbed her and then set her and her home alight. This happened on the night of 19/20th February 2004 — 20 years ago this week.

In the 20 years since my sister’s death, more than 320,000 people have been murdered in South Africa. Adjusting for population size it would take Japan almost 2,000 years to reach that number. Bloodshed in South Africa is so common that it has become fetishised. A simple murder, just a stabbing or a shooting of a nobody will be invisible. To get the attention of the media it must be extreme, be of someone known, it must be titillating. The jaded have to be shocked.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Murder on the rise in South Africa’s ‘big four’ provinces

Beth was a model. She was beautiful. She was white. This is what made it news. The gruesomeness was a bonus, an opportunity to elevate it above the banality of everyday murder.

I am a clinical psychologist (not practicing), and a working researcher/academic. My area of expertise is trying to understand the myriad biological, social, interpersonal, and environmental influences on caregivers, infants, children and adolescents to make us who we are. Much of this work attempts to understand the impact of trauma, violence and loss on how children and adolescents develop. The irony is not lost on me.

In the months and years after my sister’s death I knew I would one day write a book about her and her death. My book will have three themes.

The first will be a memorial to my sister and the life that was taken from her. The second will be what I have learned about loss and grief and mourning. The final theme will be about the ubiquity of violence in the lives of all South Africans, the centuries of violence, apartheid state violence, and the intergenerational transmission of violence.

My sister could light up a place. She could hold a gaze in an utterly unconscious way that made you feel like you were the only other person in the world. One friend described her as being like magic dust — an angel fairy. Beth was kind, warm, funny, forever quirky, and driven by deep empathy and compassion.

One of my favourite pictures of my sister is her sitting with three street children. In the background is a truck and the tail lights of a car. The young boy in the foreground is holding what looks like a sparkler in one hand, and with his other is showing the camera a peace sign.

But it is the expression on my sister’s face that reveals exactly who she was. In the photo she is holding nothing back, she is utterly in the moment, in total awe of the moment.

Beth Margaret Tomlinson, who was murdered 20 years ago on 20 February. (Photo: Supplied)

My sister’s murder has never been solved. During the course of the week that followed her murder, we were visited by the two detectives who were to tell us that they had few leads. I remember watching them and thinking on the one hand how I appreciated the effort of their visit — knowing this would not happen for most family members of a murder victim.

But more importantly, had I harboured any illusions about the capture of my sister’s killer, these hopes were dashed as I watched them. They seemed bewildered, over-burdened and somehow going through the motions. They were not going to arrest anybody. Not that they were necessarily bad detectives or that they did not want to solve the crime. But rather that they knew the chances were so slim, that in South Africa if a killer is not caught within the first hours, the first day, then the chances of them being caught receded to near zero.

They knew this. And I think the calm dignified desolation of my parents perturbed them given how little they could offer.

Antoine Leiris’ moving memoir of his wife Helene who was killed at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris in November 2015 (You Will Not Have My Hate), movingly describes not being able to speak — of how in the immediate aftermath of his wife’s death “sentences of more than three words tired him [me] out”.

In my case it was different. I was not able to stop talking. Certainly, in the short term. Leiris also speaks of the “bureaucratic irritations that pollute grief” — the police, the funeral. This was not my experience. My bureaucratic irritations served me well in the beginning, contained my grief, gave it some bounds, shored it up so that it did not bleed all over the place.

One thing I have learned about loss and grief is that it is not linear, that you never “get over it”, and that Elisabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grief are little more than a work of fiction.

One of the things about my mourning was what reminded me of Beth. When I began to imagine that I had “worked through her death” (another banal and meaningless piece of psychobabble), something would suddenly drag me back deep into my grief. Sometimes it was expected, when someone spoke directly about her, or about another murder in our blighted country.

Other times it was random, listening to a song she had no way of knowing, being introduced to somebody called Beth, the word sister, being asked by somebody whether I had siblings.

You learn (maybe) to live with grief, to live through it, next to it, and at times (when you are lucky) ahead of it. But that is as good as it gets.

For Beth, my beloved sister. DM