Exactly a year ago today, the world changed for us, and also for Malta.
As we commemorate today one year from the barbarous murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, we retreat to our small world, for we are a small enterprise and reflect on what it means to miss a friend and a colleague, stolen from us in that heinous way.
Others may make deeper or vaster reflections, from speculation on how the murder was carried out and who commissioned it, to what the murder says about our country, to what Daphne stood for, etc. At the other end of the spectrum, there will surely be those who disagreed with Daphne during her life (or the other way round). Of such complexity is our country made.
But instead of these vast and lofty thoughts, we prefer to remember today the Daphne we knew, who worked with us, the person who swung from editing (and compiling) glossy magazines on beauty and good food to the political analyst with pungent comments to the student of social comment, always interested in the ways of this small island, to the campaigner for ethical standards in public life.
The Daphne we knew was a deadly serious person seeking high ideals and promoting good practice, even in the writing of stories themselves and in following up the stories we many times tend to skim over.
She drove herself hard and at times she skipped mealtimes and even sleep in her search for truth. Yet she was also not just a model journalist, never content with what she had been fed, delving under the surface of things, building up a whole network of collaborators who like her believed in seeking truth and nothing but the truth.
Besides writing her blogs and her articles, and monitoring all the comments she received, she kept up an interminable conversation with the most diverse of people. These are kept by those who received them and revered as other people might reverse relics of saints and martyrs. While her blogs and her articles are public, these conversations remain private and reserved.
Besides being a colleague and a long-standing friend, Daphne was also a wife to her husband, a mother to her children and a beacon to those around her. She loved nature, lived among nature and her destiny was to die in the natural environment she lived in.
Just like the plants and trees she planted, so too her written words bore fruit and a year later she is even more present than she was before she was taken away from us.
This editorial was penned by veteran editor Noel Grima, who knew Daphne Caruana Galizia for over 25 years.
The Malta Independent today also published the below page in remembrance of the slain journalist.