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His free hand cupped around the cigarette hanging from his mouth as he lit it, protecting it from the wind whipping from the cars going past.

He smoked when he was nervous.

Something caught his eye on the side of the Koonoomoo bends in the dry scrub. Two pram wheels. Broken bits of plastic.

The crosses he could handle. But not this.

‘‘This is the hardest part,’’ he said, kicking one of the small, black wheels.

‘‘It’s looking at this stuff that your anger dissipates. You look at this and you start thinking of the kids.’’

One year ago, Darren Baldock’s mother and stepfather were killed in a head-on crash with another car on Goulburn Valley Hwy between Koonoomoo and Tocumwal.

Tocumwal couple Jacko and Sandy McKnight were driving to Cobram to do some shopping that morning.

A car carrying a Finley family — two women in the front and three children aged nine months, four and three, in the back — veered onto the opposite side of the road and the two vehicles collided.

‘‘The families were broken,’’ Mr Baldock said, looking at a piece of pram plastic in his hand.

Mr and Mrs McKnight, both 61, were killed and the Finley family members suffered serious injuries, which they may deal with their whole lives.

‘‘That’s the worst kind of punishment ... to wake every morning and you feel it. We’re lucky in some ways,’’ Mr Baldock said.

It has been a year — a long year — for those involved.

Cobram police, which led the investigation, has completed its initial investigation and handed the brief of evidence to the coroner for an inquest. The families now wait on a coroner to find an answer to the ‘‘why’’.

‘‘Maybe the coroner’s finding will be good and will help other people, but it’s no good sitting in a drawer,’’ Mr Baldock said.

It is feelings most families left behind have after car crashes occur with investigations that take months, years, to conclude.

‘‘I understand they’ve got a process .... But you’d like to feel some sense of involvement in it, whereas right now you feel like an outsider,’’ Mr Baldock said.

Mr and Mrs McKnight’s family and friends spread ashes at a plaque near the river at Tocumwal on Thursday.

Mr Baldock, his wife Donna and two children Ethan, 9, and Mitchell, 5, will spread some of Mrs McKnight’s ashes at her mother’s grave near their Geelong home.

Ethan had been acting up at school, trying to gain control of the uncontrollable, and Mr Baldock hoped last week’s memorial would give his eldest closure and a chance to say goodbye.

But closure may not come for Mr Baldock, nor anyone involved, until the why is answered.

‘‘You know how it happened, but we don’t know why and that’s the thing I’m afraid of and scared we’ll never get to,’’ Mr Baldock said.

He flicked his cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out. He turned away from the image he had in his mind the entire time he stood alongside those Koonoomoo bends — his parents’ four-wheel drive, stopped dead on the middle of the road, its front crumpled up.

He gave a thumbs up to the Geelong Football Club flag screwed on to a tree with crosses at its trunk and parts of a pram along its roots and walked away.

Shepparton News