Dusk was rapidly fading into darkness.

In just a few, brief minutes, we would be plunged into the inky night and forced to reconsider the predicament we were in: lost on a rocky, Sardinian mountainside.

What made our situation even worse was that we had no idea where the shepherd’s hut – our makeshift home for the night – was and the mountain rescuer we were with had just admitted that he’d left his GPS in the car and didn’t know which way we should turn.

Heading back to the car was not an option: walking over the limestone boulders while laden down with sleeping bags and camping stoves was difficult enough in the daylight. One wrong step in the dark could have had fatal consequences.

With my 60-litre rucksack still on my back, I leant back against an old, gnarled juniper tree and surveyed my stark surroundings; my silence wrongly mistaken for fear.

But that was far from true because, having clawed my way back from Matt’s suicide, there’s very little that scares me these days. Getting lost on a mountain at night falls considerably short of the long-list.

In fact, there’s only one thing that terrifies me so utterly and absolutely that I get chills even thinking about it and that is the recurring nightmare that one of my nieces or nephew may, at some point, kill themselves, too.

This isn’t a one-off thought. It plagues me constantly. And this is not the fervent exaggeration of my - admittedly - overactive imagination.

I have every reason to worry.

Losing a parent can have a devastating impact on children, especially if that grief isn’t channelled or allowed to be expressed. The Boston Bombings left three people dead, while the explosion north of Wako, in Texas, killed 14. I’m embarrassingly bad at maths but even I can work out the repercussions that blast will have on a small community of less than 3,000 inhabitants.

Closer to home, we’ve had the suspected suicide of a police officer in involved in criminal charges.

He was also a father-of-two, which means another two children learning to live with the stigma and pain of their dad killing himself and trying to find a way to move forward.

But that’s not all. Suicide is now the biggest killer of young men in Britain – and we should all be worried. Suicide survivors (and how I hate that that term, even though I understand that I am, indeed, a survivor of the grief that threatened to break me, physically as well as mentally) are five times more likely to end their own lives than someone that has only conventional grief to contend with.

Rightly or wrongly, I don’t bottle up my emotions anymore. I cry when I’m sad. I laugh when I’m happy. I tell people when I’m pleased, angry or disappointed and I ask for help when I need it. My straight-taking doesn’t win me any friends but it might just save my life.

Matt wasn’t like that. He was a people-pleaser. He didn’t express his feelings. He plastered a smile on his face even when, as we now know, he was in incredible emotional pain. Dissecting his journey to death is pointless because there is no way of knowing which switch it was that triggered his methodical plan to end his life. I’ve learnt to give it very little space.

What preoccupies me far more is that my nieces and nephew have undoubtedly inherited some of their dad’s personality traits. All I can hope is that being silenced into killing themselves isn’t one of them.

Suicide is still so stigmatised that perhaps I should keep these thoughts to myself, aware that I am that indelible printed words are so much stronger than their diluted verbal counterparts.

But that’s not to say I think they will let history repeat itself. If their grief is channelled and expressed and they understand the importance of seeking help if they are depressed, then they can grow up into strong, healthy adults, albeit with a traumatic past.

That’s where we all have a part to play. We tackle the taboo of suicide head on if we don’t want more young men killing themselves and more families ripped apart, only to perpetuate the cycle of dysfunctionalism.

It’s ironic that the further I progress along the twisty path of bereavement and head towards a normal mundane life, the more vocal I get about suicide. And it’s not out of any desire to remain entrenched in the past.

If fewer people kill themselves as a result of understanding the devastating consequences their suicide will have on their families, then getting on my soap box and harping on about the S-word has to be worth it, especially where children are involved.

That’s what I was thinking about when we finally reached the shepherds’ hut after a thigh-burning vertical climb in the dark.

As we roasted pork, vegetables and local cheese on the campfire, where I demonstrated the survival skills I’d honed as a Guide, I looked up at the star-studded sky.

Nothing can bring my brother back but maybe, just maybe, I can stop someone else losing theirs.

I’m walking 60km across the South Downs on May 11 in order to raise £2,000 for Winston’s Wish the UK’s largest charity for bereaved children. I’ve already pulled £1,540, which means I need just £460 to meet my target. Please sponsor me here