‘Slainte Jill’ Tom Meagher posts heartbreaking tribute to his wife

Tom Meagher has posted a heartbreaking message about his wife, Jill, on what would have been their 10th wedding anniversary.

Jill Meagher was just 29 when she was raped and murdered by Adrian Bayley while walking home from a night out in Melbourne, Australia back in 2013.

Bayley was sentenced to 35 years.

Taking to his Facebook page, Tom shared a gorgeous picture of Jill on the couple's wedding day, describing her as a "force and energy that was literally breathtaking". 

"I day-dreamed about what we will be doing in five years, in ten years, in twenty or thirty years – we never made it to five," he wrote. 

"Four years later she was brutally and violently taken from this world.

"Only five weeks ago I stood in the Wicklow mountains where we were married, looking up at the canopy in the woods behind the grounds, as I have done many times in the six years since her death."

Describing her killer as "the cretin who took her from this world", Tom writes how his wife still "communicates through the ones she loved and who loved her, through everyone who lives life like she did."

Addressing the issue of "the everyday spectrum of male violence", Tom writes: "In a culture where the death's of most women are not newsworthy, are so commonplace that they are seen as incidental, expected and simply inevitable, he certainly does represent the extremist wing.

"But it's the many silent foot soldiers, supporters, cheerleaders, beneficiaries and bloated, self-righteous guardians of male supremacy who vocally claim to despise the extremist wing, while essentially supporting the underlying ideology that chills my blood.

"I can hold the polarities of Jill and Bayley in my mind, as light and darkness, as good and evil. It's the deliberately inscrutable, seemingly unreachable void that exists in between to prop up that darkness that keeps me awake at night."

Finishing up his post, Tom directly addresses Jill, writing: "Slainte Jill. You were a warrior for love, life and liberation Thank you for consistently and persistently teaching me how to live, how to think, how to embrace love wholly, and to bear witness to the fire you lit in me and so many others in your short time on this earth. You are loved at every moment of every day."