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Episode: Revisiting Ashley Judd: Grief, Love and Naomi

Author: CNN
Duration: 00:41:53

Episode Shownotes

When Naomi Judd died by suicide in 2022, after a long struggle with mental illness, her daughter Ashley found her. In this deeply moving, revealing, and insightful conversation Ashley Judd talks about the trauma she has worked hard to face, the grief she now feels, and how her mother’s spirit

is still very much alive in her life. Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode, Ashley Judd delves into her experiences with grief following her mother Naomi Judd's suicide. She reflects on unresolved childhood traumas and the coping strategies that impacted her ability to express emotions as an adult. Judd differentiates between trauma and grief, emphasizes the importance of nurturing one's inner child, and explores maintaining a connection with her mother through shared memories. Additionally, she discusses the importance of self-responsibility while supporting loved ones and the journey of emotional healing as part of the grieving process. This conversation aims to foster understanding and connections among those experiencing grief.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Revisiting Ashley Judd: Grief, Love and Naomi) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_02
This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. There's nothing sweeter than baking cookies during the holidays. With Prime, I get all my ingredients delivered right to my door, fast and free. No last minute store trips needed.

00:00:12 Speaker_02
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00:00:28 Speaker_06
Welcome to All There Is, I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm on vacation this week with my kids and I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving. I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but after my brother Carter died, my mom and I stopped recognizing holidays.

00:00:42 Speaker_06
Christmas, Thanksgiving, it was all just too painful. I know for many of you listening right now, this week may be tough. I just want you to know that you're not the only one who feels that way.

00:00:55 Speaker_06
I'm going to be enjoying being with my kids this week, but any holiday is also a reminder of the people I love who aren't here. I'll have an all new episode of the podcast next week. What follows is an episode from last season.

00:01:09 Speaker_06
It's my interview with Ashley Judd. Let's get started. The past is never dead, it's not even past. William Faulkner wrote that in his novel Requiem for a Nun, and my mom liked to quote it a lot.

00:01:25 Speaker_06
I found an addendum of sorts to it online recently, a quote by a writer named Greg Isles from his book The Quiet Game. I want to read it to you because I think it speaks to grief in a powerful way.

00:01:38 Speaker_06
Iles wrote, Faulkner said, the past is never dead, it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

00:01:54 Speaker_06
Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new, but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.

00:02:08 Speaker_06
The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. The past has felt especially present to me these last few weeks.

00:02:21 Speaker_06
Perhaps it's because of the holidays I've so long avoided or the anniversary of my dad's death last Friday. But the dim dramas of my childhood have been playing out very brightly in my mind.

00:02:33 Speaker_06
The grief I've so long buried is increasingly, insistently trying to make itself known to me. I just don't know if I'm ready to welcome it. I'm not sure what's more embarrassing, my desire to weep or my continued difficulty in doing so.

00:02:52 Speaker_06
This is All There Is with me, Anderson Cooper. My guest on the podcast is Ashley Judd. But before we start, I want to mention that we're going to be discussing the death of Ashley's mom, singer Naomi Judd, who died by suicide.

00:03:07 Speaker_06
If you or someone you love is struggling, help is available. In the U.S., you can call or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. We'll get started in a moment. Welcome back to All There Is.

00:03:27 Speaker_06
Ashley Judd is an actress, author, activist, and mental health advocate. She's also the daughter of Naomi Judd and sister of Wynonna.

00:03:36 Speaker_06
Naomi and Wynonna were one of the most successful country music acts in history, with a string of hits and multiple Grammy and Country Music Association awards.

00:03:45 Speaker_06
Naomi Judd struggled with physical and mental health issues for years, and in April 2022, one day before she and Wynonna were due to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi Judd died by suicide. She was 76 years old.

00:04:00 Speaker_06
Ashley Judd joins me now. Would it be okay if I played a little bit of one of her songs?

00:04:07 Speaker_00
Oh, please do.

00:04:09 Speaker_06
This is Love Can Build a Bridge. This is actually the last performance that she did with your sister. April 11th, 2022, and she died on April 30th.

00:04:19 Speaker_04
Love can build a bridge Between your heart and mine

00:04:48 Speaker_01
I've always been so proud of the music. I've always loved the music.

00:04:54 Speaker_06
Has grief been what you expected it would be like?

00:04:59 Speaker_01
Well, I've had several journeys with grief, and each has been distinct, unique, and also universal. So my grief journey started as a child because I played the role of the lost child in my family system growing up.

00:05:15 Speaker_01
And so when I came into recovery in 2006, what they said is that I had unresolved childhood grief. That child grief is such a deep, hollow, And when I started to cry, it felt like it was those bottomless tears to which there was no end.

00:05:33 Speaker_01
And I wondered if I could die from crying, but I realized it's the not crying that will kill me. It's the not crying that will kill me.

00:05:41 Speaker_06
I still find it very hard to allow myself to cry, but I feel like there is a well of tears, even now as I'm speaking to you, just beneath the surface that could very easily explode.

00:05:51 Speaker_01
Yes. I identify with that, you know, and it comes in these waves and it has so many different characteristics. You know, one of the things that I want to offer is that I have learned how to hold my own hand in my crying.

00:06:06 Speaker_01
And there is a place where trauma and grief and transcendence meet, and I call it the braid.

00:06:12 Speaker_06
The braid.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
Yes, that they all go together and there's this beautiful melding. But I believe I have a higher power who suffers with me that's just fundamental to the God of my understanding.

00:06:25 Speaker_01
And so I tried to go to this place where God was with me and so all of that was touching this transcendence simultaneously.

00:06:34 Speaker_06
You have said, I was powerless over my childhood. The survival strategies I developed made my adult life unmanageable.

00:06:42 Speaker_06
That is completely what I've now realized, that all the things that I developed to get through my childhood, all the strategies I developed of keeping things inside, doing everything myself, never asking anybody for help or advice, it has made my adult life unmanageable.

00:06:59 Speaker_06
These are strategies which have gotten me this far, but they are keeping me stuck in this middle ground of not experiencing real grief but also not experiencing real joy because I can't allow myself to experience any strong emotion.

00:07:15 Speaker_01
And that line is borrowed from a piece of very wise recovery literature and I have to acknowledge that those survival strategies were really brilliant.

00:07:24 Speaker_01
You know, they were creative and adaptive and resilient and they got me through things that otherwise I perhaps wouldn't have made it through and then as an adult,

00:07:34 Speaker_01
I'm so conditioned to rely on those strategies, but I can learn new ways and I can separate out the things for which as a child I was not responsible and I was vulnerable and needy and defenseless.

00:07:46 Speaker_06
I've heard from so many listeners who have unresolved grief or unprocessed grief. Do you still feel like that little girl is inside you? That that little girl is the person who reacts in a crisis situation first?

00:07:59 Speaker_01
Absolutely. Yes. And, you know, I think that developing a relationship with the child who's always alive inside of us is a joy and a delight and terrifying.

00:08:11 Speaker_01
And sometimes I wish she would just shut up and go away and mind her own business and get off my back and not be so needy. And then also she's, you know, she's my responsibility. We have to take care of that part of us because no one else will.

00:08:26 Speaker_01
And when it's time for us to die and we take those final last steps,

00:08:30 Speaker_01
We take them with all the parts of ourselves, and our loved ones who may be by our side, or maybe not, can only go so far with us, and then it is truly down to the God within us, who is in us like butter is in milk.

00:08:42 Speaker_01
It's the parts of us that have been with us inside of ourselves, and God, and that is it. And if we've abandoned those parts, we have abandoned ourselves.

00:08:51 Speaker_06
Your childhood growing up was, I mean, you wrote about childhood rape, about neglect, about sexual abuse by a male relative. There were two years where you were living alone while your mom and your sister were on tour.

00:09:03 Speaker_01
And then there were my grandparents who saved my life because I lived with them in the summertime where I was fed and watered and had a routine and they kept me going. It was ghastly and it was lonely.

00:09:15 Speaker_01
But I also acknowledge there was a lot of love in my family. It just hurt, right? It didn't work particularly well and it hurt. But I also had these two sets of grandparents with whom I lived in Appalachia. And they were my high holy altar of safety.

00:09:32 Speaker_06
So do you feel like you have been grieving for much of your life?

00:09:35 Speaker_01
Yes, and I think that I'm grief literate now. And grief and I are on pretty good terms. That doesn't mean I get a pass. It doesn't mean that there's a shortcut, but there's a shorthand.

00:09:45 Speaker_01
And we should say that there's a difference between trauma and grief, right? Because the trauma is intrusive and comes up unbidden. We don't have any control over it.

00:09:55 Speaker_01
It's a memory that's not processed and that lives free in the brain, bouncing around and seizes us beyond our control. And grief is a natural, organic human process that has natural stages that self-resolve over time.

00:10:14 Speaker_06
The death of your mom, how was that grief different than grief you had experienced throughout your life?

00:10:21 Speaker_01
That's a really good question, Anderson, because I think that the death of a parent is something for which we at least conceptually have some kind of preparation.

00:10:34 Speaker_01
And I also knew that she was walking with mental illness and that her brain hurt and that she was suffering. But that didn't necessarily prepare me. My mother's death was traumatic and unexpected because it was death by suicide, and I found her.

00:10:55 Speaker_01
And so it had this calamitous dynamic. My grief was in lockstep with trauma because of the manner of her death and the fact that I found her. And so what I needed to do first was like vomit, you know, just, I held my mother as she was dying.

00:11:18 Speaker_01
It was a pieta. So I, but, and then there was, you know, people need to be aware that there's a bit of a graphic story and there was blood. And I just needed to like process the fact that I was with my mother's, blood.

00:11:33 Speaker_01
You know, I'm so glad I was there because even when I walked in that room and I saw that she had harmed herself, the first thing out of my mouth was, mama, I see how much you've been suffering.

00:11:47 Speaker_07
You said that too.

00:11:48 Speaker_01
And it is okay. It is okay to go. It's okay to go. I am here. It is okay to let go. I love you. Go see your daddy. Go see Papa Judd. Go be with your people.

00:12:06 Speaker_06
And she heard you?

00:12:09 Speaker_01
Oh, she heard me. And I just got in the bed with her and held her and talked to her and said, Let it all go. Be free. All was forgiven long ago. All was forgiven long ago. Leave it all here. Take nothing with you. Just be free.

00:12:29 Speaker_01
And I did that for, I don't know what it was, 14, 15 minutes. Just held her.

00:12:40 Speaker_06
It's an extraordinary blessing that you were able to do that.

00:12:45 Speaker_01
You know, she wrote this beautiful song in 1975 about how we just found the notebook in which she has it written down in her handwriting, about how I picked her for my human life and she birthed me.

00:13:02 Speaker_01
And then the song goes on to say, when I hold her ashes in my hand and I let them go, I'm to carry on because my spirit is bright inside of me. And oh, when I read that, I wept. I wept and I wept.

00:13:24 Speaker_01
And it was like this blessing, this, she birthed me and I got to midwife her home and the exquisite symmetry of that. I'm so thankful I was there.

00:13:38 Speaker_06
Even knowing the trauma you would go through, you still were glad?

00:13:42 Speaker_01
You know, with the healing arts that are available and my ability to access them and my willingness to do it, it was a very small price to pay.

00:13:51 Speaker_06
You said that in the fall of 2022, you began to have nightmares and you began to weep in your sleep and have intrusive thoughts. How long did that go on for?

00:14:03 Speaker_01
You know, the truth is I had to work my ass off. It took work. I kept a commitment. I went to the rainforest in Central Africa in June.

00:14:13 Speaker_01
Mom died on the 30th of April, and my partner has a vulnerable research camp in a very remote part of the Congo with UNFPA, for whom I serve as Goodwill Ambassador. And so I went, and that's when I first started weeping in my sleep.

00:14:28 Speaker_06
Were you actually asleep or waking up and weeping?

00:14:31 Speaker_01
Yes, yes, yes. I was asleep and I was crying in my sleep. And then I got a referral to a particularly expert EMDR practitioner and I just dragged my bones over there twice a week for three months just to work on my trauma.

00:14:51 Speaker_06
EMDR's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. A series of rapid eye movements while rethinking about a traumatic episode. Is that correct?

00:15:01 Speaker_01
Yes and then the brain is so imaginative and generative it really takes over and so you only have to hold the explicit image of the traumatic event for a few seconds but you do have to hold it.

00:15:13 Speaker_01
You do have to bring it up initially and then it goes away and it helps the traumatic memories be processed and stored into the brain in a way that makes them not intrusive and

00:15:25 Speaker_01
come blindingly out when I'm sitting in so-called polite company and I want to just blurt out inappropriate things because I'm being hijacked by a bloody memory.

00:15:37 Speaker_06
These thoughts, these intrusive thoughts can come at any time you're sitting with friends in a situation completely unrelated and suddenly the images come of being there with your mom.

00:15:50 Speaker_01
Yes, or the police arriving or being interrogated four times or the fact that there was all this body camera footage or, you know, all the things that were apart and were very alive inside of me until I completed this very rigorous and intensive series of EMDR.

00:16:04 Speaker_01
And then the grief came up and it was like such a relief just to grieve. And I actually had a re-experience of the shock, which is the first stage of grief, a year after my mama died. I would just be doing something, washing the dishes, you know,

00:16:20 Speaker_01
writing on my second book and its wave of shock would overcome me as if I had just walked in the room again.

00:16:26 Speaker_06
You told I think the New York Times that after doing that that you learned to kind of store your memories in a safe place almost like they were located behind cellophane of a scrapbook page, is that right?

00:16:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, that's one of the ways I experienced the difference between grief and trauma.

00:16:43 Speaker_01
Trauma is bouncing around and jumping out at me behind a sofa, whereas grief is in a scrapbook, like an old-fashioned scrapbook, in a photograph, behind a page of cellophane, stored on a bookshelf.

00:17:00 Speaker_01
You know, I'm in a pretty joyful place about my mom's death, which also needs to be shared and uplifted because my mom was this intensely curious person. And she was so interested in neuroscience and neurocognition and the universe and the cosmos.

00:17:17 Speaker_01
And she was buddies with Lisa Randall, who's this astrophysicist at Harvard. She knew Marvin Minsky, who was the original person who was exploring artificial intelligence.

00:17:27 Speaker_01
These were just her friends and people wouldn't associate Naomi Judd with these Nobel laureates per se. But my mom is now in the vastness of consciousness in the mind of God. What a great place for her to be. I'm thrilled for her.

00:17:40 Speaker_01
You know, all of these mysteries which just made her daydream are now where her spirit resides. And so I'm having these conversations with her about how she's just with the mystery.

00:17:55 Speaker_06
So you have conversations with your mom?

00:17:57 Speaker_01
Yeah, a little sly wink wink, you know, a little writing back and forth.

00:18:03 Speaker_06
It's one of the things that I've learned in talking to people that's really been helpful to me is this idea that you can still have a relationship with somebody who has died.

00:18:10 Speaker_04
Yes.

00:18:11 Speaker_06
And in fact, that relationship can grow and change and morph. As I age, I come to understand my father in a way I didn't before.

00:18:19 Speaker_06
As I have children of my own, I suddenly see my father and my mother in a different light because I understand more about their parenting and what they saw in me. Do you find your relationship with your mom changes?

00:18:33 Speaker_01
I am finding that, and I really encourage people to honor these small impulses. If a thought crosses the mind, pay attention to it. Consider it a nudge, perhaps from your loved one.

00:18:52 Speaker_01
You know, when I go to Walgreens, which is where I buy all my greeting cards, I will stop and look at the cards from mothers to daughters. And I will pick out the one that I think mom would have chosen for me. I did that at Christmas.

00:19:09 Speaker_01
I do that on my birthday. And I pick out the one that I would have gotten for her for the holidays. I'll go to Walgreens and pick out the one for her birthday, which is on January 11th.

00:19:19 Speaker_01
And then I went on this kick recently where I wanted to talk to people who knew her, one of her last treating psychiatrists.

00:19:26 Speaker_01
And then a boyfriend she had in 1975 who was a Vietnam vet who became a peace activist and lived in the woods in Appalachia without running water or heat. And I just said, I got to talk to this guy. He knew my mom in a way that I never will.

00:19:42 Speaker_01
You know, when I was being paid 10 cents to massage her feet when she got home from nursing school.

00:19:48 Speaker_01
And Doudon, who played the guitar for the Judds and created all those signature licks and songs like Why Not Me, he was on the road with my mother and sister and I want to talk to Doudon. And I did.

00:19:59 Speaker_06
You wanted to see your mom through different eyes?

00:20:02 Speaker_01
I just wanted to hear stories, dimensionality, personality, what was on her mind, what she was like, what they talked about, if she talked about me.

00:20:17 Speaker_06
One of the things that... I'm sorry.

00:20:24 Speaker_00
I'm here, Anderson.

00:20:27 Speaker_06
One of the things I found so hard about losing my brother to suicide was I get stuck in how his life ended. And my shock over it and the realization that I didn't really know him.

00:20:40 Speaker_06
And I'm wondering if the manner of your mom's death made you question how much you knew her.

00:20:50 Speaker_01
Thank you so much for sharing that. All our stories are sacred. And I really honor the place in you that that's coming from. And I think we all deserve to be remembered for how we lived. And how we died is simply part of a bigger story.

00:21:14 Speaker_06
We're going to take a short break. More with Ashley Judd in a moment.

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00:22:23 Speaker_06
Welcome back to All There Is. It is your mom's birthday coming up January 11th. I know on the first birthday that you had without her, you actually threw a party.

00:22:34 Speaker_01
I threw a wonderful party. It's like 60 people 60 people who knew and loved and adored Diana Ellen Judd Naomi. Yes. Yeah, it was wonderful.

00:22:47 Speaker_06
I was that I that must been hard No, I don't again.

00:22:51 Speaker_01
I guess it's just the nudge I just I don't know where the idea came from it just bubbled up and the next thing I knew there were 60 people at the house, you know the

00:22:59 Speaker_01
amazing woman, Miss Doris, who sewed mom's costumes, and Brent Mayer, who produced all the Judd's records, who had just beautiful stories about her.

00:23:08 Speaker_01
And we had fried chicken and biscuits and gravy, and we just, you know, squeezed onto my sleeping porch and pulled up chairs and sat on the floor and laughed and cried and celebrated.

00:23:20 Speaker_06
Do you still feel like you are grieving?

00:23:24 Speaker_01
Oh, I'm still grieving, yes, yes, but in different ways. And part of the way I'm grieving is that mom's spirit is very alive to me. I mean, I did a little grieving day before yesterday.

00:23:35 Speaker_01
We had Christmas and we had 18 people in a cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, you know, all my chosen family. One of the things we learned to do with mom was all sit around and say, what is the one memory you really want to make this holiday?

00:23:47 Speaker_01
What's something that if you didn't have the opportunity to do it, you would be disappointed? And for her, it was she always wanted to get a big picture of the family all together. And so we do that.

00:23:58 Speaker_01
That's a tradition that is still carried on as inspired by her. So I'm grieving in that way, you know, by keeping her spirit and her traditions and her customs alive.

00:24:09 Speaker_06
I spoke to President Biden about grief a few months ago, and there's a photograph of his son Beau when he was a little boy, and he's turning to the camera and kind of waving.

00:24:21 Speaker_06
And one of the things he said is that's the image that the president has in his mind's eye of his son, not the image of his son at the end of his life, not at the beginning of his life, in that moment.

00:24:33 Speaker_06
I'm wondering, is there an image you carry of your mom in your head?

00:24:40 Speaker_00
Well, now you've got me. My turn to weep.

00:24:49 Speaker_01
So mom and I and pop and I are neighbors in rural Tennessee and we're stoppers by. So just stop by, stop by, stop by. You know, mom would stop by and she would always have these plastic bags.

00:25:09 Speaker_01
And at first, years ago when this started, I would be a little aggravated because I recycle. You know, I would see like, why is she bringing these unnecessary plastic items into my house? And then I thought, you know what?

00:25:23 Speaker_01
She's letting me know that she's thinking about me on aisle four. that I'm always on her mind. That's what this is about, you know. And I began to see everything that she brought into that house as precious.

00:25:39 Speaker_01
And then when I would go to their house, I always went around the side of the house to the back porch, and I never had on shoes. And the side of the house and the back are walled, floor-to-ceiling glass.

00:25:54 Speaker_01
And she would be on her sofa where she stayed because of the depression. But when she saw me, she would get up. Invariably, she got up no matter how sick she was. And she would light up.

00:26:10 Speaker_01
And she would come to the back door and open it and she would exclaim, there's my darling, there's my girl, there's my baby. And that's how I see my mom.

00:26:25 Speaker_06
I read that she used to call you Sweet Pea. Is that right?

00:26:27 Speaker_01
She did call me Sweet Pea. And I still sign my cards to pop Sweet Pea. I am not letting go of that one. I'm keeping that one for life.

00:26:42 Speaker_06
My mom left little notes among her things because she knew I'd be the one going through them all. Have you gone through your mom's stuff?

00:26:52 Speaker_01
I've gone through some of it and I have, I'm blessed to have an attic so I have a lot of things in the attic. I have her hairbrush and I have that sitting out with some of her hair in it and I have all her pajamas folded in my closet with my pajamas.

00:27:08 Speaker_06
Do you wear them?

00:27:10 Speaker_01
I haven't worn them yet, but I will. I will. I wear her pants. I have some of her fancy dresses and coats and things, which I look forward to wearing. And I have a lot of her things and everything has folded Kleenex in the pockets.

00:27:26 Speaker_01
And I just leave those and I pull them out and I sort of wave them. And, you know, everybody knows that I'm wearing something of my mom's if I've got a folded Kleenex.

00:27:34 Speaker_06
She was always the go-to person for a folded Kleenex.

00:27:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, and she often had a half a tuna salad sandwich in her bra. That's how she rolled.

00:27:42 Speaker_06
In her bra?

00:27:44 Speaker_01
She was funny. She was funny.

00:27:46 Speaker_06
Was that for herself or to offer to others?

00:27:51 Speaker_01
Well, she always fed her children. She always offered some for us. I mean, I've been through some of her day timers, you know, and look down at what she wrote on our birthdays. Yeah, but that notebook with her songwriting is very precious.

00:28:11 Speaker_01
You know, her first ever songs. And, you know, she went on to receive many accolades and win Grammys for songwriting. And these are just her initial forays in 74 and 75. And they're beautiful. They're beautiful. Some of them are like psalms.

00:28:30 Speaker_04
Love can build a bridge Between your heart and mine Love can build a bridge Don't you think it's time? Don't you think it's time?

00:28:58 Speaker_06
There's one other song I just want to play. It's Guardian Angels.

00:29:02 Speaker_00
Yeah, about my great-grandparents, my triple great-grandparents.

00:29:08 Speaker_05
And I'm really troubled, and I don't know what to do. Any whispers just do your best. We're awful proud of you. They're my guardian angels. I know they can see. Every step I take, they are watching over me.

00:29:39 Speaker_06
It's such a great song.

00:29:40 Speaker_01
Thank you. Thank you, Anders. Love that. Life, the pathos.

00:29:53 Speaker_06
I received more than a thousand calls at the end of the last season of this podcast, and I listened to all of them, 46 hours of people's calls. And people spoke about grief in so many different ways and so many different kinds of grief.

00:30:05 Speaker_06
And one of the kinds of grief people spoke about is the grief for somebody who's still alive, but who is suffering a mental illness or who's suffering an addiction or alcoholism.

00:30:16 Speaker_06
And so there's a lot of people listening who are in this situation right now. And I'm wondering what you would say to them about that grief of seeing a loved one suffer. And yet, how do you navigate that?

00:30:34 Speaker_01
I would say there's always help and hope for friends and families. And we have the right to lead our own lives with dignity and wellness and pleasure.

00:30:49 Speaker_01
And we're not betraying our loved ones by pursuing a good life for ourselves when they are sick and suffering. You know, my mother took so much pleasure in the goodness of my life, and she was so tremendously proud of me.

00:31:11 Speaker_01
And my social activism, my advocacy, my voice, it gave her so much delight. I am responsible for my own life. And if that means I'm responsible for my own life, it also means that other adults are responsible for their own lives.

00:31:28 Speaker_01
And I can walk beside them, but I can't get inside their skin and live it and do it for them. And I can have compassion and say, I see you, I hear you, is there something I can do to support you right now?"

00:31:44 Speaker_01
But to understand that that support should not go so far as enabling them. You know, to love them but not do for them what they can and should do for themselves. And it's very fine work. It's like being a fine mechanic on a Swiss watch.

00:32:03 Speaker_01
You know, how to sit with my mom and know that she really wants a pill that's going to fix it when I think that she needs to go to detox, right, which at certain times she did.

00:32:16 Speaker_01
Or I think that a good stay in behavioral health, which we also know is the psych unit, under expert care might be beneficial, but her PTSD is getting in the way and she's too scared to surrender to that kind of care.

00:32:34 Speaker_01
And I have to respect her autonomy, even though I have medical power of attorney and could sign her in. But then how do I handle my disappointment, my anxiety, my sense of loss? Those things are my responsibility.

00:32:51 Speaker_01
This distinction between enabling, when I'm really doing for someone what they can and should do for themselves, and giving encouragement and understanding can be acquired.

00:33:04 Speaker_01
But we have to look for our teachers, you know, and those can be found in 12-step programs. It can be found in a good therapist. It can be found in a lot of recovery literature.

00:33:13 Speaker_06
Do you feel like the grief that you feel over your mom, that that will be with you always? Is it something that just ebbs and flows? Is it something that morphs with time and becomes something different, but is always there?

00:33:29 Speaker_01
I think it will be a journey of discovery. I think it will be a journey of discovery because there are many things I haven't done yet. I haven't been ready to look at pictures yet.

00:33:38 Speaker_06
Family photographs.

00:33:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, family photographs. I've seen a few, but I haven't really looked thoroughly, intensively at pictures yet. Pictures of her in recent years before her death. She was in Austria with Pop before she died.

00:33:55 Speaker_01
She came back on Friday and she died on Saturday. And she was having a mixed experience in Austria. She was having a really good time and also she texted me, my brain hurts. And so I haven't looked at the pictures from Austria.

00:34:08 Speaker_01
I haven't looked at, you know, the holiday pictures from the previous years. And yeah, I think it's going to be just the walk, the walk of my life. As I reflected now, I'm in this kind of yummy place of just

00:34:27 Speaker_01
enjoying the mirth of knowing that she's with this vast consciousness and that she knows the mystery now. And that just delights me.

00:34:40 Speaker_06
One of the things I'm very grateful for in terms of my mom's death, who died at 95, was that there was really nothing left unsaid between us. And I'm wondering, do you feel that with your mom?

00:34:55 Speaker_06
Because, I mean, the road you had been on with her, I mean, it's an extraordinarily winding and torturous at times and beautiful at times road.

00:35:06 Speaker_01
You know, I hadn't really thought about that, Anderson. And I think that my mom and I were pretty complete. I mean, we talked about a lot of stuff. We were emotionally quite intimate. And the one ache that I had for my mom

00:35:24 Speaker_01
was that I know that toward the end, what ended up becoming the end of her life, she was feeling some guilt and shame about her parenting, even though all was forgiven very clearly on my part.

00:35:42 Speaker_01
You know, I made my amends to her, which is what really instigated the healing in our relationship. I did that in 2008 for the rage that I had carried as an adult, which really opened the floodgates to a very deep bonding between us.

00:35:58 Speaker_01
And she spontaneously made her amends to me as well. She shared this story about

00:36:06 Speaker_01
how one Easter when we lived in Marin County, she couldn't afford a turkey and she bought a chicken and she told sister and me that it was a turkey, as if we knew the difference. I was in the third grade.

00:36:17 Speaker_01
And she was just, she had so much shame about that. And I remember feeling like I wish I could have just lifted that shame out of her, but that has to be an inside job.

00:36:31 Speaker_01
Although I look back on it and I wish I had maybe said a little more or done a little something like patted her leg or given her a hug or a kiss on the cheek and just expressed a little bit more of the compassion that I was feeling inside.

00:36:46 Speaker_01
So that feels like a little piece of unfinished business. And I did address that on her deathbed. When I was saying, let it all go, don't take anything with you, that's what I meant.

00:36:57 Speaker_01
It was that moment I was referring to, and any guilt or shame that she was feeling about her parenting.

00:37:04 Speaker_06
I read this quote earlier, and I just, I didn't read the entire quote, but it gets to what you're saying, which was, you had said, I was powerless over my childhood. The survival strategies that I developed made my adult life unmanageable.

00:37:14 Speaker_06
When I took responsibility for those survival strategies, my relationships with both my parents transformed and healed. 100%. That's what made the difference.

00:37:23 Speaker_01
Absolutely. That made the difference. That was the catapult. It was the catalyst and the catapult.

00:37:29 Speaker_06
When you said you took responsibility for those survival strategies, what does that mean?

00:37:36 Speaker_01
I did my anger work and what that looks like is, you know, kicking and screaming and biting and yelling and telling all the perpetrators to get off of me and all that kind of stuff.

00:37:48 Speaker_01
And writing and drawing and, you know, just getting it out because it lives in the very cells of our bodies. Moving it out experientially of my body. And, you know, so I quit taking my anger out on my parents.

00:38:02 Speaker_01
I became able to hold complexity and to have a tense conversation without blowing up or leaving the room or, you know, getting sideways.

00:38:12 Speaker_06
So that was the change, sort of recognizing the little child, the stuff that was from the little child, and being able to work on that and figure out a way to amend those survival strategies.

00:38:24 Speaker_01
Yes, yes. And know what was the core pain from childhood and work on that separately. And what was showing up as an adult.

00:38:34 Speaker_06
Well, Ashley, thank you so much for, is there anything else you'd want to say?

00:38:39 Speaker_01
Oh, just thank you so much for being you and bless you on your journey. Just keep trudging, keep trudging. And I appreciate the opportunity to be with you. And I'm so thankful that we're in this community of grievers together.

00:38:57 Speaker_06
It is the strange thing about grief is that it feels so alone. And yet it is this experience which everybody has gone through or will go through. And yet it still feels so lonely.

00:39:14 Speaker_01
No one can do it for us. We do not have to do it alone.

00:39:20 Speaker_06
Ashley Judd, thank you so much.

00:39:22 Speaker_01
Peace be with you.

00:39:24 Speaker_06
If you or someone you love is struggling, help is available. In the U.S., you can call or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. Ashley also had some suggestions you can check out if you're interested. One is a website, grief.com.

00:39:40 Speaker_06
Another is the Loving Parent Guidebook. And a third is another book, Opening Our Hearts, Transforming Our Losses. We'll have an all new episode of the podcast next week. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I hope you know you're not alone.

00:40:01 Speaker_06
All there is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan DiZula is our technical director, and Steve Liktai is our executive producer.

00:40:14 Speaker_06
Support from Nick Godsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Haddad, Charlie Moore, Carrie Rubin, Carrie Pritchard, Shimmery Cheetreet, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John D'Onora, Lainey Steinhardt, Jameis Andrest,

00:40:26 Speaker_03
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00:40:39 Speaker_03
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00:40:54 Speaker_03
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