Ashley Judd Touches Hearts With Her Personal Essay Talking About Her Final Moments With Her Mother
On April 30th, Naomi Judd, 76, took her own life with a gun at her home in Tennessee. The family released a statement saying: “We have always shared openly both the joys of being family as well as its sorrows, too. One part of our story is that our matriarch was dogged by an unfair foe.”
Based on an autopsy report obtained by Fox News it shows that Naomi Judd died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
And now, Ashley Judd is sharing how she felt during her final moments with her mother. She penned a personal essay and then it was published by The New York Times titled:
“The Right to Keep Private Pain Private.”
She started her essay by reflecting on the day that her mother took her own life. She wrote: “The trauma of discovering and then holding her laboring body haunts my nights.” She continued by saying that the “rampant and cruel misinformation that has spread about her death, and about our relationships with her,” and that it “stalks” her days.
Ashley Judd said that she intends to “make the subsequent invasion of privacy — the deceased person’s privacy and the family’s privacy — a personal as well as a legal cause.”
She believes that the family members who have lost a loved one are “revictimized” by the laws that give them the power to release their private moments to the public. She said, “I felt cornered and powerless as law enforcement officers began questioning me while the last of my mother’s life was fading.”
She continued: “I wanted to comfort her, telling her how she was about to see her daddy and younger brother as she ‘went away home,’ as we say in Appalachia.” She also shared her experience with a series of interviews that “felt mandatory and imposed on me that drew me away from the precious end of my mother’s life.”
Her essay criticizes law enforcement for “terrible, outdated interview procedures and methods of interacting with family members who are in shock or trauma.”
Ashley Judd suggested in her essay that “privacy in death is a death with more dignity.” She adds that she understands that law enforcement is required to investigate a “sudden violent death by suicide,” but “there is absolutely no compelling public interest in the case of my mother to justify releasing the videos, images, and family interviews that were done in the course of that investigation.”
In concluding her essay, Ashley Judd further shared that her mother “should be remembered for how she lived, which was with goofy humor, glory onstage and unfailing kindness off it — not for the private details of how she suffered when she died.”
Just earlier this month, the Judd family filed a petition hoping that the police reports and recordings from the investigation into the death of Naomi Judd will be kept private from the media and the general public. According to the document Ashley Judd was in “clinical shock, active trauma, and acute distress” following her mother’s death. She did not want the public to have access to the recordings of the interviews.
Mourning the death of a loved one is not easy. Hopefully, everyone would have the heart to show respect to those who are grieving, whether or not they are celebrities.
