He, his mum Janet and sister Becky, all had to cope with the awful loss of David

First, the bare, stark fact. The matter of public record. My dad David Bairstow was only 46 years and 126 days old when he committed suicide almost 20 years ago. My mum Janet, my sister Becky and I found him when we returned home at 8.30pm on one of those typically lampblack and cold January nights. He had hanged himself from the staircase.

Now, the speculation, the what-ifs, the what-might-have-beens, the guesswork.

The great risk of being alive is always that something can happen to you — or to someone you dearly love — at any moment. I learnt that lesson on a Monday evening so ordinary that otherwise it would be indistinguishable from 1,001 others.

Jonny Bairstow was just eight when he came home to find his dad had committed suicide

Jonny had to deal with death from a young age — and that awful night just seemed ordinary

Everything seemed normal to me. They say that infants can pick up a minute shift of mood at home, alerting them when something is a little off. I’d gone past the stage of infancy — I was a young child — but the eight-year-old me had registered nothing untoward.

To me, my dad was just my dad, as ebullient and as energetic as ever. I never saw him down or doubtful, or fretful about either himself or our future. I had no inkling that anything was wrong. He didn’t seem like a man full of distractions to me.

In the morning I said goodbye to him and walked to school with Becky, the Christmas holidays over and a new term beginning.

In the early evening my mum took me to football training at Leeds United, bringing Becky too. That our lives changed irrevocably while the three of us were away seemed to me — then as well as now — inconceivable and incomprehensible.

Jonny remembers his dad, David, also a cricketer, as an ebullient and energetic character

A Clear Blue Sky will be seralised by Sportsmail — starting in the Mail on Sunday

The inquest into my dad’s death, which I didn’t attend, heard evidence about his mental state. That he’d been suffering from depression and stress. That he’d seen both his own doctor and a consultant psychiatrist.

That he’d experienced extreme mood swings, veering between the dramatically high and dramatically low, leaving my mum unsure about ‘which version of him would come through the door’. That he’d been for a drink at one of his favourite pubs a few hours before he died (though the toxicology report revealed no extravagant level of alcohol in his system).

That he’d been concerned about my mum’s health and the treatment she was undergoing for breast cancer, diagnosed less than three months before and far more aggressive than even she appreciated at the time.

She’d had chemotherapy, radiotherapy and then chemotherapy again. She was wearing a wig because her hair had fallen out. I didn’t know — but I learnt later — that the hospital became more concerned about my dad’s emotional state than my mum’s.

He was afraid she was going to die. He was also afraid of how he would cope — and what would happen to us — if she did.

But Jonny's mum, Janet, remembers she 'did not know which version of him' she would see

Janet was suffering with cancer at the time, but the hospital were more concerned with David

YOUNG DAVID'S DEBUT LEFT GEOFFREY BOYCOTT BAFFLED! When the call came to play for Yorkshire, Dad was sitting in his school library, revising for his A-Levels. My dad misunderstood the message. At first, he thought he’d been picked for the second team. After the penny dropped, he went out to celebrate, downing two pints before summoning the courage to go back and knock on the headmaster’s door. He sucked on a packet of mints, to mask the smell of beer, and told him that the match clashed with his English exam. David, at 18, carried Geoffrey Boycott's bags before turning out for his Yorkshire debut The next day he awoke at 6am, unable to eat breakfast. He sat the exam at 7am, tackling the poetry of Milton and the novels of Graham Greene. At 9.30am, he was driven to the match. At 9.45 he was standing beside the main gates, leaving tickets for his father, when Geoffrey Boycott arrived. ‘Hello, David. Will you carry this?’ said Boycs, handing him his bag. The two of them walked to the dressing room, where Boycs chose his spot and told my dad to put the bag down beside it. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him. ‘You can go now.’ My dad gave him a baffled glance, unsure about whether this was a leg-pull. ‘But I’m playing,’ he replied. Boycs then gave him a baffled glance, equally unsure about whether he was now the butt of a practical joke. Advertisement

Also, my dad had been particularly anxious about an impending court appearance to answer a drink-driving charge, which would have meant the loss of his licence, a potentially grievous blow to his promotional and marketing business — and to our family finances.

The incident precipitating it was an accident on a quiet country road the previous October. My dad was bringing me home from training at Leeds in his Volkswagen Scirocco. A car, coming in the opposite direction, dazzled him with its headlights.

For a split second, my dad lost control of the wheel. We veered off the road, struck a slight bank and the car tipped over, leaving me on top of my dad. Shoeless, and still wearing my football kit, I freed myself and then clambered over him, escaping through the back window. With only the odd cut and bruise, which was miraculous, I stood in the middle of the road and waited. The driver who’d blinded my dad hadn’t stopped, he’d sped away, unidentifiable.

A friend of mine, also on Leeds’ books, was being taken home by his father. I flagged them down, and the police and an ambulance were called.

That afternoon my dad had been at the funeral of a golfing buddy. Like everyone else, he’d gone to the wake afterwards. The police routinely brought out the breathalyser, finding him over the limit. I can’t condone my dad’s drink-driving, but the circumstances surrounding the case — the car responsible for it, the driver absconding afterwards without a care for our well-being, the fact that my dad hadn’t been speeding — didn’t seem to interest the police.

I, the only other witness, wasn’t even asked to give a statement. I am still livid about that.

The repercussions of the crash rippled out. My dad was mortified he’d put me in danger, mulling over afterwards how much worse the crash could have been. It left him with a debilitating arm injury. His future in local cricket, and also the enormous pleasure he got from playing golf, were jeopardised.

He had also swallowed an overdose of painkillers at home... He described it as ‘a cry for help’.

His right arm and shoulder required an operation, and 16 pins and a plate were put in to support his joints, which brought him considerable pain during his recovery.

Fraught with worry as the court case loomed and his other problems accumulated, my dad had not only been drinking too much generally — and he accepted as much — but a few weeks earlier he had also swallowed an overdose of painkillers at home. The same painkillers that had been prescribed for his injuries. He described it as ‘a cry for help’.

David was worried about a court case after a breathalyser found him over the drink-drive limit

David crashed the car while driving Jonny, who played for Leeds academy, home from football

My mum had for months urged him to go to a doctor and talk openly about his depression. Either he refused or, after giving in and going, he threw up a smokescreen for the doctor’s benefit. He pretended there wasn’t anything wrong that wouldn’t soon be shaken off. ‘He and the doctor ended up talking mostly about sport,’ my mum said.

The coroner was patient and sympathetic, aware of my dad’s popularity and the accounts of him as a decent family man. He recorded an open verdict, as certain as he could be that my dad hadn’t meant to die.

He was making a further ‘cry for help’, and it had gone wrong in a way he hadn’t foreseen and didn’t intend because his illness confused him and clouded his judgment.

My dad, knowing that we were on our way home, thought we would rescue him, added the coroner.

David thought that Jonny, Janet and sister Becky would save him on the day that he died

Though almost 20 years have passed, Jonny is no closer to an explanation for what happened

As it turned out, one small innocent delay after another — none of them anyone’s fault — meant we arrived back half-an-hour later than we’d planned. The coroner’s concise, concluding sentence encapsulated the difficulty for those of us left behind looking for closure and searching for ‘The Why’ behind his death. ‘I do not know what happened,’ the coroner said. ‘He is the only one who did.’

Though almost 20 years have passed, I’m no closer to an explanation for what happened, which makes it harder to accept. Why my dad decided to end his life, and why he did so that evening, is an unsolvable puzzle. There was no note to read, no definitive clue to discover.

The following day was my mum’s 42nd birthday. Only a few hours before he died my dad had gone to a nearby town and booked a meal for the two of them.

There were fragments, just bits and pieces of information, but putting them together to reconstruct his last months never created a coherent whole that made absolute sense and explained everything, especially about what he must have been thinking. No matter how hard I tried, from what I knew as I grew up or discovered subsequently, there were always gaping holes. Questions that can’t be answered. Things that don’t add up. The truth is snagged somewhere in between them, caught in one of those places that’s impossible to reach. I live with that.

The following day was my mum’s 42nd birthday. Only a few hours before he died my dad had gone to a nearby town and booked a meal for the two of them. He’d also booked a babysitter for Becky and me. That act makes what he did seem even more illogical to us. So did something he said not long before. After a friend of his died, also committing suicide by hanging, he’d asked my mum, disbelievingly: ‘Why on earth would anyone do that?’

So, instead of certainties, there are only theories, and always will be. My mum believes there were ‘small bereavements inside him’, among them the loss of his cricket career, his search for something to replace it — which he never found — and also the death of his father.

David booked a table for two for Janet's 42nd birthday a few hours before he hanged himself

My dad was an only child. His father raised him all but alone after his mother abandoned the two of them. He was only three years old.

Illness does its early work in secret, so another crucial aspect I don’t know is when his own began. My dad once declared ‘I love life’. For so long he gave every indication of doing that, making it impossible to pinpoint precisely when feeling a little down became melancholy and then tipped into an engulfing depression.

My dad had suffered a succession of setbacks. He’d applied for the job as Yorkshire’s cricket manager, believing he was the ideal candidate. He didn’t get it. He considered standing for the committee until the prospect of success dimmed for him.

He’d been doing occasional commentaries for the BBC, and listeners liked him, but a more permanent role went to someone else. He’d been steadily hunting down promotional work, which was becoming harder to get. He’d been running his own company, winning a contract to merchandise World Cup ties.

David kept wicket for Yorkshire and applied for the cricket manager's job — but didn't get it

Life without cricket was hard for David, he missed the adrenaline pump of performance

He missed the craic and the camaraderie of the dressing room eight years after leaving it too

Life without cricket was initially harder for my dad than playing the game for Yorkshire and England had ever been. He missed it, and also the adrenaline pump of a performance.

He missed the craic and the camaraderie of the dressing room eight years after leaving it too.

There is nothing he wouldn’t have done for the club. His roots were in Yorkshire cricket. So were his inspirations. And so was his identity, his sense of self. Once a thing is known, it cannot be unknown — especially when you’ve seen it with your own eyes. But in the weeks, months and years that followed my dad’s death, I tried to blot out the memory of how it happened as much as I could.

In significant ways, I succeeded. Gone are the raw details of what I witnessed and also what was done and said in the immediate aftermath of it. Perhaps I was just too young to absorb them in the first place. Or perhaps trauma obliterated them, the mind deliberately wiping away in an act of self-protection what was too hurtful to bear.

I can’t tell you who among the three of us was first through our front door. I can’t tell you how we got from our house to our neighbours, which is where we apparently went.

David's love for cricket became a family affair — Jonny is pictured with half brother Andrew

Jonny, pictured with David and sister Becky, felt vulnerable and afraid a while after his death

But what remains — and always will for me, I think — is how I felt, then and for a long while later: vulnerable and afraid, the sense of disorientation and loss overwhelming. I learnt only retrospectively about the five stages of grief, but I experienced each of them to a degree — especially the first, which is denial.

I knew what death was, and I also knew categorically what it meant. Nonetheless there were times, particularly when I first woke up in the morning or returned to the house from somewhere, when I half-expected to find my dad still alive, smiling and sitting in his chair, exactly as I’d known him. Or I was sure I’d hear his car on the drive and his key turn in the lock. I’d see him framed in our wide front door, ready to pick me up in his big arms again for a hug; a hug so muscular it was like being cuddled by a gentle bear.

Winston Churchill once said: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ It sums up our family’s approach to the aftermath of my dad’s death. Becky and I passed a near-sleepless silent night, but next morning my mum got us up and made sure we washed and scrubbed ourselves, brushed our teeth and dressed for school in our plain navy and white uniforms.

She insisted that we went there, though I don’t remember either of us protesting much at all. It was my mum’s way of bringing a touch of normality to our lives, pressing on without my dad because she knew, absolutely from the start, that we couldn’t do anything else except confront, square on, the grim situation we were all now in.

But Janet made sure Jonny and Becky got up and were ready for school the very next day

Janet believed the family should not put anything off today in hope it will be easier tomorrow

Already our lives had begun to change convulsively — a process that would go on until almost everything familiar to us had been rearranged or was different somehow. Knowing this, my mum came to the conclusion — and I wholeheartedly believe she was right — that we shouldn’t put off doing anything today in the hope that it would somehow seem easier to do tomorrow.

The fact that it wouldn’t was the only certainty we had then. We couldn’t think or wish away reality. We couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.

We left my mum on her birthday — her cards unopened, her presents still wrapped — to deal with the business of death while coming to terms with her own emotions, her own trauma.

She went to one of her chemotherapy sessions and discovered that the newspapers, spread across a table in the hospital waiting room, were full of headlines about my dad’s suicide. The doctors, knowing of my dad’s death, had wanted to cancel the session. ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘You can’t do that to me. Not now. Not after what I’ve just gone through.’