Nigel's darkest night HOW HE FOUND PEACE IN SADNESS

Nigel Latta’s latest - and last – book was published the day he died.

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Called Lessons on Living: Finding Your Way Through Life’s Up and Downs, it shares the strategies the psychologist, author and broadcaster used to navigate tricky times, and find ways of being more resilient, joyful and attuned to what matters most. He hoped people would take some of the things he learned on his journey and apply them to their own lives in their own way.

Here, Nigel talks about his and wife Natalie Flynn’s response to learning he had terminal stomach cancer, and how a chance encounter that could have been upsetting instead filled him with joy...

Tears, ice cream and Quetiapine

That first terrible night, we didn’t go home. We couldn’t. I remember Natalie asking our friend how we should be with the children. It’s a strange thing, but even though we had over half a century of clinical experience between us, we both felt lost. We both felt like we should know the answer to that question... but we just didn’t. It really did feel like we’d suddenly found ourselves in Dante’s dark wood. The straight way was lost to us.

“You need to be there for them the way you usually would,” she said. Our friend also just happens to be a very skilled and very experienced psychiatrist, and when she wears that hat, she has a deeply calming presence born of long experience.

That was one of the best pieces of advice we got on the journey. So instead of going home, we went to a hotel for the night. We needed some space.

We needed to process all this information and recalibrate. We needed to stop the wheels from spinning like they were... all disconnected and out of control.

I ate a lot of ice cream that night.

F**k it, why not?

And we cried. A lot.