When Naomi Judd, the Grammy-winning country singer, died last month, her daughter Ashley Judd said she had lost her mother to the “illness of mental illness.” On Thursday, Ms. Judd was more candid, saying in a televised interview that her mother had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her Tennessee home, encouraging those in need to seek help.
Ms. Judd, an actress, told Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America” that she spoke about her mother’s death because her family wanted to share the information before it “became public without our control.”
“We are aware that while we mourn the loss of a wife and mother, we are a public family in an uncanny way,” Ms Judd said. “So that’s really what drives this timing. Otherwise it is clearly much too early. So that’s important for us to say in advance.”
Naomi Judd and her other daughter, Wynonna Judd, dominated the country charts in the 1980s as the mother-daughter duo, the Judds. Naomi Judd, 76, died on April 30, a day before the duo were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
In Thursday’s interview, Ashley Judd said she was visiting her mother at her home outside of Nashville when she died. Ms Judd said she went out to greet a friend of hers who had passed by, and when she went upstairs to tell her mother that the friend had arrived, she found her mother dead.
“Mother used a gun,” Mrs Judd said. “That’s the piece of information that we find very inconvenient to share, but we understand we’re in a position that if we don’t say it, someone else will.”
“Mom was a brilliant conversationalist, she was a star, she was an underrated songwriter,” Ms Judd said. “And she was someone who suffered from mental illness, you know, and who had a lot of trouble getting off the couch, except going into town every day to the Cheesecake Factory, where all the staff knew her and loved her.” loved her.”
Naomi Judd was born in Ashland, a mining town in northeastern Kentucky, and lived in California before moving to Nashville in 1979 as a single mother of two daughters.
Mrs. Judd supported her family by working as a nurse while pursuing a music career with Wynonna. Their rift came in 1983 when Mrs. Judd cared for a patient who turned out to be the daughter of an RCA Records executive. A record deal, nine Country Music Association Awards, five Grammys and 14 number 1 hits followed.
Ashley Judd said in the interview that her mother was most alive when she performed.
“She was very isolated in many ways because of the disease,” Ms Judd said. “And yet over the years there were a lot of people who showed up for her, not just me.”
Ms. Judd encouraged those in need to seek help and cited resources including the national suicide hotline and the National Alliance for Mental Illness, a mental health organization that also has a hotline.
“And so I want to be very careful as we talk about this today,” said Ms. Judd, “that for anyone who has those ideas or those impulses, you know, to talk to someone, to share, to be open, to be vulnerable to be.”
In the United States, if you have suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at: 800-273-8255 (VOICE) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. To go here for sources outside the United States.