(Warning: This article discusses suicide and can be triggering for some people.)
Several days after country music star Naomi Judd passed away, her daughter, actress Ashley Judd is sharing more details about her mom’s sudden passing.
As Mamas Uncut previously reported, Naomi Judd had a lifelong battle with her mental health and often dealt with severe bouts of depression. As Naomi said herself in a 2016 interview, “What I’ve been through is extreme. My final diagnosis was severe depression,” Judd told ABC’s Robin Roberts in an interview with Good Morning America.
Ashley Judd Shares Emotional New Statement With Details of How Mom Naomi Judd Died
“[I’m] treatment-resistant because they tried me on every single thing they had in their arsenal. It really felt like, if I live through this I want someone to be able to see that they can survive. They see me in rhinestones, you know, with glitter in my hair, that really is who I am. But then I would come home and not leave the house for three weeks, and not get out of my pajamas, and not practice normal hygiene. It was really bad.”
Now, in an interview with Diane Sawyer, Ashley Judd revealed that her family agreed for her to share her mother’s cause of death in that interview. “She used a weapon,” Ashley told Sawyer on Good Morning America. “A firearm. So that’s the piece of information we are very uncomfortable sharing.”
Naomi was 76 when she took her own life on April 29. Ashley said the family is opening up about her mother’s death in order to shed light on mental illness and to do so before it became public in another way.
Heartbreakingly, Ashley admitted that it was she who discovered her mother’s body. “I have both grief and trauma from discovering her,” Ashley Judd admitted.
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Ashley also brought up the fact that Naomi took her own life just one day before she and her oldest daughter, Wynonna, were set to be officially inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside of her,” Judd explained. “Because the barrier between the regard in which they held her couldn’t penetrate into her heart and the lie the disease told her was so convincing.”
In an op-ed Ashley wrote for USA Today in honor of Mother’s Day, she talked about the “abrupt” and “shocking” way her mother left her and her sister. And how she didn’t get to “show her again how much we love and honor her.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to visit her on Sunday, to give her a box of old-fashioned candy, our family tradition. We were supposed to have sweet delight in each others’ easy presence.”
Judd continued, saying, “Instead, I am unmoored. But my heart is not empty. It is replete with gratitude for what she left behind. Her nurture and tenderness, her music and memory.”
If you or someone you know is dealing with depression or thoughts of suicide please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.