AS I write this there are tears in my eyes. It can't be helped, because I've just turned the final page of one of the most moving books I'm ever likely to read.

Forgive the blubbering honesty. It is an absolute requirement at this moment - an instinctive emotional response after reading A Blond Boy with Buttercups, which records a devastated mother's outpouring of grief and bewilderment following the suicide of her eldest child.

The book - a collection of poetry and prose - is Kathleen Hollingworth's tribute to the memory of her son, Ben, a gamekeeper on Lord Peel's estate in Swaledale, who in February 1998 drove up on to the moor and shot himself. He was just 22 years old.

Mrs Hollingworth's account of her son's tragic and incomprehensible death and its impact on herself and her family is remarkable in many ways, but the book, which also includes work from other writers, has a particular significance for me because I have seen its gradual evolution from just the germ of an idea to its emotive fruition.

I first met her four years after Ben's suicide, when she enrolled at a creative writing course I ran at Wensleydale School in Leyburn. I was struck immediately by her honesty and openness when she told me that she needed to write to help her cope with the grief of losing Ben. I had never thought of creative writing as a form of therapy.

After meeting her again to discuss her book, I am more than ever convinced that by committing her innermost thoughts and memories to the page she has, indeed, enhanced the healing process.

Looking back, she reveals the need to write was an instinctive response to losing Ben, the eldest of three sons.

"There was no intention to publish a book," Mrs Hollingworth told me. "In those days and weeks after Ben's death, I just scribbled things down in a diary and on scraps of paper as thoughts came into my head. I felt I had got to get it all out - get the pain out. I felt a real instinctive need to do it.

"Then when I started the creative writing class, I felt I had to make some kind of sense or order from my incoherent scribbles. It was like an evolutionary process. That was the first time I had shared with anyone the poems I had been writing.

"Writing about Ben was at the forefront of my mind. I was living with his death all the time, but I didn't think then I would produce a book in his memory."

Mrs Hollingworth, who works as a school secretary in Arkengarthdale, does not shrink from the reality of what happened to Ben, though she articulates her thoughts with care.

"I never feel any stigma about suicide, not like some people who have suffered this kind of bereavement. I accept that Ben died of suicide. That's how I think of it, that he died of it rather than committed it. I don't like the expression committed suicide - as if a crime's been committed."

Although at the inquest the coroner recorded an open verdict, Mrs Hollingworth and her family accept that Ben intended to take his own life.

"With suicide, once you get over the shock, most people want to know the truth. I took in the whole horror. I never shied from anything about Ben's death."

Her son's suicide was all the more traumatic for her because her father had ended his own life five years before.

"Only after Ben's death did everything become so clear about life and death. Losing dad was bad, but it is completely different losing a child. The death of a child is so awful, there's nothing worse.

"Nothing can hurt me as much as this. Knowing this gave me strength. Nothing's going to be as bad as this ever again. There's an energy of life; somehow you always will be connected by love.

"Before Ben's death, I would have said I was a good mother, but after his death I couldn't bear myself, thinking I must have done something terrible in his life for him to end it. It is only by looking at my other two sons, Tom and Adam, and realising how compassionate, loving and decent they are, that my feelings of self-worth began to return.

"I want people to know that no matter how horrific something like this is, you can find a way. It seems impossible to go on but you can find a way.

"Sometimes I feel that Ben has almost grown back into me, which is a very odd thing to describe. I don't feel he is gone. Clearly the person who is flesh and blood has gone, but not the essence of Ben - that has not been annihilated.

"My book is a tribute to the love that existed and still goes on between Ben and me. In the beginning, I felt it would be a betrayal of him to begin finding good things in life and living again. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. It would be a betrayal of everything he was and still is to me not to live again."

Mrs Hollingworth says her husband, Dave, and her younger sons have dealt with Ben's death in their own personal ways.

"Tom and Adam have read some of my writing and have been able to handle it, but Dave hasn't been able to even open the book - it's just too painful. I hope in time that he will be able to embrace this tribute to Ben and gain as much strength from reading it as I have from writing it."

* A Blond Boy with Buttercups (£7.95) is published by the Arkengarthdale Millennium Project (ISBN No 0-9539215-2-2). To order copies from Kathleen Hollingworth, tel 01748 884534. The book is also available from Ottakar's bookshop in Darlington (01325 465666) and Castle Hill Books, Richmond (01748 824243). Profits from sales will be shared between the RSPCA, NSPCC, the World Society for the Protection of Animals and the Compassionate Friends, a child bereavement charity