Ashley Judd talked about her mother Naomi Judd’s death by suicide on David Kessler’s “Healing” podcast and said that she forgave her mother long ago.
Ashley said, “My most ardent wish for my mother is that when she transitioned, she was hopefully able to let go of any guilt or shame that she carried for any shortcomings she may have had in her parenting of my sister and me because certainly on my end, all was forgiven long ago. All was forgiven long ago.”
Judd now knows that her mother’s disease was a disease she could not overcome. She offered, “I look back on my childhood, and I realize I grew up with a mom who had an undiagnosed and untreated mental illness. And there are different behavioral expressions, interactions, flights of fancy, choices that she made that I understand were an expression of the disease, and I understand that and know that she was in pain and can today understand that she was absolutely doing the best she could, and if she could have done it differently, she would have.”
Ashley also noted that she wants to change the wording of suicide, “‘Committed’ [suicide] comes from this hierarchy of punitive transgressions, and committed to an institution or an asylum, and I believe that the person who suffers from mental illness, they are trying to have some relief or escape from something that perhaps we cannot fathom or conjure or imagine for ourselves, and how fortunate are we.”