I felt anything but stern stuff at Billy’s funeral. I managed to keep it together all the way through the ceremony but my knees buckled at the graveside and Jake and Mark had to prop me up. There was no holding back the tears as Billy’s coffin was lowered into the ground. We all cried as we said our final goodbyes. No one cared who saw, least of all me.

Billy’s friends had asked us if they could graffiti his coffin. We talked about it for a long time. Mark said no, immediately. He wanted our son to have a normal funeral, he wanted to have his death taken seriously, not marred by strange and obscure tags and designs on his final resting place. I was torn. Billy wanted to be remembered. In one of the text messages the police found on his phone he’d told Kira that he wanted to be infamous, that he wanted the world to see his tags and know that Billy Wilkinson had existed. But the world does know that Billy existed, at least our small part of it. We deliberately avoided the papers when the police released the news of his death. We closed our doors to the reporters and photographers who turned up on our doorstep. We hid ourselves away from the world, the world that knew that our younger child was dead, and we grieved in private. Billy wanted to tag buildings but it is our brains that his name is inscribed upon, our lives that have been transformed through knowing him, our hearts that have been for ever changed.

Finally we said no to the coffin being graffitied. We wanted it to be new, untainted, untouched by the world, just as Billy was when he was born. He was such a beautiful baby. The moment he was in my arms I pressed my nose into his hair and inhaled the heady softness of him and my heart swelled with love. My child, my second child. We had created him – me and Mark. We had produced another perfect little boy. I felt blessed. I knew enough women who’d suffered miscarriages to know how very, very blessed I was to have conceived, carried and birthed a healthy child. I don’t believe in God but doing it twice in a row felt like a miracle. He was a miracle. And he had his whole life ahead of him. A life of joy and fun, love and adventure. He could have been anything, done anything but all I ever wanted was for him to be happy.

We tried to be good parents. We did everything we could for our children. We clothed them, fed them, played with them and loved them but one of them slipped from our fingers. One of them let go when we told him to hang on.

Why did that happen? Where did we go wrong?