ONE thing we can be sure of is that Jade Goody is not, any time soon, going to be forgotten. Not by her children. Not by the man who is their father. Not by anyone who followed the rollercoaster story of the woman who became both a reality television superstar and villain, and who, when she died of cancer aged just 27, triggered a wave of grief that prompted Stephen Fry to describe her as a “Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks”.

It’s testimony to the impact she made that when I meet the father of her children, TV presenter turned author Jeff Brazier, I want to talk about Goody.

What is it like for Goody's two sons to grow up without her? What does he think she'd make of his new book, The Grief Survival Guide, at the heart of which is her sad and premature death? “Well,” he says, “she would be very impressed I’m sure. I remember her telling me, some years ago, it was about time I got a real job. She would rather that she was still here, though. She would rather that the book didn’t exist.”

Remembering the media circus that existed around Goody and the wider world of reality television back in the noughties, it seems remarkable that Brazier – her former partner and now a life coach specialising in bereavement – was ever part of all that. As he sits delivering his matter of fact wisdom about grief, he seems not so much interested in fame as psychology, not so much concerned with getting his picture in the paper, as issues around mental health.

The TV presenter and one-time reality television regular, who appeared on shows from Shipwrecked through to Dancing On Ice, met Goody back in 2002 at the height of the meteoric rise to fame and fortune that followed her appearance on Big Brother. Within three months, she was telling him he was going to "be a dad". Their first child, Bobby, was followed quickly by their second, Freddie. When their rocky relationship ended, they kept joint custody of their children, and, though Goody towards the end of her life married Jack Tweed, Brazier's strong respect for the mother of his child runs through his book.

The Grief Survival Guide, is the story of how, when faced with bringing up two children who had lost their mother, Brazier decided to tackle grief straight on handle, for their sake, it as best he could. "Grief is a big part of our lives," he says. "One of the ways of helping yourself to unravel the grief is to express it. And writing is just one form of expression."

Along the way he tells the tales of many people he has coached. He points to a half-full water glass. "Let's say that water is the natural amount of grief that a person might experience, and the ingredients of that will be shock and disbelief and all of the things that you go through. " He then tops up the glass with more water. "Well, what I’ve found having coached so many bereaved clients is that we add a load more: blame, regret, thoughts of what I should or shouldn’t have done."

But the grief of Brazier's children wasn't just any grief, it was a bereavement in the public eye. Goody was the most memorable and famous of all Big Brother contestants. A former dental nurse, she appeared on the show in 2002 and became catnip both for those who enjoyed her humour and lack of a verbal filter, as well as those who liked to laugh at her misconceptions, such as her insistence on the fact that “East-Angular” was abroad.

She made her name on reality television, had her cancer diagnosis revealed there, died in the public stare, almost, to the last, still living it out like she was on Big Brother, doing photo shoots, releasing pictures of her wedding, in her final months to Jack Tweed, working to earn money to put aside for her two sons. "I've lived in front of cameras," she said at the time, "And maybe I'll die in front of them." The impact of her death, in March 2009, significantly boosted public awareness of cervical cancer.

On the day Goody died – March 22, 2009 – she was surrounded by her mother, husband Jack Tweed and friend Kevin Adams. Her children, were with Brazier in Glasgow, where he was working as host of The X-Factor Live Tour. In The Grief Survival Guide, he describes how when Goody got her final prognosis, she had decided to tell her sons she was going to die. “She bravely told them the story that we had agreed was best for them to hear – that God wanted Mummy to be an angel and that soon he would send for her and she would become a big, bright star that they would be able to see in the sky on its way to heaven.”

When Brazier learned of Goody’s death, he walked out to the garden to get some air in advance of telling his sons, then four and five. Seeing a single, solitary star in the sky, he realised what he needed to do and showed the children the star. “They knew who the star was and we sat gazing up at her for a while before blowing her kisses and getting into bed to face the unknown together."

It would have been possible for Brazier, following Goody’s death, to continue the reality show which has become such a national obsession, and keep his children in the public eye, to sell photo shoots with them and make a profit from the media interest. They could have been living in a “big, big mansion” as a result. He was even offered £100,000 for a photo shoot of the family at Christmas. But that’s not what he chose to do.

From the start, Brazier kept his sons away from the limelight, taking them to Australia at the time of the funeral to avoid the "media circus" it would entail. On his return, he asked the Press Complaints Commission if they could write to all media outlets asking for privacy for his children, which they did. “What I was fed back was that everybody was really welcoming of that because what had happened around Jade’s death had got out of control.”

The decision to keep the children out of the public eye wasn't a hard one. “I did think that it would not really equate to a normal childhood for them to have a continuation of the media attention that surrounded Jade. I didn’t think it was right for me to court that or encourage that and gain from that financially … We’ve enjoyed privacy, which has absolutely helped them to have a normal childhood and to be able to grieve in a natural way.”

But times, and his attitude, have changed. Growing up in a world of social media, his sons will, he believes, need to learn to take control of how they present themselves. Hence, recently he posted a picture of them on his own social media, and has included many stories about the boys in his book. “The problem for me now is that if I stopped them from going on all these social media platforms, sharing pictures of themselves – is that a normal childhood? They are 12 and 13. Bobby is nearly 14. Does that go against the brief? Do I have to now reconfigure my view?”

Brazier wears his own grief extraordinarily lightly. He appears unscathed, a golden boy, still youthful at 38. Yet he has been through plenty. Like Goody, whose parents split up and whose father later died of an overdose, Brazier had a chaotic childhood, as his book makes clear. Born to a 16-year-old mother, he spent his first five years in foster care. He never knew his biological father because when his mother picked him up at five years old, she presented her new husband, his stepfather, as if he were his father.

It was only later, when, after years of difficult marriage, his mother fled with him and his brother to a women’s refuge, that he finally learned that his father had been the skipper on the Marchioness, who died when the boat which went down in the Thames disaster in 1989.

All this, he observes, could have made his bitter or resentful, but it didn’t. “When I was younger and I was listening to the 89th argument going on downstairs between my mum and stepdad that week, I asked a lot of questions of myself of the situation. I’d think, why has he come home and said that? Even at an early age, I had a heightened awareness of psychology.”

When I ask about his first experience of grief, he talks of when he was ditched by the professional football team he played for, Leyton Orient FC. “Though personally I don’t think I grieved because I’m very good at moving on so the next day I’d already got a job as a barrister’s clerk and a contract with a semi-professional football team and I was on double the amount of money I had been.” He adds: “Little survivor.”

Brazier met Goody in 2002, post-Big Brother, when she was making a fitness video and was sent to stay with her personal trainer Kevin Adams, then Brazier’s flatmate. Three months in to their rollercoaster relationship, she announced that she was pregnant. Before that moment he had never considered whether he wanted to be a father. “The first thing that came into my mind was – well, I’m here. My mum was 16 when she had me and all my family were obviously very against her keeping me. I couldn’t be so hypocritical as to enjoy life the way I was, yet not give that child the right to live as well.”

When she was dying, Jade Goody made two requests for her children: that they should remember her, and that they should receive a private education. Both of those boxes have been ticked. “All the special occasions are marked in a really respectful and fun way," says Brazier. "Also we do something on the 15th of every month – whether it be bowling or going to the cinema – doing something that we enjoy and dedicating it to Mum.” On one occasion they released balloons from the Golden Gate Bridge.

However, not everything that Goody planned for her children has worked out as she hoped. Much of the money she spent the last months of her life trying to put away for her sons has gone, he suggests, to the tax man. “That’s the sad state of affairs because Jade intended that to be for the boys to make their early adult life slightly easier, so they would be able to buy property maybe. It wasn’t to be, but that’s completely out of my hands.”

How does he feel about the fact that this new work, which he finds so fulfilling, would not have happened without Goody's passing? “It’s quite simple" he says. "We’d rather Mum was here. It’s like a sliding door situation. Who knows where we would all be if Jade was still here, but irrespective of any of that, we’d rather she was.”

His sons have not read the book. “Teenagers are not interested in the slightest in anything that their dad does," he says, "although they were good enough to sit and listen to me at every mealtime over the last five months discussing what I’d learned that day and written about.”

One chapter, however, was “very much written by them” – it covers how a widower or widow should introduce a new partner into their children’s lives.

Brazier has had several partners in the years since Goody passed away. When he talks of having been a single father, he points out he had not done it entirely alone. “Anyone who is in my life is in my children’s life and plays a role. When the boys have grown up and we're asking where does the credit go, you absolutely look at any one of my partners, probably three people, that have been involved. They’ve played major roles in the boys’ life. I must thank them individually. And my mum who’s been ever present.”

He has been with his current partner, Kate Dwyer, for three years and she is mentioned many times in the book. “One of the best memories I have," he writes, “from my current relationship was when my girlfriend joined the boys and me in the sea on Christmas Day because the boys wanted to take their traditional balloon release for Jade to new levels be releasing them in the water. Despite the freezing cold, she joined in for the children.”

Much of Jade Goody's short life story seems to have been a harbinger of the age in which we now live. Long before social media had us in its grip, she was a victim of the kind of mass bullying now so common in the cyber domain that it has a name: trolling. The way people spoke when they accused her of racism towards Shilpa Shetty in the 2007 Celebrity Big Brother, seemed to prefigure today’s Brexit era tensions, and the way many are prone to laughing at and dismissing people with views like Goody’s.

It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like, for Brazier, to be on the fringes of all this. “That bubble I lived in at the time was very difficult,” he says. “It didn’t always bring me a great deal of joy to be honest. It was a difficult phase, but a learning phase, and I was young and that’s what you have to do. But I don’t regret any of the experiences that I had.”

The Grief Survival Guide: How To Navigate Loss And All That Comes With It is published by Hodder and Stoughton