The only grief I can talk about with some authority  – indeed the only one I've attempted to fathom – is my own family's.

Like the Kellys, my family has been shaped by untimely death. Eight days before my son Liam turned three, my husband William died aged 41. That was after a decade-long battle with a brain tumour.

My parents have both died in recent years as have all my seven aunts and uncles. My husband's sister and Liam's beloved aunt Jeannette who helped me raise him, also died of cancer in 2015 aged 53. As an only child, all my immediate family members – with the exception of my son – are dead. All I am saying is I know pain.

While I've been deeply saddened by the loss of my parents – I have a lifetime of love to remember them by. My son does not have these memories of his father – and that's the heartbreak.

I daresay it's the heartbreak Stuart Kelly felt on the loss of his brother Thomas, and what his family must now feel about the loss of Stuart. Because for those of us who lose people we love young, even the happy times are sad, because the people we love aren't here to share them with us. For some there is a fate worse than death, and that's called living a life without the people you love and whose love sustains you. There should be no judgement if you feel life is no longer worth living because of this. Sometimes the pain is unbearable.

What I know about the tricky business of loss is we all grieve in different ways. I feel that grief is like a foreign country – you can't know what it's like until you've been there. Untimely loss is a stamp on your life passport that no-one wants – and it sets you apart from everyone else. I've often said to my son I wish there was a Lonely Planet guide to the Land of Grief, or a How to do without your dad for Dummies. But there is not. We stumble on in the dark – and ask for no judgement from others – but often get it. 

Even experiencing cancer is a kind of grief – because it makes you different from the healthy majority. I'd say the experience of walking with William down the treadmill of cancer treatment – four brain surgeries, radiation, immunotherapy, chemotherapy etc – set me apart from my peers. It fast-forwarded me to a point in my life many older people were already at, but few my age were. 

At times it was enriching. So much so that after he died, I became very involved in brain tumour advocacy in much the way the Kellys tried to turn the tragedy of Thomas's death into something positive for others through their advocacy to stop alcohol-fuelled violence. As William always said, you can compare up, but you can compare down too to the people less fortunate and helping them helps you.

At times it was enriching. So much so that after he died, I became very involved in brain tumour advocacy in much the way the Kellys tried to turn the tragedy of Thomas's death into something positive for others through their advocacy to stop alcohol-fuelled violence. As William always said, you can compare up, but you can compare down too to the people less fortunate and helping them helps you.

With the zeal of a recent convert, I threw myself into the anti-cancer cause while raising my young son. I didn't realise at the time it was one way I dealt with my grief – but I know it helped in those early days because it gave his death and my life meaning.

So many of us struck by the trauma of early loss find our solace in alcohol, drugs, overeating or overworking. I'm guilty of some of those and I don't judge those who succumb to them because sometimes we just need to numb the pain. I threw myself into a big job for a while – which was just the intellectual engagement I needed to feel nearly normal again.

But then last year, a decade after my husband's death, a time that intersected with my son turning into a teenager, I couldn't do it anymore. I needed just to sit and face the pain rather than attempt to constantly avoid it. I didn't see it at the time because it was painful, but I needed to go into the dark in order to see the light again.

I remember hearing once on the American radio show This American Life, an interview with a man whose son had accidently killed himself with a gun he'd found under a bed. "People who say time heals all wounds, just haven't been to the place of pain I have," he said.

Time has brought happiness back in our lives. It has made the stretches between sadness longer, but the scar is always there, as Stuart Kelly said of his brother's death. An invisible scar on the outside, but a deep wound inside. For me it's like when you break a glass vase; suddenly your heart is cut by a shard of sadness that you thought you'd long ago cleaned up. While it's not the chaos of those early crazy days of grief, it can still cut like a knife years on.

Anniversaries are the times I feel this the most, sometimes without realising they're approaching. Like the Kellys, July is a difficult month for us. July 2 is the anniversary of my husband's death and July 10 is Liam's birthday. I so relate to the song Wake me up when September ends, by Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong, whose father died of cancer when he was 10. At his funeral he cried and ran home and locked himself in his room. When his mother got home and knocked on his door Billie yelled: "wake me up when September ends". That's how we feel about July.

I try to practice radical self love in this month. We celebrate Liam's birthday with great gusto. I try to remember my husband's words in his final few days, that forgiveness is everything. So I forgive myself and my son, and all who have trespassed against us. I do a lot of retail therapy, eat a bit more, drink a bit more, try to socialise more than I usually do.

My son listens to a lot of rap music, watches a lot of Chris Lilley and Monty Python, and somehow we ride out our sadness together. I don't judge his, he doesn't judge mine. And generally we get through July – like we have this past one - though it's rarely dry for me.

A decade on, I decided that to accept the unacceptable fact of my son no longer having his father, I needed to take myself off social media. Not merely because of the trolls and the needless nastiness there – decades of journalism have helped me develop a thick skin to criticism – but also because I wasn't robust enough to see the photos of happy families when mine was not.

It seems to me a medium of careless conversation – and those of us grieving are already exposed to enough accidental thoughtlessness. 

There's always that awkwardness when people don't know what to say in the face of a death before the three score years and ten. Just an "I'm sorry" and some silence I've always found the best solution.

I've lost count of the number of stupid things people have said to me over the years about my son's absent father. "Left your husband in America did you?" one cocky soccer dad said to me on the sidelines in Sydney once. "Yes in the San Francisco Bay where I scattered his ashes," I replied. 

Judgements come at us in all shapes and forms. In general now I try to avoid people and situations where I feel judged. And social media seems like a magnet for Judge Judies – so I avoid it when I'm feeling vulnerable.

Most people wouldn't know about my sadness because I tend to view the world from the sunny side up. But scratch beneath my colourful surface and there is a dark pentimento of pain I expose only to professionals, and express only through art: singing, writing, or playing music. I rarely expose my friends to my private pain, because they are stakeholders in wanting the old me – the one before death defined me.

For both my son and myself – speaking to professionals about our grief helps provide a container for our sadness that we can flush away when we leave the room. Because that sadness will be with us forever. We needed a way through it. Did I say don't judge? Professional counsellors don't.

I collect quotes about grief. That it's a journey of absorption, adjustment and acceptance. A recent favourite is from film director Philip Cox about life in the face of death. It is this:

I remember Nelson Mandela talking about grief's ugly step-sister, anger. When he was asked after all those years in jail on Robbin Island why he wasn't angry, he said: "I would be, if I felt it did me any good." Anger is always there beneath the surface of my grief and Liam's, and we're trying hard not to take it out on each other. If it's not expressed though, I know now it can morph into depression. 

I think most people would describe me as an optimist, but privately I read all that I can in an attempt to understand our pain. This is perhaps my problem. Because grief is an emotional not an intellectual exercise, it's a task you carry out only with your heart not your head. Bad things happen to good people as the book says. There is no closure, or getting over, there's just a getting through.

And all I hope is that my son gets through, because I know I will. He is 14 now, the same age Stuart Kelly was when his brother Thomas died. Often Liam tells me like most teenagers: "mum sometimes you talk too much, I wish you'd just shut up." And he's right. Because for us, and also for the Kellys, there are no words.