Every night before Mark Longley goes to sleep, he says goodnight to a picture of his 17-year-old daughter Emily, murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 2011.

Longley, 51 – a warm and sensitive man – also talks to Emily in his head; she was his “mate” as well as his daughter. She replies sometimes, he says, laughing. “Don’t be a dickhead, Dad,” is a phrase she was fond of, he says.

“Death is the atom bomb [for] emotions; if your internal wounds were visible you’d be rushed to hospital and you’d be in intensive care,” says Longley, speaking from his home in Auckland, New Zealand.

“We don’t talk about death; there’s no duck, cover and hold routine. We know what to do in an earthquake but we don’t know what to say or do if someone dies. We are kind of awkward about it. It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch.”

Eight years ago Emily was studying at Brockenhurst College and living with her grandparents in Bournemouth, Dorset, when when she was strangled by her 20-year-old former boyfriend, Elliot Turner. Turner’s parents were accused of helping their son cover up the crime, and were later sentenced to 27 months in jail for perverting the course of justice. Their son, who had displayed controlling, jealous and threatening behaviour towards Longley during their brief relationship, was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 16 years. Until recently, he remained unrepentant for his crime. Longley has not forgiven him.

This week Longley, a journalist, will release a three-part podcast exploring death, grief and how to survive after your world explodes. Piecing together his story with those of others who have lost someone, and the opinions of grief experts, the podcast also features archival home recordings that capture Emily’s playfulness and spirit, as well as key recordings from throughout the murder trial.

It’s confronting listening but also moving and universal in its themes, with its gentle urging that grief can be done better and more humanely.

Longley says the podcast is the result of years of grappling with grief. He wanted to design a how-to guide, a “metaphorical hug” for those who might have lost someone, or are trying to support someone who has.

“I found the whole process of grief quite strange,” he says. “I noticed people were really uncomfortable talking to me about grief and about Emily.

“I was in a weird paradox where I felt isolated and I wanted human contact, but people didn’t know how to talk to me. The journalist in me thought this was interesting and I wanted to examine it.”

Last year Longley spoke at the Auckland vigil for the murdered British backpacker Grace Millane. Since Emily’s death he has become a passionate advocate for White Ribbon.

The lawyers working on Emily’s case were clear from the beginning, Longley says, that her death had all the hallmarks of domestic violence.

It still haunts Longley that no one saw the warning signs of her toxic relationship with Turner. He believes she would still be alive if someone had recognised the relationship for what it was, and helped her escape.

Although Emily was killed in the UK, Longley’s research into domestic violence has centred on his home of New Zealand, which has one of the worst rates of intimate partner violence in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Police attend a family violence incident once every four minutes in the country, and the Labour coalition government has pumped a record NZ$320m into the sector in an attempt to tackle the horrendous statistics.

Longley strongly believes that more of the responsibility of confronting domestic violence lies with men.

“One of the most common questions in family violence is, why didn’t she leave him? Not, why did he hit her?” says Longley.

“The man is out of that equation, all the onus is on the woman, there’s no suggestion the man shouldn’t have been hitting her. And we need to reverse that. It shouldn’t be up to the woman to leave and go to a refuge, it should be up to the man to stop being violent.”

Longley is preparing for a “bit of a break” after tackling the experience of grief so intimately but is then considering another podcast, this time examining domestic violence.

It has been close to a decade since Emily died but Longley says grief never ends. “What a load of rubbish closure is,” he says.

“People keep asking if you have closure. You never have closure. I think people wanted to feel I had closed that [the murder] off so we could all move on. You never move on. I miss Emily every day, I think about her every day. And, God forbid, if you ever did move on, it would be like saying that person didn’t exist.”

• Death: A podcast about love, grief and hope is released on 12 June, and is available on iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud and all major podcast apps. See more at newshub.co.nz/podcasts