HE would have squirmed at this. Squirmed at the headline, hated his picture, recoiled from the thought that he was at the centre of things, when what he really wanted was to be at the football, there and bearing witness, there because it mattered, there because it happened. 

There, always there, dark jacket, white shirt, dark trousers, there until that inexplicable, unfathomable moment when he was no longer there.

The story of John Alder is not easy to relate, because a reserved, private man would have shied from the telling. Because an extraordinary life of dogged support - over four decades, he missed a single Newcastle United game, when his mother was fading - ended incomprehensibly, when a missile obliterated the aeroplane that he, Liam Sweeney, a fellow fan, and 296 other people were flying in. Because the details are almost too difficult to bear.

He was a known unknown; familiar to thousands - that long hair, those clothes, that reliable, ubiquitous presence - spoken to by few. 

They called him 'The Undertaker' but he was also John, Uncle John, a son, a colleague and a friend. He was a brother to Joyce, his closest living relative, inseparable as children, her a tomboy traipsing after him, he "polite and gentle," both "street-kids" playing near their auntie's pub.

It was on Thursday July 17 that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, but it is only now that Joyce and her family can contemplate an ending. She was present when John's body was flown from Amsterdam to Leicestershire one Thursday this month, after an agonising process of recovery, identification and delay. There will be a quiet funeral later this week and a reception at St James' Park; well, it had to be there, really.

The quietness is their choice. There was neither quiet or choice in John's death, the scrolling ticker of dreaded news, totting up fatalities, blame thrown between sparring governments, the saturation coverage and then an emotional swell which built and flooded from Tyneside. John and Liam had been traveling to New Zealand to watch Newcastle in pre-season, a version - extreme though it was - of what we all do. They were going to the match.

In one sense, it was universal, in another alien. John's name trended on Twitter - he did not do Twitter - Sir Bobby Robson's statue at St James' became a shrine, Gary Ferguson, a Sunderland supporter, decided to raise money for some flowers; £33,618 later, it was a phenomenon for which two charities would benefit. There were ceremonies at Newcastle and Sunderland, an invitation to Downing Street (Joyce was not ready for that).

All the while, John was not home; always there but now absent. "Those first few days were surreal," Joyce said. "You're suddenly reading and watching things at an intense rate, to try and glean as much information as possible and then you hear that they can't even get on the crash site - it's heartbreaking … You're seeing this site and thinking 'my brother's there'. The inside of you is just screaming all the time."

Joyce and Ian, her husband, have not spoken publicly before, but the desire to contain their grief is balanced by recognition that they and John have become part of something bigger, by a need to explain who he was. And they have decided, too, that his collection of memorabilia, programmes hoarded and cataloged - nothing thrown away - should be auctioned off for The Sir Bobby Robson Foundation. They want John's obsession to benefit others.

We met at their mother's old house in Low Fell, on a neat slope of terraces. It was here that Joyce and John grew up, the home that John never left and scarcely changed when Ethel, their mum, passed away eight years ago, barring a Buddha figurine perched on the gas fire that he did not like and replaced with a horse. It was from here that John would set off at 11.30amevery fortnight, to walk to St James', through Gateshead and over the dark currents of the Tyne.

As a boy, he was not gripped by football. "From the age of 11 to 16, he probably swam three times a day," Joyce said. "He was dedicated to it - he swam for Gateshead, we've still got all the gala programmes - but he had his heart set on being a technician for the Post Office and the grammar school entered him for mainly CSEs. So he stopped swimming and got the O Levels he needed and went on to work for British Telecom.

"He'd dedicated his life to swimming and then suddenly he just cut that off. He never went to the baths again. That was about the time he started with the football. It's as if something else had to fill the space. I think he had an obsessive nature. My dad wasn't interested in football, but we had some friends up the street and their dad took him. That was where it started."

At one point, John bought a 'Limited Edition Heritage Stone' which was amongst hundreds laid at St James'. It was labelled 'THE UNDERTAKER 4-1-1964', a reference not to his date of birth, but his first match. Newcastle were beaten 2-1 by Bedford Town in the FA Cup that day, a fitting introduction to a team seldom worthy of those who follow it (his last game was a 2-1 friendly defeat to Oldham Athletic).

It began with every home game and then spread further when he was earning money. He applied for a passport, just to watch Newcastle, but travel was organised, whether here or abroad, with painstaking care; he could not miss kick-off. No drink before games, because alcohol may have impaired his enjoyment (he could make up for it afterwards) or forced him to the toilet. Shared car journeys meant BBC 5 Live or companionable silence; cheese sandwiches and no music.

He always wore the same thing, but 'The Undertaker' garb was not a costume and he was not a celebrity (although he was inducted in the Premier League's Hall of Fame in 1999 as Newcastle's 'Super Fan'). "I think it came about because he used to go matches in his school uniform," Joyce said. "Black blazer, a white shirt and dark trousers. He hated shopping and it was what he was comfortable in. There are four identical shirts upstairs that have not come out of their packets."

John had always been "painfully shy" - visiting their gran, he would ask Joyce to go in first, just in case anybody else was there - and yet football is social. "I doubt he would have told anybody he had a sister or a niece and nephews," Joyce said. "He would keep his private life separate. And in the same way, the football world was his world. On the day I took the wreath to the ground, I remember standing on the pitch thinking 'you should be up in your seat, John.'."

Football kept him from family functions. His dedication "was too serious" to pull his leg about, but they could talk about the sport and there would be some ribbing with Richard and Peter, his nephews, who are Liverpool fans and John knew the right people to get them tickets for Anfield. When Ethel died, he began sending Joyce an email "as regular as clockwork, 11am every Monday, with 'I am okay' written in the subject line."

They last saw him at the end of January, a chat on the train - Joyce and Ian were en route to Australia, to see Karen, their daughter; John was traveling to Norwich City - but there was a tradition that they would talk on their birthdays and they spoke on Joyce's, on July 10.He told her there would be no Monday morning email for three weeks, no 'I am okay', because he was heading to New Zealand and then on to Germany, where Newcastle had friendly games.

He and Liam had settled on Malaysian Airlines. "He mentioned the plane that had disappeared and I gather, retrospectively, that the tickets were cheaper because of that," Joyce said.

A little while later, Joyce and Ian were out for the day. They got home and caught the late news; a flight, a crash, Ukraine, Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. John's route, although he had not told them when he was flying. It was after 10pm and John went to bed early and rose at six - a habit from swimming - but Joyce rang the home phone. "I didn't get an answer." Left it a few minutes, tried again. "Still no answer." Dug out his mobile number. "Still no answer."

She rang the Foreign Office at 11pm. "I just thought that if they told me he wasn't a passenger, I could sit back and relax," she said. Details were taken but there was no call back. She tried again at midnight. "They said 'we haven't got that information'." She stayed up until two and then attempted to sleep, the phone beside her.

"At half-past five, there was a knock on the door and two policewomen were there and they looked at me and said 'I think you know what we've come to tell you'. All I could say was 'I hope not'."

A tragedy, but not an accident; somebody flicked a switch or pulled a trigger. Somebody gave an order. "I can't cope with that at all," Joyce said. "It's just so senseless and when you look at the bigger picture, the other passengers, the innocence… Nobody on that plane deserved to die.

"It's the enormity of it. When you think about how much grief you've got yourself and then it's multiplied by all these people. Sending that missile up … You know it's going to be in the news for a long time and every time it feels like somebody has stabbed you. It's a reminder of your own personal loss, but a big part of you feels that loss for everybody else, the tears cried every night by people who are screaming out for their loved ones and they're never coming home.

"It couldn't have happened in a worse way or in a worse place - there's no way you could ever visit the site and say 'this is where my brother died'. I didn't think I'd be the sort of person who would want to, but part of me now feels it would have been nice to say 'this is where you went, John. Goodbye'. It all just feels too much."

The circumstances are harrowing. The police traveled to Low Fell to collect forensic data, to take Joyce's DNA. John was eventually identified by the fingerprints he gave to United States immigration when Newcastle were there in 2011, but that was not until the end of August and the wait since then has been because there may have been more of him to find. "In my own mind, I've got to think he's there in that box like I see him in my head," Joyce said.

At first, there had been regular contact from the Foreign Office, but "then it got quite patchy. Just before John was found there was very little communication and I remember my daughter being here, getting on to them - she was a lawyer at one stage - and she gave them quite a bit of stick, but we haven't heard from them since. It's all been through police liaison officers. Sometimes I've been tearing my hair out - is somebody going to ring, is someone going to let me know?"

The response from football, from Newcastle, from Sunderland, from everywhere, was overwhelming. It brought warmth from St James' and a sense of unity to a fractured club; in the 17th minute of every match, an echo of MH17, there are 60 seconds of applause for John and Liam, followed by a throaty roar. John may have had a dim view of that - the match should not be interrupted - but the noise, the collective, brought solace to his relatives.

He never wore a replica shirt or a scarf, but plenty have been draped in his memory. "I found it amazing," Joyce said. "All this press, all this attention, all this for John and Liam. My brother was a total introvert! All the gestures, all the reactions were so touching. We're so grateful. You read all these things like 'condolences to the family' and part of you is thinking 'well, that's me', but it doesn't feel like you."

Notions such as rivalry dissipated. Ferguson asked on a Sunderland message board what they could do; soon, donations from fans of clubs everywhere, were rushing in. "It wasn't made up of big gifts and that's more touching in some ways," Joyce said, "that so many people sent £5 or £10. It wasn't just people who could write a cheque for £3000 and not think about it. It was 'I'm a fan, too', just recognising that here were two guys going to a football match."

There is now a permanent 'Alder Sweeney Memorial Garden' at St James' and when the families went there to reflect and to grieve, they asked Newcastle if they could enter the stadium and spend some time at John and Liam's seats. "I hadn't been to a ground before," Joyce said. "I'd never watched a match. I looked around and thought 'can so many people really come here, can it really be this big?'

"When we came back for the first game and the crowd applauded, I think I had my eyes shut then. I couldn't cope. But when we were up in the box, looking around … all this for John and Liam. It's incredible that all these people could feel part of our tragedy."

When the rocket flared and 298 lives ended and others changed immeasurably and forever, Joyce and Ian had driven to Ethel's terrace in Low Fell. In the lounge, they found a scrap of paper resting on an armchair beside the fire, the one where the horse stands. "It listed 'passport, trousers, shirt', column after column," Joyce said. "He'd used the same list time and time again. He ticked it off every time he went away for the football."

George Caulkin