‘The world became hell in an instant - but I’m still here, fighting’

Sometimes Mike Palmer finds it hard to look at old photos and videos of his youngest daughter Beth. He worries about going too far back in his memories in case he can’t return to the present - and he needs to look forward.

Beth was a loving and popular child, ambitious and aspirational, growing from head girl at her Sale Moor primary school to a supremely-talented singer - studying to become a vocal artist at college.

“I’ll always remember her as a happy, bubbly, wonderful daughter, holding my hand, sitting on my shoulders,” Mike, 59, says. “I’d forgive her for anything. If she was naughty or cheeky she could just turn round and say, ‘I love you dad’, and it was all forgotten.”

With hindsight, Mike, a retired firefighter, thinks maybe Beth did begin to show signs she was not entirely happy as she got older - the odd comment about having a bad day, becoming quieter than she used to be, some erratic behaviour - including the occasional sudden joyous outburst. At the time, he put it down to mood swings that come with being a teenager - as most of us would.

So it felt ‘utterly out of the blue’ when Beth took her own life on March 28, 2020, a week into the first Covid lockdown, at the age of just 17. Her death plunged Mike, from Sale, into a darkness so black that he fell into ‘a suicidal spiral’.

“The world became a hell in that very instant,” Mike says. “As a firefighter I dealt with life and death many times, I never took it lightly, I always cared, but I always processed it well.

“But losing Beth totally destroyed me. I couldn’t focus on my family, I couldn’t even see them, they were spinning in their utter grief. Devastation is too small a word.

“And it plunged me into a world of total blackness. Almost as if I had been