To grieve her mother, Ashley Judd first had to heal trauma

Ashley Judd spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the trauma she has worked hard to face, the grief she now feels, and how her mother’s spirit is still very much alive in her life.

Ashley Judd feels the presence of her late mother in what she describes as “winks” or “small nudges.” She has followed those gentle impulses to the greeting card isle at Walgreens, where Judd will stop and look at the cards from mothers to daughters and pick out the one that her mom – singer and songwriter Naomi Judd – would have chosen for her. “You know, I did that at Christmas. I do that on my birthday. And I pick out the one that I would have gotten for her, for the holidays,” Judd recalled in a recent conversation with CNN’s Anderson Cooper for his podcast “All There Is.” Judd has done a lot of healing work in the more than 20 months since her mom died by suicide at age 76 in 2022. “There is a place where trauma and grief and transcendence meet, and I call it the braid,” Judd explained. “I think that I’m grief literate now and grief and I are on pretty good terms. That doesn’t mean I get a pass. It doesn’t mean that there’s a shortcut, but there’s a shorthand.” It’s a shorthand Judd has learned through the courage she has found to process pain she experienced in her childhood and in her mother’s passing.