'I have this week started to sit in sacred presence with her precious things,' writes AshleyJudd, one year after her mother's death by suicide
esus wept” – the shortest statement in the Bible. Lamentations – the only emotion for which a book in the Bible is named. What is being said here? Perhaps that we are destined to grieve.My mother died by suicide one year ago. Earlier this month, I walked through my first birthday without her, a rite of passage everyone experiences with the death of their parents.
These intimate exchanges with the private fortify me. They remind me of the interior landscape of my mother’s soul, the innocent God-scape that somehow remained untouched by the mental illness that marred her life. And they summon the welcoming sound of my mother’s voice pealing like bells whenever she saw me stride barefoot onto her back porch.
They also make me grieve for the voice she lost when my Great Uncle Charlie sexually assaulted her when she was 4 years old, for the repeated harassment she endured in workplaces during her adulthood as she raised two girls as a single mom on low-wage jobs, the intimate partner violence she experienced, and a rape about which she wrote and spoke boldly. These assaults and violations, from which she never did heal, remained a source of unresolved agony and fed her mental illness.
Mom and I spoke often of male violence, of how it is normalized, of the outrage we felt at knowing that the average age of entry into beingmay be as low as 12 to 14 in this country. On her behalf, I will continue to be “audacious,” as she called me, in my full-hearted, full-throated fight for freedom from the male entitlement to female bodies.
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