Kornelia

My name is Kornelia Zimmer.

My brother Mark Zimmer was killed on the 16th of November 2008.

The perpetrator was sentenced and is currently being released on parole.

You can't just live the carefree normal life that you had before. So, the best way I sort of...someone explained to me is...your whole life, you've got a set of values and beliefs. You step out of bed that day and you know what's gonna happen, or you sort of know what your day's going to bring. And after a crime like this, every day is like stepping out of the bed and not knowing if there's a floor there or not.

People do think of grief as a normal process. You know, there's I think the five or six steps of grieving and stuff. I haven't felt that very helpful for me because of the other stuff you're dealing with after a homicide, such as post-traumatic stress, trauma, then you've got the court case and media and stuff, so it's not a normal grieving process.

Grief disconnected us as a family, it completely changed us and everyone took their own journey through the grieving process. I think it's really important to know that everyone needs to grieve differently. Some people grieve privately, some more openly, and we all just did what we could to get through each day.

I naturally got busy and took on the caretaker's role of my family to try and alleviate some of the pain and burden of my parents.

But it did delay, I guess my own grieving process and my ability to process what happened.

I showed and expressed my anger a lot. Anger, for me stopped me from sleeping, from talking, from connecting to people, from living my life the way it was. Guilt, like anger is really self-destructive, and it's quite common. You always think 'could I have done something?' or the 'what if?' questions.

For me personally, because this is a long journey, having someone, a trusted person to speak out my anger with, to speak about what's going on in my head, to plan for the future, to see a way out of it, to manage the pain.

It's really about preparing and knowing what you gonna say in certain situations like the first time someone says 'how many siblings do you have?'

And what they refer to is mindfulness techniques. So I did yoga, I did meditation - there's small things on how to get to sleep at night.

But I also joined a group, the Compassionate Friends which has got similar siblings who have gone through similar deaths in the family.

My mantra, from the start until today is just to get through each day. I didn't want to get wrapped up in victimhood. I wanted to be a survivor and I wanted to live for my brother.

Love you, Miss you.

Talk soon.