Jill Meagher’s husband’s emotional tribute 6 years after her death
On what would have been their tenth wedding anniversary, the husband of rape and murder victim, Jill Meagher, has written an emotional letter to his wife.
Tom Meagher shared the emotional tribute on his Facebook page, where he poured out his grief and heartache.
“Ten years ago today, I was lucky enough to marry this incredible human,” Mr Meagher wrote alongside a photo of Jill on her wedding day.
“When I woke up that day, continuously fumbling over the elusive art of tying a tie and nervously downing cheap white wine way too early in the morning, I imagined the seemingly endless stretch of time we would have together.”
Mr Meagher said he had dreamed about what their life would be like together in five, 10 or 30 years into the future.
“We never made it,” he wrote.
“Four years later she was brutally and violently taken from this world.”
In 2012, 29-year-old Jill Meagher was killed by serial sex offender Adrian Bayley in Melbourne.
Bayley was on parole when he brutally raped and murdered the ABC employee when she was on her way home from work drinks – a crime which was a catalyst for an overhaul of parole.
At the time, the Victoria premier said the state’s new parole laws were now the toughest in Australia.
Mr Meagher revealed that he still visits their wedding venue in remembrance of his wife.
“Only five weeks ago I stood in the Wicklow mountains where we were married, looking up at the canopy in the woods behind the grounds, as I have done many times in the six years since her death.”
Despite feeling like his words were too feeble to express his emotions, he said writing of his wife’s legacy still “unlocks something for me — an expanse, where the artificial separateness between me and her, between life and death dissolves effortlessly.”
Mr Meagher also mentioned his wife’s killer in the letter, saying how him and Jill represent the extremities of good and evil.
“The arsehole that took her from this world communicates with us through violence, misogyny, hatred and death,” he wrote.
“His pallid shadow can never extinguish her light. I carry the scars of Jill’s death because that’s how I remember to carry her light inside me.
“The polar contrast between Jill and her killer are so clearly bookends of the extremity of good and evil that it sometimes feels like an ancient tragedy played out in real life.”
Mr Meagher also condemned violence against women, saying: “In the war on women, this man exemplifies the extremist wing of the hateful and pervasive ideology of male sexual terrorism, but it’s the everyday spectrum of male violence that disturbs me even more.”
“In a culture where the deaths of most women are not newsworthy, are so commonplace that they are seen as incidental, expected and simply inevitable, he certainly does represent the extremist wing”
Mr Meagher ended the emotional letter by saying his wife was a “warrior for love, life and liberation”.
“Thank you for consistently and persistently teaching me how to live, how to think, how to embrace love wholly, and to bear witness to the fire you lit in me and so many others in your short time on this earth. You are loved at every moment of every day.”
Bayley was sentenced to life in prison, with a 35-year non-parole period, for the rape and murder of Jill Meagher.
Judge Geoffrey Nettle said Bayley subjected Meagher to a “savage and degrading” assault in Brunswick, Melbourne on September 22, 2012 and that his previous attacks on women demanded that he receive a lengthy prison sentence.