In 2000, after 12 years of severe depression my mother Chrissy committed suicide. The night I heard she died I lay in my bed, hair still wet from the shower that had been interrupted by the call, with a deep sense that I hadn’t begun to feel the pain. I lay there, age 22, across the world from where she lay, counting off the events in my life I was going to live through without her. Just six weeks into my new life in London, the tether to my old life, my home, was gone. I made the 24 hour plane journey back to Melbourne, I cried, swapped stories, hugged and even laughed. Her funeral service was jammed to the rafters, with the many friends she had made over her lifetime, all of them in disbelief that this gentle soul’s life had ended this way. I thought about how lucky I had been to have her until I was 22, instead of 14, when the threat of her suicide was with us almost daily. There …