Pink tribute to tragic girl (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Pink tribute to tragic girl

10:12pm Friday 14th March 2008

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BURNLEY College students are raising cash to buy a pink headstone in memory of a teenage girl.

Kayley Howson, 18, was found dead at her family home in Rosehill Road, Burnley, on Sunday, March 2.

The health and social care student took her own life after fighting a four-year battle with depression. She was found hanging by her mother.

Now her friends at the college are bidding to raise cash for a heart-shaped headstone in pink - her favourite colour.

Mum Janet, 48, said she used to called her daughter the Pink Lady.

She said: "Kayley was weary and she had been on a lot of medication.

"She'd had a down week that week but she was covering it up so people wouldn't know. I didn't go out that week because I was her carer and was worried about her.

"I last spoke to her at about 10.50pm on the night she died. We'd chatted about a film she had watched and she said she was going to bed."

The family found notes left by Kayley, saying there has to be a better place than this' and requested songs to be played at the funeral.

More than 350 people packed her funeral on Monday at Rosehill Methodist Church.

Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel, one of Kayley's favourite songs, was played as her pink coffin was carried into the church, followed later by Because You Loved Me by Celine Dion.

Janet said that Kayley, a former pupil of Rosehill Primary School and Gawthorpe School, loved her music, reading and writing poetry.

She said: "Kayley had trouble expressing her feelings to people but somehow she could find the words to write poetry. We didn't realise how much she had written - but we found hundreds of poems.

"The last poem she wrote was My Happiness - she had sent it to a competition in America. A few days after she died we were told her poem would be in an international book of poetry.

"If she'd have known that she'd have been buzzing. It would have given her something positive to think about, but it was read out at her funeral."

Kayley leaves her mother, father Freddie, sisters Lisa, Catherine and Jayde as well as nieces and nephews and friends. The family have asked that donations in memory of Kayley are made to Mind or Rape Crisis via funeral directors Alderson and Horan in Rossendale Road, Burnley.

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