---

Before she speaks to area high school students, Kathi Meyer always hands them a copy of the eulogy she wrote a few days after her 17-year-old daughter Taylor died following an underage drinking party.

"It gives the kids a good perspective of who she was, how normal she was," Meyer said last week in her Plainville home. "She really was like everybody else."

It's that message that Meyer, 40, tries to get across to the students and parents she speaks to - a tragedy can happen to anyone at anytime.

"You never like to think that anything could happen to your kid," she said. "But that is not the case."

For Meyer, that was never more evident than a year ago this weekend, when Taylor disappeared after a homecoming party at the abandoned Norfolk Airport. Her body was found three days later in a swampy area where she had passed out after drinking, and drowned.

Out of that horrible tragedy, Meyer said she knew she had to do whatever she could to make sure no parent ever goes through the pain she did - that no one ever loses a sister or brother the way Zachary, 20, and Logan, 11, lost Taylor.

So Meyer set out to talk with students and parents across the state, to show them that she was just an ordinary mother and Taylor an ordinary teenager, just like everyone in the audience.

"I think it was just something I knew that I had to do to get something good to come out of it," she said. "There's a message here, there's something for kids to learn from this."

After giving her first speech on Jan. 8 at North Attleboro High School, Meyer quickly found herself giving three a week during prom season.

This year, she plans on doing only one presentation a week, with assemblies planned in North Quincy and Dedham, among other school districts.

When speaking to parents, Meyer has told a story of how Taylor was put into police protective custody during a King Philip Regional High School football game the previous school year.

After picking Taylor up at the Wrentham police station, Meyer said her daughter was still belligerent, so she dropped her off at the Plainville station to let the severity of the situation sink in.

After grounding Taylor for a month and taking away her cell phone, Meyer said she thought she and her daughter had an understanding, and couldn't believe Taylor was drinking again the night she died.

"I never would have thought she was drinking that night," Meyer said. She tells parents she wishes she had access to Taylor's Facebook.com page, and better communication with her friends and their parents.

She has urged parents to not make the mistakes that she made and make sure they know exactly what their kids are up to before it is too late.

There are a few photos of Taylor inside Meyer's home, but nothing overwhelming. She cleared out her daughter's room a few months after her death and converted it to a playroom for her son as way to move on.

While memories of Taylor remain, Meyer said her family has done its best to adjust, acknowledging that she is not coming back and doing their best not to put her on a pedestal.

"We have never held Taylor under any high standard just because she isn't here," Meyer said. "Unfortunately, you have to move on with your life and you have to make the best of it."

Meyer made news in November when she went to the Wrentham District Courthouse to retrieve pink bracelets that several of Taylor's friends were wearing in her memory as they were arrested at another underage drinking party, just a few weeks after her death.

"I said, 'Can I please have your bracelet, you don't deserve to wear one,'" Meyer said. "I was upset and I let the kids see that I was upset."

Despite frustrating incidents like the one at Wrentham court, Meyer said she has received a lot of support in the year since Taylor's death, particularly via e-mail from the parents and students she's addressed.

She said a few of the e-mails were particularly moving, including a story from a Bellingham student named Alex, who found himself unable to enter a party a few days after Meyer's speech.

"I pulled up to the house, and I thought of you and Tay, seeing her picture there on the stage and knowing that you were not physically with her killed me," Alex wrote. "I thought of my parents being up on that stage and it brought me to tears."

"It wasnt just a couple tears, I was sobbing," he continued. "I honestly think you could have saved my life."

It's stories like Alex's that keep Meyer going and on the one-year anniversary of Taylor's death, she knows no sign of stopping.

"I'm going to be doing these speeches forever," she said. "It's something, as a mom, that I will always do."