'The horrific moment I learnt the truth about my dad'

Those who have lost a loved one will tell you that grief is a journey. There's no definitive end point, but rather a series of peaks and troughs, advancements and setbacks, highs and lows.

For Anthony Marn, an oil painter and former police officer from Manchester, grief is a rock in his chest that he can always feel. Tragically, when he was just five years old his mother took her own life and, eight years later, his father did the same.

While he didn't know much about his mother's passing, when his father died he knew he had taken his life, but his paternal grandparents, who he describes as "lifesavers", protected him from the truth. "In those days no one really talked about it, there were no family conversations about what had happened," he explains over the phone from his home in Delph.

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While Anthony spent most of his teenage years trying to process the trauma, when he was 26 he was forced to confront his past. Joining Greater Manchester Police in 1990, part of his training was to attend a post-mortem to prepare him for the line of duty - but nothing could have prepared him for what happened next.

"Before going in to the post-mortem, they gave me photographs of a body and what they didn’t realise is that they gave me photos of my father and the location where he died - I had never known where he died," recalls Anthony.

"It was a totally strange experience. After that I stayed off work for a week and then went back to work and I blocked it out completely. Over the course of the next 15 years I dealt with various incidents and I knew it always affected me because of my reaction."

Anthony was given counselling during his time on the force and went on