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. I found an addendum of sorts to it online recently, a quote by a writer named Greg Iles from his book The Quiet Game. I want to read it to you because I think it speaks to grief in a powerful way. Iles wrote, "Faulkner said the past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in web spun long before we were born. Webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Ashley Judd is an actress, author, activist and mental health advocate. She's also the daughter of Naomi Judd and sister of Wynnona. Naomi and Wynnona were one of the most successful country music acts in history, with a string of hits and multiple Grammy and Country Music Association awards. Naomi Judd struggled with physical and mental health issues for years, and in April 2022, one day before she and Wynnona were due to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi Judd died by suicide. She was 76 years old. Ashley Judd joins me now.
Would it be okay if I played a little bit of one of her songs?
This is Love Can Build a Bridge. This is actually the last performance that she did with with your sister. April 11th, 2022. And she died on April 30th.
I've always been so proud of the music. Hmm. I've always loved the music.
Has grief been what you expected it it would be like?
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. 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 ache. And when I started to cry, it felt like it was those bottomless tears to which there was no end. 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.
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.
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 and my crying, and there is a place where trauma and grief and transcendence meet, and I call it the braid.
Yes. Yeah. 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. And so I, I tried to go to this place where, where God was with me. And so all of that was touching, this transcendence simultaneously.
You have said, "I was powerless over my childhood. The survival strategies I developed made my adult life unmanageable." That is completely what I have 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. 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.
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. 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, 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.
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 in a crisis situation first?
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. And sometimes I wish she would just shut up and go away and mind your own business, get off my back and not be so needy. And. And then also, she's, um, you know, she's my responsibility. We have to take care of that part of us because no one else will. And when it's time for us to die and we take those final last steps, 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. 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.
Your childhood growing up was, I mean, you wrote about childhood rape, about neglect, about sexual abuse by male relative. There were two years where you were living alone while your mom and your sister were on tour.
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 they kept me going. It was ghastly and it was lonely. But I also acknowledged 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.
So do you feel like you have been grieving for much of your life?
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. And we should say that there's a difference between trauma and grief, right? Because the trauma is intrusive and comes up unbidden. We we don't have any control over it. It's a memory that's not processed and that lives free. And 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.
The death of your mom. How is that grief different than grief you had experienced throughout your life?
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. 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. And so it had this calamitous dynamic. And my grief was 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. It was a pieta. So I but then there was there was, you know, people need to be aware that there's that that'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. 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."
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.
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 is forgiven. Long ago. All was forgiven long ago. Leave it all here. Take nothing with you. Just be free." And I did that for, want to know what it was? 14, 15 minutes. Just held her.
It's an extraordinary blessing that you were able to do that.
Oh. 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 burst me. 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, uh, when I read that, I wept, I wept and I wept. 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.
Even knowing the trauma you you would go through, you still were glad.
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.
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?
You know, the truth is, I had to work my ass off. It took work. I kept a commitment. And I went to the rainforest in Central Africa in June. My mom died on the 30th of April, and my partner has a vulnerable research camp in a very remote part of the Congo. And, uh, with UNFPA, for whom I serve as goodwill ambassador. And so I went and I, that's when I first started weeping in my sleep.
Were you actually asleep or waking up and weeping?
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.
The EMDR is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, a series of rapid eye movements while rethinking about a traumatic episode. Is that correct?
'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. 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 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.
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.
'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. And then the grief came up, and it was like such a relief just to grieve. And I actually had to re-experience of the shock, which is the first stage of grief. A year after my mom had died, I would just be doing something, washing the dishes, you know, writing on my second book and it's wave of shock that overcame me as if I had just walked in the room again.
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?
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the ways I experienced the difference between grief and trauma. 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. And 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 cognition and the universe and the cosmos. 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, and these were just her friends. And people would 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. 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.
So you have conversations with your mom?
Yeah. A little sly wink, wink, you know. Little writing back and forth.
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, and in fact, that relationship can grow and change and morph as as I age. I come to understand my father in a way I didn't before, 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?
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. 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. 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. And then I went on this kick recently where I wanted to talk to people who knew her. One of her last psychiatrists 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've got to talk to this guy. He knew my mom in a way that I never will, you know, when I was being paid $0.10 to massage her feet when she got home from nursing school. And Don, 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 Don. And I did.
You wanted to see your mom through different eyes?
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.
One of the things that I'm [crying]
One of the things I've 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. And I'm wondering if the manner of your mom's death made you question how much you knew her.
Thank you so much for sharing that. All our stories are sacred and I really honor the place I know 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.
We're going to take a short break. More with Ashley Judd in a moment. Welcome back to All There Is. It is your mom's birthday coming up January 11th. I know on on the first birthday that you had without her, you actually threw a party.
I threw a wonderful party for like 60 people. 60 people who knew and loved and adored Diana Ellen Judd. Naomi. Yeah, it was wonderful.
That must have been been hard.
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 amazing woman, Miss Doris, who sewed mom's costumes, and Brent Maher, who produced all the Judds records, who had just beautiful stories about her. And we had fried chicken and biscuits and gravy and we just, you know, squeezed onto my screed in porch and pulled up chairs and sat on the floor and laughed and cried and celebrated.
Do you still feel like you are grieving?
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. We had Christmas, and we had 18 people in a cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains. You know, all my chosen family. And 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? 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. 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.
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. 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. And in that moment, I'm wondering, is there a an image you carry of your mom in your head?
Mhm. Well, now you've got me. My turn to weep. So mom and I and pop are neighbors in rural Tennessee, and we're stoppers by. So we just stop by, stop by, stop by. And, you know, mom would stop by and she would always have these plastic bags. And at first, years ago when it started, I would be a little aggravated because I recycle, you know, what I would see? Like, why is she bringing these unnecessary plastic items into my house? And I thought, you know what? She's letting me know that she's thinking about me on file for 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 is precious. 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 backer walls, um, floor to ceiling glass. 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. 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.
I read that she used to call you sweet pea. Is that right?
She did call me sweet pea. And I sign find my cards to pop sweet pea. I am not letting go of that one. I'm keeping that one for life.
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?
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.
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 just like that. 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 up, Kleenex.
She was always the go to person for folded Kleenex.
Yeah. And she often had a have a tuna salad sandwich in her bra. That's just how she rolled.
She was funny. She was funny. And, uh.
Was that for herself or to offer to others?
Um. Well, she always fed her children. She offers them for us. Um, and I've been through some of her day timers. You know, and look down at what she wrote on our birthdays and. Yeah, but that notebook with her songwriting is very precious. You know, her first ever her 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. Um, and they're beautiful. They're beautiful. Some of them are like psalms for love.
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?
There's one other song I just want to play. It's, um Guardian Angels.
Yeah, about my great grandparents. My great grandparents.
When I'm really troubled. And I don't know what to do. And he whispers just do this. 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.
Thank you. Thank you. Anderson. Love that.
I received them 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. And one of the kinds of great people spoke about is the grief for somebody who's still alive, but who is suffering a mental illness or who's suffering in addiction or alcoholism. And so there's a lot of people listening who who are in this situation right now. And I'm wondering what your what you would say to them about that grief of seeing a loved one suffer. How do you navigate that?
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. 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 and the goodness of my life, and she was so tremendously proud of me. And my social activism, my advocacy, my voice. It 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, 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? But 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. 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 now, which at certain times she did, 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. And I have to respect your autonomy. Even though I have medical power of attorney and could sign her in. You know. But then how do I handle my disappointment, my anxiety, my sense of loss? Those things are my responsibility. You know, this distinction between enabling what I'm really doing for someone, what they can and should do for themselves, and giving encouragement and understanding can be acquired. But we have to look for our teachers. You know, in 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.
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? It becomes something different, but it's always there.
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.
To look at family photographs.
Yeah. Family photographs. I've seen a few, but I haven't really looked thoroughly, intensively at pictures yet. Pictures of her in in recent years before her death. You know, she was in Austria with pop before she died. 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. I haven't looked at, you know, the holiday pictures from the previous years. And yeah, I think it's going to be just a the walk, the walk of my life. As I as I reflected. Now I'm in this. Kind of yummy place of just. Enjoying the mirth of knowing that she's. With this vast consciousness and that she knows the mystery now. And that just delights me.
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? Because, I mean, the road you had have been on with her? I mean, it's an extraordinarily winding and torturous at times and beautiful at times road.
You know, I hadn't really thought about that. And her son 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. 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. You know, I made my amends to her, which is what really instigated the healing and 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. And she spontaneously made her amends to me as well. She shared the story about. 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 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. 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 and just expressed a little bit more of the compassion that I was feeling inside. 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. Let it don't take anything with you. That's what I meant. It was that moment I was referring to, and any guilt or shame that she was feeling about her parenting.
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 survival strategy that I developed, made my adult life on an unmanageable. When I took responsibility for those survival strategies, my relationships with both my parents transformed and healed 100%. That's what made the difference.
Absolutely. That that made the difference. That was the catapult. The catalyst and the catapult.
When you said you took responsibility for those survival strategies, what does that mean?
Um, well I did my anger work. And what that looks like is, you know, kicking and screaming and fighting and yelling and telling all the perpetrators to get off of me and all that kind of stuff, 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, um, you know, so I quit taking my anger out on my parents. I became able to hold complexity and to have a tense conversation without blowing up or leaving the room or, you know, getting sideways.
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.
Yes, yes and know what was the core pain from childhood and work on that separately, and what was showing up as an adult?
Well, Ashley, thank you so much for this. Is there anything else you'd want to say?
Oh, just thank you so much for being you and bless you on your journey. And 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.
It is the 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.
No one can do it for us. We do not have to do it alone.
Ashley Judd, thank you so much.
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. Another is 'The Loving Parent Guidebook.' And a third is another book opening our hearts, 'Transforming Our Losses.' Next week I'll speak with Nicole Chung, bestselling author of two really beautiful books, 'A Living Remedy' and 'All You Can Ever Know,' which deal with loss and grief, race, class and adoption.
'You also described, once your mother died, sort of being un-adopted.
Yes. It felt like this unraveling of our family like to be the only one left, and I have no one I could really call and talk to and be like, remember when this happened? Like, I'm carrying my mom's and my dad and my grandma's memories, and it's just me.
That's next week on All There Is. All There Is is a production of CNN audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producers are Haley Thomas and Felicia Patinkin. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Licktieg is the executive producer of CNN. Audio. Support from Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Shimrit Sheetrit, Ronnie Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dionaro, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andres, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman.
