Ashley Judd is filled with "incandescent rage" following the death of her mother.
Ashley Judd filled with 'incandescent rage' after mother's death
Naomi Judd, 76, died earlier this month after battling the "disease of mental illness" for many years and her daughter Ashley, 54, admitted she feels her mother was let down by a "lifetime of injustices".
In a personal essay for USA Today, she wrote: "She died just hours before her peers at the Country Music Hall of Fame could demonstrate to her how much they esteem her. She died just days before my sister and I could show her again how much we love her.
"I am unmoored. But my heart is not empty. It is replete with gratitude for what she left behind. Her nurture and tenderness, her music and memory.
"Perhaps it’s indecorous to say, but my heart is filled with something else, too. Incandescent rage. Because my mother was stolen from me by the disease of mental illness, by the wounds she carried from a lifetime of injustices that started when she was a girl. Because she was a girl.
"My mama was an extraordinary parent under duress: She showed my sister and me the power of having a voice and using it, and there has been no greater lesson. But motherhood happened to her without her consent. She experienced an unintended pregnancy at age 17, and that led her down a road familiar to so many adolescent mothers, including poverty and gender-based violence.
"Forgive me if my grief isn’t tidy. When I think about my mother, I am awash in the painful specifics."
Ashley went on to praise her mother for working to overcome the obstacles in her life.
She said: "My mama was a legend. She was an artist and a storyteller, but she had to fight like hell to overcome the hand she was dealt, to earn her place in history. She shouldn’t have had to fight that hard to share her gifts with the world."
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