Wynonna Judd says her late mother, Naomi Judd, was “determined” to kill herself.
“With the same determination she had to live, she was determined to die,” the 58-year-old country singer told People.
“It’s so hard to understand how someone can be so strong and yet so vulnerable.”
The candid interview comes five months after Naomi died by suicide on April 30 at age 76, after a lengthy battle with depression.
“I can’t quite turn my head around it and I don’t know if I ever will. That she left the way she did,” Wynonna continued.
“That’s how baffling and cunning mental illness is. You have to make peace with the fact that you don’t know. Sometimes there are no answers.”
Wynonna reiterated that the five-time Grammy winner was a naturally “determined” person, “no matter what happened to her.”
“Getting fired. Being forgotten. A single white woman raising two babies on her own. About welfare and food stamps. She never gave up,” she says.
The singer also noted that she was “grateful”. Her last words to her mother came on April 11 at the CMT Awards, where they sang their big hit “Love Can Build a Bridge.”
“The last thing I said to her was ‘I love you,’ and I’m so grateful for that,” Wynonna said.
She previously admitted to being “incredibly angry” at Naomi in her first interview since her mother’s death.
“I got the call and I went to see her and I saw her and said goodbye to her in the hospital,” Wynonna recalled to CBS Sunday Morning last month.
“I closed her eyes and kissed her forehead, and that was that. And before I know it, I’m sitting here on the side porch, just trying to think of what’s next.’
Wynonna continued, “I didn’t know she was where she was when she ended it because she’d had episodes before and she got better. And that’s what I live in is like, ‘Was there something I was looking at? should have looked or should have known?’ not me.”
The singer’s autopsy report from the Nashville medical examiner’s office revealed she had “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound” and was “declared dead shortly after arrival” at a nearby hospital. Wynonna is currently on a final tour for The Judds, which was announced just weeks before Naomi passed away.