Ashley Judd Shares the Last Words She Said To Her Dying Mother Naomi Judd

In her interview on Anderson Cooper's All There Is podcast on Wednesday, Ashley Judd narrated her heartbreaking, poignant farewell to her mother Naomi Judd. Ashley recalls seeing her mother's suffering in the latter minutes of Naomi's life and allowing her to let go of a life that had become unsustainable. In 2022, the grief-stricken actress disclosed publicly that her mother, country music great Naomi Judd, had died by suicide at age 76.

As reported by HuffPost, Ashley said during the podcast, "I … knew she was walking with mental illness, that her brain hurt and that she was suffering. But that didn’t necessarily prepare me." Judd disclosed to Cooper that she was the last person to talk with her mother and the one who had located her. She continued, "My mother’s death was traumatic and unexpected because it was death by suicide and I found her. My grief was in lockstep with trauma because of the manner of her death and the fact that I found her. What I needed to do first was vomit. I held my mother as she was dying."

She remembered seeing her mother's body and uttering, "Mama, I see how much you’ve been suffering and it is OK. It is OK to go. It’s OK to go. I am here. It is OK to let go. I love you. Go see your daddy. Go see Papa Judd. Go be with your people." Anderson then asked her, "And she heard you?" She replied, "Oh, she heard me. And I just got in the bed with her, held her and talked to her, and said, 'Let it all go. Be free. All was forgiven long ago. Leave it all here. Take nothing with you. Just be free.'" She added, "And I did that for, I don’t know what it was, 14, 15 minutes, just held her."

Over the next several days and weeks, the sisters—Ashley foremost among them—spoke about Naomi's method of passing away. According to an interview Ashley did with Good Morning America, Naomi committed suicide and "used a firearm." Naomi never hesitated to share her lifelong battles with suicidal thoughts and sadness that refused to go away.

She told ABC's Diane Sawyer at the time, "She used a weapon. My mother used a firearm. So 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." She added, "My mother knew that she was seen and she was heard in her anguish, and she was walked home. When we're talking about mental illness, it's very important to be clear and to make the distinction between our loved one and the disease. It's very real, and it lies, it's savage."