‘My first birthday without her’: Ashley Judd reflects on grief and loss a year after mom Naomi's death
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WILLIAMSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE: Ashley Judd recently opened up about dealing with grief and loss a year after her mother Naomi Judd’s death. The actress reflected on her life without her mother in an essay, titled ‘Ashley Judd: A Year of Grief and Learning Without My Mom,’ published by TIME on Saturday, April 29, for the late country star’s one-year death anniversary.
In her essay for TIME, the ‘Double Jeopardy’ star spoke about her first birthday without her mother and shared how she was coping with the ‘irreplaceable loss.’ Judd also remembered the struggles her mother endured throughout her life and said that she is now channeling her grief into advocating for causes that were important to the late musician. Naomi Judd died by suicide at age 76 on April 30, 2022, after a long battle with mental health issues.
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‘I felt her love as I read the card’
Judd, who turned 55 on April 19, opened her heartwrenching essay by sharing the details of spending her first birthday without her mother. “Earlier this month, I walked through my first birthday without her, a rite of passage everyone experiences with the death of their parents,” she wrote. “At the shop where Mom and I always selected our cards, I read the ‘To Daughter’ birthday cards and imagined which one Mom would have given me: She always chose the gooiest and most expressive, underlined the parts she thought most meaningful, and of course, wrote by hand her own message addressed to ‘Sweetpea,’ Judd recalled.
“I felt her love as I read the card I imagined she would have picked. A beautiful ouch. And I remembered how every year on my special day, Mama would recount giving birth to me, sharing with the sweetest smile how she felt when she held me for the first time, what I smelled like, and what an easy baby I was." Judd also revealed that she has “started to sit in sacred presence” with her mother’s items, from decades-old planners to “her strands of red hair in her brush.”
She wrote, “These intimate exchanges with the private fortify me. They remind me of the interior landscape of my mother’s soul, the innocent God-scape that somehow remained untouched by the mental illness that marred her life.” The actress continued, “And they summon the welcoming sound of my mother’s voice pealing like bells whenever she saw me stride barefoot onto her back porch.”
Ashley Judd reflected on her mother’s struggles
Judd also remembered her mother’s painful sufferings in life, from being sexually assaulted at the hands of her great-uncle at the age of four to facing intimate partner abuse, being raped and surviving workplace harassment while raising her two daughters as a single mother. “These assaults and violations, from which she never did heal, remained a source of unresolved agony and fed her mental illness,” Judd noted.
“Yet she did her utmost to fight back with the skills she had. In conversation she declared #MeToo; in her journals she wrote it; and in collages she made in therapy she expressed her trauma in Technicolor,” she said. Judd mentioned that her mother often shared her “outrage” about issues like male violence and sexual trafficking and pledged that she would continue to on the late singer’s behalf. “On her behalf, I will continue to be ‘audacious,’ as she called me, in my full-hearted, full-throated fight for freedom from the male entitlement to female bodies,” Judd wrote.
“With April being not only the anniversary of her passing but also Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I will therefore accept in her honor the Lifetime Igniting Impact Award from the World Without Exploitation, which works to create a world where no one is bought, sold or exploited,” she stated. “I will continue to agitate for the Equality Model, which advocates holding sex buyers, pimps and brothel keepers accountable for their demand for vulnerable human bodies,” the actress continued. “People who support the full decriminalization of sex buying, brothel keeping and pimping — which has been proposed around the country – flummoxed Mom. That is part of my commitment to her legacy and one way in which to honor the depth of our relationship, both as her child and a fellow survivor,” Judd revealed.
Ashley Judd criticized the coverage of her mother’s death
In her piece, Judd criticized the invasive ways in which details of her mother’s tragic death were covered by the press. “It is neither ethical nor decent to publish the kind of invasive details about death by suicide that appeared in print and on the internet after her death,” she argued. Judd also vowed to “channel my mother's hallmark grit” by advocating for laws protecting the privacy of families “ravaged by death by suicide,” including “more responsible reporting.”
Judd also opened up about accepting the Lifesaver Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention alongside her sister Wynonna for their work to destigmatize mental illness. “This is an award I would never have wanted to be given, yet one I will accept on my knees, bloody as they are from a year of falling, crawling and getting back up again,” she said.
The 55-year-old also shared that Mercy Community Healthcare of Franklin, Tennessee, will be naming its new mental-health facility in memory of her late mother. Judd said the organization’s work on treating underserved communities and offering sliding-scale payments “would be a balm” for her mother, who was upset that “people hurt and that they could not access the care she could.”
‘None of us need do it alone’
Judd ended her essay by sharing that she has “learned how I can make the irreplaceable loss of my mom serve her legacy.” She revealed that she is coping with her inner grief by advocating for causes important to her late mother. “I have been comforted, by the work I’ve done to commemorate my mother, and by the many who also walk in and with grief and have shared theirs with me,” Judd wrote. “Though no one can do our grief for us, it is also true that none of us need do it alone,” she concluded.