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THE anger comes in waves and she can’t bring herself to wash the dirty clothes he left in a basket when he died.
It’s seven months since 19-year-old Dylan Aylward crashed his Suzuki GSX 600F on Emerald Avenue, Wodonga and his family will live with the fallout from that Friday night in March.
“To lose someone so instantly — it’s so unbelievable,” his mother Marcelle Rudd said.
“I have no concept of how many days, how many months, have passed.”
Mrs Rudd kneels at the memorial plaque to her son at Glenmorus Memorial Gardens, Lavington, with her youngest daughter, Sarah Aylward, 17, and family friend Tayla Crane, 19.
There are pictures of the tattooed teenager on the plaque, a motorcycle magazine beside it as a tribute and party streamers tied to a budding tree.
His family and friends came to this peaceful spot a week ago to celebrate Dylan’s 20th birthday.
Police say Dylan, who was unlicensed, was riding at more than 100km/h on the sports bike when he lost control on a sweeping bend and crashed into the fence of the Wodonga Middle Years College.
“Am I angry? Oh God yeah,” Mrs Rudd said.
“Dylan wasn’t an innocent — a loveable larrikin is the perfect way to describe him — but how do you stop them? What do you do?”
Sarah remembers the day her brother brought home the bright-yellow Suzuki.
Her mother told her: "That better not be his" before she realised that, yes, that was Dylan’s new bike.
Dylan’s choices on the night he died have scarred his family forever.
They share his clothing that still has his smell. The smallest things cause waves of pain, like finding a piece of paper with his writing on it or the mail addressed to him that still arrives.
“I’ve still got a basket full of his washing,” Mrs Rudd said.
“We still want to yell and scream and argue at him. I think it helps.”
The Border region has had more motorcycle crashes than usual this year with riders accounting for almost half of its road deaths.
Seven riders have been killed, the most recent a week ago when a Thurgoona man died in Fallon Street, Albury. Barely a week earlier, a Baranduda man was killed at Leneva.
A motorcyclist was killed near Euroa yesterday and another escaped serious injury in a Falls Creek crash.
Every crash sends a shudder through Mrs Rudd who was brought up riding motorcycles.
She urges drivers and riders to be wary at all times on the road.
“Everyone needs to be aware. It only takes that half second and you’re gone,” she said.
The North East’s top traffic policeman will be available to answer your road safety questions todayin a half-hour online forum from 12pm to 12.30pm. Click here to join the forum.
