Sometimes this blog is easy to write.

The words tumble freefall onto my laptop screen, hardly any effort is involved and after 40 minutes of tapping away on the keyboard, I sit back and think ‘so that’s what I wanted to say’.

That happened when I compared myself to my iPhone and again when I wrote about wanting out.

But other times – like now – it’s so much harder. I stumble. I err. I write chunks of text then delete them again in order to start over with a blank page. The words clunk together, as hopelessly clumsy as John Sergeant and Anne Widdecombe on Strictly Come Dancing back in 2008 and 2009 respectively.

And now that I’m on my sixteenth week of The Big Em and M Challenge, I’m beginning to understand when and why I suffer from writer’s block.

It doesn’t happen because I lack inspiration. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. It happens when I’ve got a tangled ball of emotions inside me and I need to unravel them to make sense of what’s going on and what it is I feel.

My holiday was far more relaxing than I expected and did a brilliant job of de-stressing me. But the seemingly innocuous job of choosing some birthday cards on the day before I left changed everything and brought my writing to a sudden, shuddering stop.

One of the people I had to buy a card for was my soon-to-be-eight-year-old nephew, who I last saw and spoke to back in November 2010.

We’d gone to the local market and with the pocket money my parents had given him and his two sisters, my nieces bought fluffy toy animals, whereas my nephew had opted for a felt colouring-in picture of Spiderman.

As I watched him kneeling down on the sitting room floor, fully absorbed by his project, all I could think about was how much I’d miss him and his sisters once they’d left for Canada.

But while I knew that it would be a long time before I saw them again, I didn’t realise it would impact on communication between us as well.

Every single birthday I send cards and emails to the children but I don’t know whether or not they receive them because I don’t get any reply.

I no longer know what they look like because my photos are out of date, which means I’m forced to remember them as the little children they were and not the pre-teens they’re growing up to be.

I don’t know if they’ve got long hair or short hair. If their English accents have been replaced with Canadian ones. What books they’re reading. Their favourite subjects at school. And, more importantly and one thing I think about constantly, how they’re coping without their dad.

What that means is that the notes and the stories that they used to write me, adorned with their drawings and stickers, have become even more precious than they already were, as have the brilliant classroom activities that my eldest niece used to devise for the children I teach English to.

I’ve accepted my brother’s suicide. I’ve accepted that it was Matt’s choice to kill himself and that he chose not to be here anymore. That’s tough – really tough - but learning to live without my nieces and nephew, who I adore, is almost as hard.

But I can’t cling to the past and remember the family we had because otherwise I’ll miss out on enjoying day-to-day living. And after two years of being blindsided by grief, I owe it to myself to live a life I love and to make sense of my brother’s death by breaking the stigma surrounding suicide.

Last week I was criticised yet again for writing this blog but I won’t stop. Not when I have so much to say. People need to wake up and realise the impact suicide has and the impact of that grief, especially in childhood.

I hope that one day the children will realise how much they’re loved, not just by the immediate family but also by my aunts, uncles and cousins.

One of my favourite pictures, and the one that everyone comments on when they come round to my house, is a black-and-white canvas print of my nieces and nephew.

Taken back in 2009, months after my brother died, it’s a snapshot of the three children walking on a North Dorset hillside.

The background is blurred, meaning it’s my nieces and nephew you focus on. With the youngest in the middle, flanked by his two older sisters either side, they walk squarely into the camera.

In the photo, the children are laughing and carefree. It’s as if they are walking away from the trauma of their dad’s suicide and into a future unknown and full of possibilities.

And, perhaps, that’s a lesson for us all.

I’m walking 30 miles in May 2012 to raise £2,000 for Winston’s Wish, the UK’s leading charity for childhood bereavement. Please sponsor me here.