Judd mourns mom’s suicide
When Naomi Judd, the Grammy-winning country music singer, died last month, her daughter Ashley Judd said that she had lost her mother to the “disease of mental illness.” On Thursday, Judd was more candid, saying in a television interview that her mother had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her home in Tennessee, and encouraging people who are distressed to seek help.
Judd, an actor, told Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America” that she was speaking out about her mother’s death because her family wanted to share the information before it became “public without our control.”
“We’re aware that although grieving the loss of a wife and a mother, we are, in an uncanny way, a public family,” Judd said. “So that’s really the impetus for this timing. Otherwise, it’s obviously way too soon. So that’s important for us to say up front.”
Naomi Judd and her other daughter, Wynonna Judd, dominated the country music charts in the 1980s as the motherdaughter duo the Judds. Naomi Judd, 76, died April 30, a day before the duo was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
In the interview Thursday, Ashley Judd said that she was visiting her mother at her home outside Nashville, Tenn., when she died.
Judd said she went outside to greet a friend of her mother’s who had stopped by, and when she went upstairs to tell her mother that the friend had arrived, she found her mother dead.
“Mother used a firearm,” Judd said. “That’s the piece of information that we are very uncomfortable sharing, but understand that we’re in a position that if we don’t say it, someone else is going to.” Judd said that she had suffered “grief and trauma” since her mother’s death, and that it was important to distinguish her mother from her mental illness.
“Mom was a brilliant conversationalist, she was a star, she was an underrated songwriter,” Judd said. “And she was someone who suffered from mental illness, you know, and had a lot of trouble getting off the sofa, except to go into town every day to the Cheesecake Factory, where all the staff knew and loved her.”
Ashley Judd said in the interview that her mother was most alive when she was performing.
“She was very isolated in many ways because of the disease,” Judd said. “And yet there were a lot of people who showed up for her over the years, not just me.”