I can see why someone would kill themselves. If the thing they value the most in life is taken away, especially if they think it's their own fault. Even worse if the thing they valued was the promise of a bright and better future - reality can never beat imagination.

For her it was her family she valued the most. When we were offered a new council house, one twice as large as our current house, and entirely newly built, it was how she thought life should have been and for her it was a step in the direction of a better life for her family.

The house I've lived in most of my life can't be underestimated for its shittiness. It was incredibly small for a family of four children (although my half-sister moved out at 16). When you couple the lack of space with the menagerie of mild undiagnosed mental disorders my family has, it's not uncommon for petty arguments, insults, fits of rage, shouting and screaming to take place several dozen times a day. The atmosphere is usually tense to some degree.

Unfortunately, my mom suffered a nervous breakdown when we moved to the new house. It's not too surprising - I read somewhere that moving house is the third most stressful thing a person can experience in life, after death of a loved one and divorce. (Perhaps I'm wrong, since the Holmes and Rahe stress scale says differently)

When we moved back and she fell into depression, everyone thought there must be a secret underlying reason for it. Something to do with her childhood, perhaps, my dad thought. Though when I asked her, she always maintained that it was because of her giving up the new council house. It was the guilt of what she perceived as depriving her children of a better future.

Worse, you can't get away from it. The sheer magnitude of such a blow on what you hold most dear consumes your thoughts and your sleep. And there's no-one to blame, to vent your anger out on, except yourself. You're not righteous or wronged. You fucked it all up in one wrong decision.

Although I knew her as my mom, she was truly just a girl, really, from a shit council estate called Castle Vale. She didn't deserve what happened to her. When she left school she made her life as best as she could. Finding someone who loved her. Having children, like she'd always wanted to.

The reason I don't like talking about it, isn't because I feel too strongly about it. It's the opposite. I'm concerned that I'm not sad she died. Through my life, I perceived her as being overbearing, too protective. I hated the sweetness of the notes she'd put in my luggage on the school trip to Wales. The way cheered when I came through door, to try to cheer me up, when she recognised I'd had another shit day at school. Her resistance to me moving away from home.

Honestly, I was partly glad when she died. That's what I've never admitted to anyone, and why would I? Though I can see as I grow used to life without her, I am beginning to miss her. The fact that if I want to talk to her, I can't. I'll never forget the conversation where, in sheer desperation, I told her everything that was going wrong in my life, and she said something profound that managed to turn my life around.

I suspect my feelings will continue to turn towards sadness, as I gradually forget the overbearingness and unwanted kindness I awkwardly fought off as a teenager.

I never cried after her death, though I did when I was told about her very first suicide attempt, and only partly because I thought it was the right emotional thing to do. Although, honestly, I don't want my mom back, I would like back the girl from Castle Vale who I slowly grew to know over her last few years, with who I was beginning to have mutual respect with. I want her listening skills and unconditional advice.

So there you go. I'm afraid my feelings are atypical, though perhaps I should be glad I didn't have a strong emotional attachment with my mom. I saw how much it hurt my sister, my aunt, and most of all, my dad, but it never really affected me.

Have you ever lost all interest and desire in something? Where before there was excitement, there's now a blank, grey, lifeless void? I guess that's how my mom felt about life. It's almost as though something physical about you changes. At the end, she was physically different - grey, lined, tired, and sapped of energy.

The energy you naturally had once, you can want it back, but the saddest thing is, the changes are truly physical, not mental. You can only return to your former self with impossible feats of willpower. You're fighting against you own body's changes, willing them to change back.

Like, if someone says they love you, but you don't love them back, but you appreciate their love anyway because it makes you feel wanted and somehow better about yourself. But because you don't reciprocate their love, they naturally become disinterested in you. And you want them back, but it's already too late, the disinterest has set in, they fall out of love rapidly. You remember the days when they would pine after you, and wish you had never let them know that you didn't love them.

In depression you mind can scream, scream because it's trapped in a prison devoid of any joy, happiness, desires, hopes, and dreams. All there is blandness without any point to it.

Human bodies are very strange. On the surface they are very simple - a head, a torso, two arms and two legs. Eyes to see, a brain that lets you learn about the world. Preprogrammed to feel joy, fear, to want things - a motivator to do everything you can to stay alive. How can something so basic fail at such a fundamental level? Billions of years of evolution and somehow some people's brains fail so fundamentally that people actually kill themselves?

The complexity of the human body is absurdly high. In any given situation, the most molecularly complex thing will be a person. Computers can't even yet begin to rival the processing power of a human brain. So there must be a myriad of things that can go wrong with humans. People often forget this. Just because most people don't have mental health problems, doesn't mean they don't occur.

Anyway, I rarely feel this depressed. It's just that sometimes, I'll get an intellectual glimpse into what I think my mom went through and I feel obliged to write down.