The dilemma My husband and I separated. I left him because of anger issues that he couldn’t control. A few months after we parted he died from a heart attack. I have three kids and my daughter, who is 11, believes that if I had never left, her daddy would still be alive. I loved him and refuse to tell her in full why we couldn’t live together. All the kids know is that he punched the glass door out before they went to school on the last day we were there. I don’t want her to hate me. But I feel like she does. I love my kids and I want them to remember how good their daddy was, not the bad. What do I do?

Mariella replies You’re damned every way. It’s a tricky situation and one I know all too well having deified my own father from the age of 15, when he died. Now when I look back on the struggles my poor mother had, not only in raising us alone but in doing so entirely overshadowed by her ex-husband’s canonised status in our lives, I understand how tough it must have been for her. The moment my father died his far from heroic lifestyle choices, including his alcoholism, were swept into the grave he was lowered into and buried with him.

Thanks to our mythologising of the prematurely departed he was reinvented as long-suffering, cleverer, more understanding, a beacon of intellectual stimulation and the most supportive of parents. In fact, he appeared way more indispensable in death than he ever was in life and ironically he’d have been the first person to see the irrationality of his newly elevated status.

People rarely speak ill of the dead so the already colossal sense of loss tends to be further exacerbated by well-meaning adults telling you how fabulous your parent was. If once they loomed large, in death a parent can reach gargantuan proportions. You’re left not only facing the day-to-day domestics but competing with the memory of a superhero with previously undetected powers.

Your task is made so much harder by the anger and resentment you no doubt harbour towards him

The timing is not good. Your husband passed away while your daughter was particularly engaged with him. Young girls practise relationship techniques on their doting dads, often creating an intimate and love-struck partnership, untampered by reality, until the teenage years blow some cold home truths into their cosy union.

Talking to her about him regularly will help to make him more mortal, while the more you wrap him up in silence the larger he’ll loom. You don’t need to give her a blow by blow account of his failings, but you need to be honest about good times and bad.

It’s also important to remember him with love, but not hyperbole, something we failed to do in my household. Bear in mind that your daughter’s only viable response to what she perceives as attacks on him will be to defend her territory – his memory.

I’m not so sure that this is something you can tackle alone. There’s absolutely no stigma and a lot of sense in getting your GP to recommend a grief counsellor (or call Cruse on 0808 808 1677). There are many small things you can do to make yourself an accomplice in preserving the children’s memories of their father, rather than appearing to be the villain, battling against their inevitable interest in him. From collecting the thoughts and memories of him from friends and relatives, to marking days that were once important to you all, whether anniversaries or his birthday, normalising his presence in your lives is a part of the process of mourning his absence.

Your task is further complicated by your recent separation and the anger and resentment you no doubt harbour towards him, first for the problems that caused the demise of your marriage and then his passing away, leaving you to again pick up the pieces. You’d be unusual if that didn’t make you feel guilty and even ashamed. I’m sure that you could do with some support yourself and I’ve no doubt that both you and your daughter would benefit from an expert’s guidance in how to live with your memories without being engulfed by them. There’s a wonderful new book that might help also called Grief Works by the eminent psychotherapist Julia Samuel, who uses her 25 years of experience to explore the best ways to navigate bereavement from a variety of perspectives.

The passing away of a parent isn’t something you “get over”, and nor should it be. Their abrupt departure from your life when you are young and vulnerable is enough of a severance without anyone trying to make it a clean break. The fact that you’re already agonising over how best to help your daughter and her siblings suggests they are in safe and capable hands.

If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. Follow her on Twitter @mariellaf1