Almost three decades after Peggy Vallintine took her own life, her daughter retraced her mother’s final tragic steps from a former psychiatric hospital to the place where she died.

Now, Peggy Vallintine-Carr has set up a support group to help others deal with losing a loved one to suicide.

In 1972, Peggy Vallintine was admitted to St Augustine’s psychiatric hospital in Chartham, near Canterbury, with severe depression.

She was surrounded by doctors and medical staff and her family were confident she would be safe. But the 60-year-old walked out of the hospital grounds and made the four-mile journey to Canterbury on foot.

Once in the city, she took her own life in a way so horrific her family has asked us not to reveal details.

She left behind five adult children and the youngest, Peggy Vallintine-Carr, had just turned 21.

“I remember not crying for a long time and thinking, why, because we were so close,” Peggy recalls. “In retrospect, the shock was so great I just buried it deep.

“It was September, just after my birthday. I’d been at work and hadn’t long been home. I felt so sorry for the policeman who had to knock on my door and tell me, because he was so young to be doing such an awful job.

“I had to wait for my brother to come home to tell him, then I went to my sister’s. My other sister was down visiting with her little children. That was particularly horrible.”

Peggy says her mum struggled with depression for years before she was admitted to hospital.

“I think she was in so much pain and despair she took her life,” she says. “Most people who take their own lives don’t want to die, they want to stop hurting. Stephen Fry has been quoted as saying suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

Like many who have lost loved ones to suicide, Peggy says friends often felt uncomfortable talking to her about it.

And her father who, like many men at the time, didn’t talk about his feelings was reluctant to discuss his wife’s “violent” death.

So Peggy was left to deal with the grief in her own way, feeling guilty for not being able to prevent the death, but never angry with her mother for abandoning her, just sad she had to “take such drastic measures”.

"You can say ‘I was relieved’ or ‘I feel guilty’ and no one will judge you" - Peggy Vallintine-Carr

And it was not until she reached her 40s that Peggy realised the anxieties she had felt about so many aspects of her life for so long had been sparked by her failure to deal with the grief. She knew she had to face the issue head-on.

She read up on bereavement and had counselling, but the breakthrough came when she discovered a charity called SOBS (Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide).

It was through SOBS she was able to talk to people who had suffered in the same way, enabling her to finally explore her own feelings.

Speaking about the meetings she attended, Peggy said: “Everyone at the meetings is a survivor. You know when you go into the room that everyone understands. You can say ‘I was relieved’ or ‘I feel guilty’ and no one will judge you.

“When I first went I didn’t speak for ages but after a while I realised I was safe and could let go. I could drop the facade of coping.”

SOBS also proved the catalyst for her deciding to “walk the walk”, retracing her mum’s last steps, from the hospital to the place where she had died 28 years before, in an attempt to make sense of what happened.

“I did the walk on my own,” she said. “It was quite profound really. I was looking at the trees and thinking they would have been smaller then.

“I wondered what the weather had been like, whether she was wearing sensible shoes, if she’d had a coat on. I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been receiving counselling and attending SOBS meetings.

“I felt closer to her doing it, I felt her presence. People say you walk the walk because you wish you could have been with them at the time. I didn’t want her to be alone at the time but of course she was and I can’t change that.”

Facing her grief has enabled Peggy, from Saltwood, near Hythe, to remember the good times with her mother, rather than focusing on her death.

“My mum was lovely,” she says. “I remember she used to brush my hair in front of the fire.

“She was a woman of great principle and strong ethics. A family member told me she threw tomatoes at politician Oswald Mosley and I was so thrilled. But she was quite shy so she would have been mortified if they’d hit him.

“She led a full life, had lots of children and was a very loved woman.

“There are some questions you’ll never have answers to, like why the person did it and what they were thinking at the time.

“Missing the person never stops, thinking about them never goes away, but an acceptance of what’s happened does come after time.”

For details of SOBS meetings in Ashford, Maidstone and Dartford visit www.uk-sobs.org.uk, email sobs.support@hotmail.com or call the national helpline on 0300 111 5065.