TV agony aunt Denise Robertson suffered her own tragedy when her 43-year-old son was diagnosed with incurable cancer two years ago.

She tells Julia Breen about her struggle to deal with her own heartache - while helping others overcome theirs

DENISE Robertson is crying.

Even two years on, the memory of her son John's death is so raw that talking about him, and his energetic, comforting presence in her life, reduces her to tears.

It feels strange, disconcerting, to be clumsily attempting to comfort the agony aunt who, for 20 years, has listened with obvious sympathy and understanding to thousands of people's problems on TV's This Morning show.

I never knew John, but Denise has a way of describing him and bringing him to life that makes me feel as though I did.

She makes me feel sad that he is gone.

John was one of four children to whom Denise, from East Boldon, near Sunderland, became stepmother when she married her second husband. She was then a single parent, with one son, Mark, after her first husband died.

Denise is adamant that all her stepchildren are loved as her own, but she had a particularly soft spot for John.

"I find it extraordinary when people think your pain is less because he was my stepson. You love your children partly because they need you, and stepchildren are very often needy.

"John's mother had died when he was two, so he had never had a mother and he was 11 when I married his father. In a strange quirk of fate, it was John I hung on to after my first husband died," she says.

"John was friends with my son Mark, and he was quite determined that I was going to be his stepmother. He said to me Dad wants to see you about something', and I thought what on earth does he want'?

"He dashed ahead of me into his house and I heard him saying to his father she wants to see you about something', so his father came into the hall and we met. He got us together really."

John was also responsible for Denise's love of dogs.

"He had very strong views about what a stepmother's role was," she says.

"When I married his father, I had this dislike, this fear, of dogs.

"We got back from the honeymoon and got out of the car at the gate and John said dad said we could have a dog'. I walked past him up the path, thinking, I now have five children instead of one and they want to keep animals too!

"But then I thought about it and thought they deserved a dog. So I got them a puppy but said I wouldn't feed it.

But I fell in love with dogs then and have been a besotted dog owner ever since."

Reminiscing about dogs stirs another of Denise's more painful memories.

"When John was dying in the hospice, the nurses had got him beautifully settled and I said I was going to go home for a while. I was looking after his dog Domino and I said to him I will bring Domino in to see you tomorrow, although why I should do you a favour when you're responsible for me being dog-obsessed, I do not know'.

"It was an old joke between us, and he smiled at me, and I left."

Denise is quiet for a few seconds, before emotion chokes her voice: "I never spoke with him again."

John, suffering from lung cancer, drifted into unconsciousness, before passing away.

Denise says: "Colleagues at work have said to me that I was just on automatic pilot. I don't really remember clearly the few weeks after his death.

"I found work helped. When I entered into the viewers' lives I could get away from my own life. If I hadn't been able to work, I think I would have gone mad. I have lost a lot of people in my life - my parents, my son, my only sister and two husbands. If you don't have something to hang on to, you don't get through it."

Tragedy, she admits, has made Denise a better agony aunt. "I had heard from thousands of mothers who had lost children over the years," she says. "They said the loss of a child was different to anything else.

IKNEW it was incredibly painful, but before John I couldn't see that it was more painful than the loss of a partner. Now I know it is different. I know it goes against the natural order.

"I have always had buckets of blessings and a wonderful family. But I get letters from people who have lost their only child, or their partner and child. I know there are people infinitely worse off than me and I always count my blessings."

After John's death, Denise was approached by a national newspaper and asked to write about it. But she refused, fearing it would upset the rest of the family, especially his wife, Janet, and his daughters.

"But Janet wanted me to do it, because there were things that had happened that shouldn't have done. Having to worry about paying for car parking when you're constantly at the hospital with a terminally- ill relative, worrying that when you get back it will be clamped, just shouldn't happen in a civilised society.

"There was also an incident where John was left on a trolley for hours on end in the hospital. Janet wanted me to write to help others in the same position."

Denise decided she would add a chapter to her autobiography, which she had published at the time of John's illness.

"But I couldn't write it," she says. "I churn out thousands of words a week, but it was a total block. I couldn't write anything.

"It was actually Fern Britten (presenter on This Morning) who eventually talked me through it. She said, just do it, just write and let it go. But it was a long time before I could.

"I think I'd drawn a curtain down, and I still do it. John had a wonderful rag-bag mind of useless information, and even now I'll come across a useless fact and think, wait until I tell John that. And then I realise."

Every year Denise and her family make sure they have a "family day" where they all get together and have a photograph taken.

"We did that at Easter this year," she says. "On Easter Saturday we got together and we talked about John.

"I was absolutely dreading the first Christmas after he died, but it was really not too bad at all because one of my daughter-in-laws had some photographs of John we had never seen, of him really enjoying himself on the way to a Sunderland football match and as they were passed round, we were all laughing.

"I get so many letters at Christmas from people who have lost someone and don't know how they're going to survive Christmas. But for me, it wasn't nearly as fearful as I thought it was going to be."

Denise says that life has made her an agony aunt.

"In the war I was a very small child and my mother was very frightened during the air raids and I used to sit and hold her hand and say We are going to be perfectly all right'.

"After my second husband died, I went on air two weeks later and talked about it. I think it is important that I bring that to the job.

"I am not a genius, I'm not a psychologist, but I am a survivor."

■ Denise Robertson's autobiography, "Agony? Don't get me started" is published by Max Press in paperback.

It is priced £7.99 and is available from most bookshops.

9:30am Tuesday 6th May 2008

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