A Fife mother has thanked the community for their tremendous outpouring of support after the sad death of her son last week.
Friends and family of 13-year-old Struan Gallacher gathered to pay tribute to the youngster at an informal gathering in Thornton on Saturday, just two days after the Auchmuty High School pupil passed away in his sleep.
Struan died on Thursday morning having suffered from congenital hydrocephalus, more commonly known as fluid on the brain.
While funeral arrangements have still to be finalised, on Monday his mum Margaret thanked Struan’s friends and the wider Thornton community for rallying round and helping to honour his memory in such a poignant way at the weekend.
Margaret said there were up to 80 people who gathered at The Jumps a spot where he regularly rode his quad bike on Saturday to mark what would have been his 14th birthday.
She told The Courier, “I just want to thank everybody it hasn’t really sunk in yet but everybody has been absolutely brilliant.
“We’ve had loads of people coming to the door to speak to us and we counted between 70 and 80 people on Saturday so it has been absolutely amazing.
“The procession got longer and longer and people had balloons, cards and flowers but nobody was crying because that’s what Struan had said to them.”
She added, “I can’t believe how many lives he’s touched and how many buttons he’s pushed.
“I could be sitting giving him a row and then he would turn around and say, ‘Mum, your hair looks nice today’, and your heart would just melt.
“You would just forget you had just been giving him a row but that’s the sort of person he was.”Celebration of Struan’s lifeHis Auchmuty classmates are being offered counselling to help them come to terms with Struan’s death, while his friends have also set up Bebo and Facebook pages in his memory.
With a post-mortem being held on Tuesday, Margaret revealed that Struan’s organs are to be donated at his request a request he reminded her of just two days before his death.
She said, “He came in on Tuesday and said that he could save 10 people because there’s 10 bits of his body he could give away.
“It’s that sort of thing that makes me think he had some sort of idea it was going to happen.”
Margaret added that she hopes Struan’s funeral will be a celebration of his life with one suggestion being that all of his friends will be able to write their own messages to him before they say goodbye.
She said, “I really want to aim this at the weans and when I saw the kind of messages they have been writing on the cards and flowers, I think maybe doing that at the funeral will help them and it will probably help me as well.
“I want to give him a really good send-off.”