Essay

Attention

Comment

Feminism

15 March 2024

5 min read

Sarah Everard: she was 'exactly like us'

An anniversary of anguish deserves the miracle of our attention.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Sarah Everard.

BBC/Everard Family.

This week, three years ago, we’d been shut in our homes for nearly a year and things were anything but normal. I don’t know about you, but when I think back to those locked-down days, it’s all a bit of a haze, those weird weeks tend to blur into one.

Except this week, that is. This week, three years ago, was a wholly different story.

We, the public, had just learnt that Sarah Everard, a thirty-three-year-old woman in South London, had been abducted, raped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer in the Metropolitan Police. And the news of this heinous crime took our breath away. Do you remember it? How you felt when you learned what had happened to Sarah? I can remember the anguish of hundreds of people ringing out from Clapham Common, reaching every corner of the country. I can remember that, legal or not, nothing seemed to quell the outrage that was drawing people to the vigil being held there. All that grief, it had to go somewhere.

The anger that night was so visceral, it feels like it’s still in the soil of the Common. The fear, so palpable, it still lingers in the air. And at that point, we didn’t even know the half of it. ‘She was just walking home’ - That’s the sentence, isn’t it? The one that haunted those days, weeks, and months.

Three years on and we’re no closer to coming to terms with what happened. Not really. In the wake of the recent Angioloni Inquiry, which concluded that Wayne Couzens should never have been allowed to become, let alone remain, a police officer, the BBC released a documentary that follows DCI Katherine Goodwin’s story as she led the investigation. From first seeing the bulletin of a missing young woman, to hearing the ‘whole life’ sentence come down on Couzens – viewers are walked through the whole thing, step by step. What led up to Sarah’s death, and what followed it. It’s something that we should all see, even though we’ll immediately wish that we hadn’t.

Because it would be hard to unsee the grainy footage of Wayne Couzens standing next to a handcuffed Sarah on the side of a busy road, abducting her while his hazard lights flash, all of it so sickeningly hidden in plain sight. It would be harder still to unhear the victim statement from Sarah’s mum, who admitted that every night, right at the time of the abduction, she silently screams ‘don’t get in the car, Sarah. Don’t believe him. Run!’.

All of it, it’s just so hard to know.

The details are hard to think about, and harder still not to think about. But that’s the point, I suppose. I remember what philosopher Simone Weil wrote,

that ‘capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle… it is a miracle’.

I’m just not used to a ‘miracle’ making me feel so nauseous. In theory, Weil’s words are beautiful, in reality though – they ache.

I don’t tend to acquaint a feeling of utter helplessness with the miraculous. Where my understanding runs dry, my answers falter, and my tears flow – those aren’t the places I expect to see anything of any use, spiritual or otherwise.

But Weil goes on:

‘…it is recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specific from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate’, but as a man (or woman), exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.’

Sarah Everard – her memory, as well as the people within whom her memory is most vivid, and her loss most keenly felt – deserve the miracle of our attention. Then, now, and for many years to come. We continue to grieve her, the woman who never made it home, as if we each knew more of her than her name. And that’s a beautiful thing, a human thing, a sacred thing. Because Sarah was more than her name, and she was more than her death. And so, she must be grieved as such, with our eyes fixed on the beauty of who she was, and the tragedy of who she will never be.

And it’s tricky, because you can’t tidy up lament, can you? There’s no silver-lining, nothing to polish. You can’t put a neat bow on despair or grief.

And then there’s Weil’s ‘exactly like us’ line to grapple with. And grapple with it, we do. The knowledge that it could have been any of us is ever-present. As a woman, I feel it every single day. If male violence against women is a spectrum - 1 being a wolf-whistle as we walk down the street, and 10 being death – the truth is that most of us will only ever face experiences that sit on the lower end of that scale. And yet, we are ever aware that 10 exists and that we could encounter it at any point. So, we are on the lookout for it. We are alert, always.

Sarah walked home a specific way that night; not the quickest route, but the best lit.

That’s what we all do. ‘Exactly like us’, indeed.

Lament; I suppose that’s what this feeling in my stomach is. And maybe yours too. It’s a feeling that goes beyond the rage I feel toward the monstrous perpetrator, and the institutions that failed to stop him, and so many others. It’s a kind of wordless grief that things are the way they are, agony that we live in a world that hurts this much, despair at how things could have been so different. I felt all this three years ago, when I heard about Sarah’s death. And I felt it last night, when my sister walked home from my house in the dark with her hood up so that she was less distinguishable as a woman walking alone.

And it’s tricky, because you can’t tidy up lament, can you? There’s no silver-lining, nothing to polish. You can’t put a neat bow on despair or grief, and you can’t pull yourself out of it by your own bootstraps. And that’s not to be defeatist, or to relinquish our responsibility to enact justice and fight for change. On the contrary, lament is rooted in the knowledge that things can be, and should be, better. But to try and find a way to solve the outrage we feel when it comes to the death of Sarah Everard is to completely misunderstand it, and ourselves, and reality.

Bad things hurt.

So, although writing this piece has been hard, I’m at least comforted in the knowledge that it was supposed to be a hard piece to write. And that the queasiness I feel and the tears that are threatening my professional resolve are the evidence of some kind of miracle that I don’t fully understand.

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Mental Health

2 December 2024

6 min read

No, it is not your life to dispose of

What could not be said about the assisted dying debate

Steve Hellyer

Steve is the former vicar of St Matthew's Oxford.

Empty bus seats are lit in dark neon colours.

Vy Tran on Unsplash.

It is 1979. I am aged 23 and have been in great mental and emotional anguish and pain for years. I am on a pointless journey, on Greyhound busses, from the East coast of America to the West, and am presently sitting in a parked bus just outside a city in Arizona; the powerful engine idles as we wait for departure time, giving a gentle to-and-fro rocking motion to the bus. I have not eaten for days, am unspeakably tired of my life, and have made a written list of possible ways to end it.

But not on that list is one possibility I have not previously considered, but which is now before me. As I look out to my right, up into the Arizona desert hills, I realise that here is an option which perfectly fits with my desire, not so much to do away violently with myself, as simply to drift into a passive oblivion; I realise that I could simply rise from my seat right now, get off the bus, stumble off into the desert hills, lie down, and wait to die. I need not shoot or poison myself after all. I know I can do this, and fairly easily; to die will take time, but no matter. No-one knows where I am, no-one will know I am missing, no-one will come looking for me, and probably no-one will find me. It is suddenly an immensely attractive prospect, and I am seconds away from rising up from my seat...

There is one thing, one thing only, that makes me hesitate; it is what other people would call ‘a religious belief’, but to me it is simply a truth.

It is this; I am absolutely sure that there is a God. And suddenly there is something grimly, darkly humorous even, in what I thus believe will follow my death; I will find myself, not in peaceful oblivion, but in the presence of God. I will, as they say, ‘meet my Maker’. And what then will I say to God? I will say: “Apologies: I could not go on, there was no other way out for me”. But what, I reason, if God were then to say: “You are wrong. There was a way forward. Look: you could have stayed on the bus, and had you done so, let me show you how your earthly future would have panned out…” And I will listen, and I will watch, as the film rolls on, showing me an alternative future. But of course, by then it would be too late…

And suddenly, sitting on that bus, in a moment of cold clarity, I realise, with a kind of desolate logic, how I am caught. In a very real sense, my belief in God my Creator means that I am not in fact ‘free’ to dispose of myself; more, that what I refer to so glibly as ‘myself’ is not in fact MY self. The bus ticket in my pocket may be ‘my’ ticket, my rucksack ‘my’ rucksack, but my life is not after all my possession, mine to dispose of; it is a loan, a gift, from a Giver, to Whom I am responsible, answerable…

I remain in my seat. The bus continues its gentle rocking motion a while longer. The driver gives his familiar 1970s Greyhound driver’s recitation, the various admonitions and prohibitions I have heard so many times as I have crossed America, I could give the speech myself (ending with the words ‘and no marijuana’, which always raises a smile) – and the bus pulls out onto the freeway. I look back over my shoulder at the desert hills as they recede, and feel I am leaving more than the desert hills behind; I am still in deep pain, but know I have left a possibility behind me, for good. Months later I will reflect on this moment and realise with a smile that the name of the city where I had put death behind me by not rising was Phoenix.

And so my journey has continued – on, in due time, to a return to England, to a measure of healing, to getting ordained as an Anglican priest, to thirty-four years of Church ministry, to marriage to a very remarkable woman, to fatherhood of two children - and, at some future moment, to my own death: all in God’s time.

How shoddy, shrunken and lonely, is our much vaunted and trumpeted vision of the autonomous individual.

The word ‘God’ was probably used very little, if at all, in the MPs debate on assisted suicide - and this debate has really been about assisted suicide, not ‘assisted dying’, given that people will be given drugs to self-administer. Even the Christian MPs who spoke, did not mention God, as they knew what could be said, and what could not, in order for them to be heard at all. The public arguments for, and against, the legalisation of assisted suicide have almost without exception had to be premised on one agreed assumption, apparently the only one now permissible in a post-Christian, liberal humanist, agnostic/atheist society: the assumption that my life is mine. The arguments used for assisted suicide resolve down to: “It is my life: I should be allowed to decide when to end it”. Most of the arguments used against resolve down to: “Yes, of course, granted, agreed, it is your life: but there may be unintended consequences for others in allowing you to end it, others may feel obliged to end their lives”, etc. At no point could anyone say, as I so passionately would claim: “No, it is not your life to dispose of”; there is now, it seems, no public place for the apostle Paul’s blunt statement in his letter to the Church in Corinth: ‘You are not your own.’

Yet this is now one of the most fundamental beliefs of ‘my’ life: and I have found it to be totally liberating and beautiful. I think of those glorious sculptures on the outer walls of Chartres Cathedral, including the representation of the creation of Adam, presented as emerging from the very mind of God. I think of the glory of man and woman made in God’s image as stewards of creation. I think of the extraordinary wonder of the Incarnation, of God embodied in Christ. I think of the sufferings of Christ on the cross; and I think, yes, of course I think, of the sufferings of my fellow men and women and children, and of my own sufferings, and of the call to me to shoulder the burden, both of living, and of dying, in God’s time.

And, alas, I think I also see something of how shrivelled, how wizened in comparison, how shoddy, shrunken and lonely, is our much vaunted and trumpeted vision of the autonomous individual – “my life, my rights, my body, my choice” - in the dominant contemporary Western mindset, eating away steadily like a corrosive acid any wider conception of community and the social institutions that enshrine it, and any sense of a deeper accountability to God.

Where will the current assisted suicide decision ultimately lead? What is the destination? It is difficult to predict, but the signs from other countries who have gone down this road are not good.

But what do I know? Do I have answers to all the questions around assisted suicide? I confess I do not. But one thing has become clearer to me: I am on a very different journey from the one my nation is travelling now.