Ashley Judd first had to heal trauma

To grieve her mother, Ashley Judd first had to heal trauma

 

Ashley Judd feels the presence of her late mother in what she describes as “winks” or “small nudges.”

She has followed those gentle impulses to the greeting card aisle at Walgreens, where Judd will stop and look at the cards from mothers to daughters and pick out the one that her mom – singer and songwriter Naomi Judd – would have chosen for her.

 

“You know, 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,” Judd recalled in a recent conversation with CNN’s Anderson Cooper for his podcast “All There Is.”

Judd has done a lot of healing work in the more than 20 months since her mom died by suicide at age 76 in 2022.

 

“There is a place where trauma and grief and transcendence meet, and I call it the braid,” Judd explained. “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.”

It’s a shorthand Judd has learned through the courage she has found to process pain she experienced in her childhood and in her mother’s passing.

 

“I think that the death of a parent is something for which we, at least conceptually, have some kind of preparation. I also knew that she was walking with mental illness and that her brain hurt and that she was suffering,” Judd told Cooper.

But that didn’t necessarily prepare her.

“My mother’s death was traumatic and unexpected because it was death by suicide, and I found her,” she said. “And, so, it had this calamitous dynamic, my grief was in lockstep with trauma.”