I've just got back from my mum and dad's. I told them what has happened, I'm making sure everyone knows so I get some support. Dad was going off on one about what goes on in someone's head to do heroin etc etc. He then started talking about my dead brother, and how useless he'd been. I said that drugs screw up your bain and you don't ever really think straight when you're on them. Dad said, 'but your brother only did cocaine,' (I think he meant cannabis!), 'he didn't do heroin.'

I didn't reply. Dad probably doesn't understand the implications of him being on methadone when he died. But my parents don't want to know. They still think my brother served (yes, served) five years for possession of cannabis! And my brother was excellent at good behaviour....

I sometimes think I'm the one who knows most about my brother. Everyone else seems to know bits and pieces. Sometimes I'm shocked by what they don't know (or in my parents' case don't want to know). I see the stupidity in my own situation through what happened to my brother.

He went back on heroin after he married, and cheated on his wife. She divorced him, and never remarried. Right up until the year before he died he would sit in the kitchen at Xmas telling me how he'd screwed up his life by losing Sally and how he still loved her, but she didn't want him back. When she found out he was ill, she nursed him until his death. She'd always loved him, but known she couldn't tolerate the way he would treat her if they got back together.

After he died she asked me, 'he always said I was the only one he loved enough to marry, was that true?' I could only say that it was true as far as I knew. You could never be 100% sure with my brother.

A thwarted love that stretched over thirty years, all because he'd been an arse. I don't want to be my ex-sister-in-law, so I somehow have to put Steve behind me.

One of those weird coincidences: my brother was a drunken heroin addict called Steven (even the same spelling) too.

I got back home, and haven't been feeling too well (sore throat). Put my son in the bath, and when he got out he said he thought I was the best mummy in the world. I just burst into tears because, well, I have no idea. Partly I felt guilty about what I'd exposed him too in Steve, and partly because I think the tears had just been waiting. Now I can't stop crying for any length of time.

Gonna go and watch Mr Bean with my son after the CBeebies story.