Celebrating a Legend

Today we went along to Kings Meadows High School for Aaron's memorial celebration.  I was quite anxious about it and felt teary the whole time, but instead of tears there were lots of laughs as the past Principal, Assistant Principal, work colleages and students shared their memories of Aaron at the school.

The celebration started off with the whole school meeting together.  I was amazed as to how quietly they all came in. They were very somber and respectful. 

They started off by saying 'Mr Aaron King was a legend at Kings Meadows High School'. I have no doubt that was true from all the amazing stories I've been hearing about him from students and parents, over the last three weeks.
 


They showed a couple of slideshows of photos of Aaron at school to some of his favourite music.

Some students shared with us some of their favourite memories of him.   Some of them were very funny, like him imitating someone choking to tease a girl that Collingwood choked in the grand final.  A boy shared a funny story about being on grade 7 camp and how he didn't want to get out of bed, so Aaron came into his room and instead of telling him to get up he just sat on him and farted! He got up pretty quickly then!
 

Robyn who works in the school office shared lots of hilarious stories about the antics Aaron got up to in the office all the time. 

When it was mentioned how much Aaron loved his sport and was the only teacher to set up his laptop so he got live streaming of sport on it, so he could watch it whenever he had a chance, Kobe looked at me and said 'Daddy can't watch the cricket anymore!'. 

After listening to everyone talk about Aaron we moved onto the oval with the grade 9 students (Aaron was going to be the Grade 9 Grade Leader this year).

They had organised 99 balloons to release (as legally you can't release anymore than that according to the aviation authority, as it can cause problems with aircraft!).

They had three different types of balloons - green for 'Tamar' one of the houses at school that Aaron supported and very passionate about at sports carnivals, blue to represent the school colour and I don't think I need to explain the Hawks ones :)

It is so nice to have Chrish back down from Sydney for the weekend. He really didn't want to miss out on the memorial.

Shaun who is now the Grade Leader talked to the kids about how they should think of all the happy times with Aaron, but how it's also okay to be sad and to miss him.  They then all released the balloons together.

Harri decided to stay at school for the afternoon and not come to the memorial service, as he thought it was going to be 'too sad'.  I was happy he chose to stay at school as it meant he was happy to be there, and also I did think it may have been too hard for him.

Afterwards a few students came up and said some lovely things and gave me a hug which was lovely.

We were then invited to stay for afternoon tea with the staff which was lovely. It was nice to sit and chat to his friends and hear some funny stories about him. 

It's still so hard to believe that it's real, even after days like today. I'm so glad that the school was able to do something special to remember him though.  I will post later some of the lovely things they said about him.  One thing that really stood out to me was how he helped shape the community at the school. He loved teaching at KMHS and believed in all of the kids, no matter who they were or what their behaviour was like.  I'm sure he's going to be very missed there very much.