October has always been a strange month for me; a month of memories and reflection. I suspect that a big part of it comes from my mother’s yearly visit to the cemetery on All Souls’ Day at the beginning of November to lay down flowers and the run-up to Halloween but I have found that the older I get, the more pensive I become at this time of year.

October is also the month during which Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated. There are only a handful of times when I can remember where I was when something history-changing happened, and her death marks one of them.

It was just another day at the office when my best friend messaged me on Facebook at 4.15pm to tell me that he had seen news of her murder on this newspaper’s website. I don’t need to go back to the rest of the message thread to remember how I felt; even now, if I reach in just enough into myself, I can almost get in touch with the visceral reaction I had on that day.

The last line he said before he went offline for a bit has stayed with me for seven long years: “This is no longer a democratic country.” At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant, what it really meant. I thought there was no way that justice wouldn’t be timely and swift and that everyone would come together and see that the nation had been rotting for some time. Yet, almost a decade later, this island has sunk to depths I didn’t even know were possible.

For a decade, every week has brought with it a fresh scandal and what at least appears to be a total reluctance by authorities to investigate anything at all. Our entities have become toothless and spineless and this has, in turn, been instrumental in instructing the way we treat each other. If there’s no scandal brewing or being uncovered, there’s a construction site that’s either falling apart or which should have never been allowed to exist in the first place.

It’s this island that shapes all of us. And every day we don’t recognise what our homeland has become is another missed opportunity to improve things for ourselves and our children- Anna Marie Galea

The country is crowded and filthy, and there are numerous reports that people are coming and going as they please, unchecked. The traffic is unspeakably bad and continues to get worse, with yet again nothing being done and no long-term plan being formulated to curb what has become a huge national issue. The list goes on and on and on, and, in all this, I am reminded of the last four words Daphne ever wrote.

So many people have said so many things about why Daphne wrote the way she did, and they have failed to miss one crucial point: it was the country that helped mould who she was. It’s this island that shapes all of us. And every day we don’t recognise what our homeland has become is another missed opportunity to improve things for ourselves and our children.

Daphne knew what she was for and against and stood up to be counted. In the pages of her magazine, she saw Malta as it could be, where concrete monuments to greed had no place.

Before you sleep tonight, perhaps you should ask yourself what you stand for and whether it’s good enough for anyone at all.