SHAYE Kosky chased butterflies around her yard as a child.
Her family honoured this memory at her funeral on Monday with a heart-wrenching butterfly release that saw one land on her father Tony Kosky’s arm and refuse to budge.
“Shaye would love all of you for being here,” he told the hundreds who packed a chapel at Bunurong Memorial Park in Bangholme.
“I shouldn’t be here. No parent should be.”
His 13-year-old daughter was hit by a car when crossing Princes Highway in Dandenong on 6 March, near James Street, and died in the Royal Children’s Hospital the following day.
The tragedy prompted calls from her 16-year-old sister Jacinta for other Dandenong High School students not to make the dash across the busy road.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without my other half,” she said at the service.
She spoke about the time Shaye told a group of guys they looked like One Direction just to make her laugh, and texting secrets to each other while sitting either side of their mum, Stacey Brown.
“I can’t stand this heartache and pain of not having you here anymore,” Ms Brown said.
“You made every day brighter.”
Her last words to her mum were “I love you”, as they were whenever she left the house.
Funeral celebrant Anne Edwards said Shaye loved animals – so much she was considering a career as an animal trainer – music and friends.
She loved her older sister and wanted to be just like her, stood up to bullies, loved to play soccer with the boys, loved going to school and could almost burp the alphabet.
But she was still “a girly-girl” – she wouldn’t leave the house without makeup and some bling, and loved pink, which saw everyone wear a touch of pink at her farewell.
In a letter to the Star, Dandenong resident Colin Gibbons said he had seen so many near misses near the accident site.
“And the number of cars that fly down the service road is too many to count,” he said.
Mr Gibbons said there were three stop signs in that area but no one stopped.
“I have seen school children who are on the footpath have to run out of the way of these drivers,” he said.
“My daughter also attends Dandenong High in Year 10 and she has also had near-misses.
“Why can’t something be done before we lose and other child?”
