Transcript for Ashley Judd: Grief, Love and Naomi

Oh, please do.

I've always been so proud of the music. I've always loved the music.

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 and 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 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.

Yes. I identify with that. You know, 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. The braid. Yes, yeah, that they all go together and there's this beautiful Melting. 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 tried to go to this place where God was with me. And so all of that was touching this transcendent simultaneously.

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 the child I was not responsible and I was vulnerable and needy and defenseless.

Absolutely. Yes, and 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 you would just shut up and go away and mind your own business and get off my back and not be so needy and then also 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 may be 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.

And then there were my grandparents who saved my life because I lived with them in a summertime where I was fed and watered and had a routine and they kept me going. It was ghastly and it was lonely. But I also acknowledge there was a lot of love in my family. It just hurt, right? It didn't work particularly well in 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.

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 short hand. And we should say that there's a difference between trauma and grief, right? Because the trauma is intrusive and comes up and bitten. We don't have any control over it. It's a memory that's not processed and that lives free in the brain bouncing around and sees us. beyond our control. And grief is a natural organic human process that has natural stages that self-resolve over time.

It'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 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 PA talk. So I, but 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. 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 was forgiven long ago. All was forgiven long ago. Leave it all here. Take nothing with you. Just be free. And I did that for what I know it was 14, 15 minutes. Just held her.

You know, she wrote this beautiful song in 1975 about how we just found the notebook in which she has written down in her handwriting about how I picked her from 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 oh, 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 cemetery of that. I'm so thankful I was there.

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 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, mom died on the 30th of April and my partner has a vulnerable research camp. In a very remote part of the Congo and with UNFPA for whom my service is goodwill ambassador. And so I went and I, that's when I first started weeping in my sleep.

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.

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 blur it out in appropriate things because I'm being hijacked by a bloody memory.

Yes, or the police arriving or being interrogated for times or the fact that there was all this body camera footage or 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 grief. And I actually had a 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. writing on my second book and and it's wave of shock. What over can be as if I had just walked in the room again.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the ways I experience 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. 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 her cognition and the universe and the cosmos. And she was buddies with Lisa Randall, who's this astrophysicist, Harvard. She knew Marvin Minsky, who was a original person, who was exploring artificial intelligence. 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. 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.

Yeah, a little slide, wink, wink, you know, little writing back and forth.

I am finding that, and I really encourage people to honor these small impulses if it's 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 why I buy all my greeting cards, I will stop and look at the cards from others 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 treating psychiatrist. 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. You know, when I was being paid 10 cents to massage her feet when she got home from nursing school. And Doodan, who played the guitar for the judge 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 Doodan and I did.

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.

I'm here Anderson.

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 as simply part of a bigger story.

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I threw a wonderful party. 60 people who knew and loved and adored Diana Ellen Judd. Naomi. Yes. Yeah, it was wonderful.

No, I don't again. I guess it's just the nudge. I just I don't know where the idea came from. It just bubbled up in the next thing I knew there were 60 people at the house, you know, the Amazing woman, Ms. Doris, who sewed mom's costumes and Brent Mayer, who produced all the judge's records, who had just beautiful stories about her. And we had fried chicken and biscuits and gravy, and we just squeezed onto my sleep and porch and settled up chairs and sat on the floor and laughed and cried and celebrated.

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 a great smoking mountains. You know, all my chosen family and One of the things we learned to do with mom was all set 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 altogether. 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.

Well now you've got me. My turn to leap. So Mom and I am popping our neighbors in rural Tennessee and we're stoppers by. So just stop by, stop by and you know Mom would stop by and always have these plastic bags. And at first years ago, when it 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? She's letting me know that she's thinking about me on fire before. But 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. 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 in the back of Walda, Florida 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.

She did call me sweet pea. And I still sign my card's to pop sweet pea. I am not letting go of that one. I'm keeping that one for life.

I've gone through some of it and I have blessed to have an addict so I have a lot of things in the attic. I have her hair brush 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. 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. So if I've got a folder's Kleenex, she was always the go-to person for a folded Kleenex. Yeah, and she often had a half-a-tune salad sandwich in her broth. You know, she just, that's how she rolled in her broth. Yeah, but she was funny. She was funny.

Um, well, she always fed her children. She was offering offers and for us. Um, and I've been through some of her daytimeers. 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 songs. And, you know, she went on to receive many accolades and win Grammys for songwriting and these searches to her initial four rays in 74 and 75. And they're beautiful. They're beautiful. Some of them are like songs.

Yeah. Thought my great grandparents, my triple great grandparents.

Thank you. Thank you, Anderson. Love that.

Life, the pesos.

I would say there's always health 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 in the goodness of my life, and she was so tremendously proud of me. 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. 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 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. 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, 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 her 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 when 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, 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.

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.

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. 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 the walk of my life. As I reflected now, I'm in this kind of yummy place of just enjoying the birth of knowing that she's with this vast consciousness and that she knows the mystery now and that just delights me.

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 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 immense 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. And she spontaneously made her immense 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'd maybe set a little more or done a little something like padded 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. 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 in any guilt or shame that she was feeling about her parenting.

100%.

Absolutely. That made the difference. That was the catapult. And when you the catalyst and the catapult.

I did my anger work and what that looks like is kicking and screaming and biting and yelling and telling all the perpetrators to get off of me and all that kind of stuff and writing and drawing and 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. I became able to hold complexity and to have a tense conversation without blowing up or leaving the room or, you know, getting sideways.

Yes. Yes, and know what was the core pain from childhood and work on that separately and what was showing up as an adult.

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

No one can do it for us. We do not have to do it alone.

Peace be with you.