10th September 2016

As I sit here in my kitchen drinking my normal morning coffee, in the same house that I live in every day, with my dog Freddy, it is just another day…apart from today it isn’t. 10 years ago my cousin Matt was killed. It has changed me from who I was before. Not quite as much bounce resides in me, I have a constant worry in the back of my mind (could this happen again) and I live with the loss of Matt every day. Some days more than others don’t get me wrong, but it is always there. Sometimes it’s the painful memory but I am lucky that a lot of the time it is through happy memories, such as watching the sun set. It is these positives that I try to focus on the most. My favourite memory of Matt is that he would called me his ‘favourite cousin’. Now I know he will have loved us all the same, but for me it always meant so much. Matt was a lot older than me and I was the youngest of all the cousins. Sarah and Alan are very close in age and so Matt would always go out of his way to make sure I was having fun too and never felt left out. He was someone who lived to look after other people, he was such a fun and loving person who also had a very dry sense of humour. There is a picture of me and Matt back in 1991 standing by the garages at our house in Threshfield, even though it’s one of the memories that happened furthest away in time, it is certainly the one that is closest to my heart. As soon as I look at this photo I instantly feel loved by Matt and am reminded of a very happy childhood, which was luckily spent growing up seeing all of my cousins. It reminds me of the fact that he isn’t here but it’s a different feeling now than before. Sure the underlying feelings are the same but the way I have experienced them has changed over the past 10 years. I remember the extreme wave of sadness and pain that was felt initially, followed by such anger which I chose to direct at the driver responsible. It still turns my stomach writing that but it is different to before. For a while it consumed me, it was all I could see, all I could feel and that is a very dark place to be in. Over time though this started to subside, the difficulty was the lack of understanding and to this day, it is the part I struggle with the most; but I have to let that struggle go, a person cannot live struggling with such huge questions. I have to let that go. That was most certainly the hardest part to understand, that letting that struggle go did not mean I was letting Matt go. I am left with the memory, the love, the joy that he brought to me and many others. I am left with the picture of his smile and not of a car. I have changed because of all this but it is not all negative; I love harder, I appreciate the wonders of our beautiful world more, I have a deep feeling of beauty at every sunset I see, I am even more grateful to have my sister and she is my best friend in the world. I have changed. But I am still me.