Moving on after loss

By Mara Pattison-Sowden
IN THE space of a moment, Megan burst inside the house to tell her sister the exciting news, and then she remembered her sister was no longer there.
Melissa Neylon, 18, was a passenger in a car driven by 19-year-old Jayke Baldwin when he lost control of the vehicle in a high-speed accident on High Street, Seville, on 17 February 2009, crashing it into a tree and killing his girlfriend of two weeks.
Her older sister Megan has been living with that memory through a long-drawn court case, and said she still finds herself in shock.
“The strangest thing is when I have something to tell her and come home to tell her and she’s just not there,” she said.
Megan said there were still little things of Melissa’s left around the house, which gave her deja vu.
“I kind of like to go into her room and sit there for a while and think,” she said.
Megan said she and Melissa were close, “we were pretty much best friends with stupid sibling fights”.
“I miss how much she used to pay me out for being a vegetarian, and wearing granny cardigans,” Megan said.
“It was a bad time to happen because we weren’t getting along – we were real close but she grew to be completely different.”
She said Melissa was like every young insecure teenager, and the thrill of her first boyfriend changed her.
“She got really moody around him, it’s not like he did it deliberately, but I do blame him for swerving on a dirt road,” she said.
“It was stupid, it wasn’t safe.”
It also ruined the future Megan had imagined for her sister.
“It’s hard to say career-wise what she would have wanted, but I definitely thought she would have had children and I would have had nieces,” Megan said.
It took six months for Megan to believe her sister was gone.
“I felt real out of control, I didn’t feel like a real person,” she said.
“It felt like she was still alive, and I had a lot of anger.”
Megan was hospitalised for depression on several occasions after she had episodes where she didn’t get out of bed, or shower, or even eat for a week or two at a time.
“Melissa’s death pushed me further down into depression,” she said.
“If you can’t help yourself to get better, you’ve got no hope.”
Megan said she learned to cope by having hobbies and interests, good friends, and not shutting herself away.
“I try to keep myself busy and get out of the home and not wallow and think too much,” she said.
“There’s lots of loneliness in the house, and it’s strange that I don’t have someone of my generation to talk to anymore.”
Megan has never had a driver’s licence, and spends two hours travelling to Deakin University for her studies. “I was always scared of being in an accident or causing an accident, but Melissa, she was keen to get her licence,” Megan said.
Megan said she would be moving closer to university, where she would study psychology to advocate for mental health patients.
“Moving was something I was going to do before my sister died, but I wanted to stay here longer for my parents,” she said. “I would have felt guilty if I’d moved out, and I’m glad that I stayed.”