Wynonna Judd tells late mum Naomi she’s missed ahead of one-year anniversary of her suicide

4 April 2023

Wynonna Judd told her late mum she misses her ahead of the one-year-anniversary of her suicide.

Wynonna Judd told her late mum she misses her ahead of the one-year-anniversary of her suicide

The singer, 58, paid tribute to the performer when she became overwhelmed with emotion while performing at the 2023 CMT Awards, as the 2022 show was the last public event her mother Naomi attended before she took her life aged 76 on 30 April, 2022.

She pointed to the sky while performing “I Want to Know What Your Love Is” with fellow country star Ashley McBryde, 39, on Sunday (02.04.23) and said: “Mama, you need to be here, and I miss you, and I love you and I don’t understand.”

Wynonna added backstage to Entertainment Tonight ahead of her first year without her mum at the end of the month: “It’s an anniversary and we all have anniversaries. I’m not terminally unique.

“We all have something that we look at and go, ‘What the hell? What’s going on? I don’t understand,’ and that was my, ‘I don’t understand.’”

Admitting she has had a “bittersweet time”, as the one-year anniversary of Naomi’s death falls around the same time as her granddaughter, Kaliyah, turns one year old: “I’ve got both agony and ecstasy happening.”

Wynonna, who has been working through her grief by focusing on touring and writing the new song ‘Broken and Blessed’ inspired by her mother, previously told Entertainment Tonight about its lyrics: “‘I’m somewhere between hell and hallelujah’ is one of the lines in it. I struggle. And I think when I struggle, I say it onstage.”

Naomi, who battled a series of mental health issues, shot herself dead in an upstairs room of her beloved 1,000-acre Tennessee farmhouse estate, where her daughters Wynonna and actress Ashley, 54, also had properties, and which she had showed off on a 2016 episode of Oprah Winfrey’s ‘Where Are They Now?’

The toxicology report on the late singer revealed she had several different drugs in her system at the time of her suicide, including medications used to treat insomnia, Parkinson’s disease, depression and seizures.

Wynonna, who spent years performing with Naomi in The Judds, has been touring since her mum’s suicide and had The Hollywood Reporter the singer had been “very excited” about their upcoming joint tour.