by Naomi Judd
He knew I was on to him. “I have to get my gear.”
“Well, yeah!” I blurted out with a faltering conviction. “If you’re really going fishing.”
His shoulders drooped and he glanced at me dejectedly. “I’ll be back home Sunday night, in plenty of time for work at the gas station on Monday.”
I was trying really hard not to cry. I was terrified that he would never come back to us.
Mother joined me on the porch as Daddy drove off. “He’s going to see her.” She went back inside, to the kitchen, where she could always be found, for more than twenty years of their marriage, cooking, washing and ironing clothes, doing everything to take care of Daddy and four children. My heart began to break. Sure, I had heard the rumors around town, but now my own mother was confirming that they were true.
A young woman who worked as a receptionist for Ashland Oil had begun dropping by Daddy’s gas station on a regular basis. Her name was Cynthia, a semi-attractive girl who was only a couple of years older than me. In Ashland, Kentucky, in the 1960s, she was labeled “from the wrong side of the tracks.” But she was smart enough to figure out a way to change sides quickly. She began flirting with Daddy whenever she could. For a few years, it appeared to be only a flirtation, but then everything took a turn in her favor. Daddy started spending overnights with her.
I wanted to dash into the kitchen and hold Mother, realizing that she had to be devastated. By the time I saw her, she was scrubbing the grease spots out of Daddy’s work pants and acting like absolutely nothing was wrong.
Even if Mother could pretend everything was status quo, I couldn’t. I had noticed that after Brian had died, my parents drifted apart. I was emotionally distraught that my father would cheat, but mostly I was appalled beyond measure that he would have an affair with this opportunistic young woman who could have been one of my schoolmates.
While I was living in Los Angeles, Daddy finally did leave home, never to return. He moved in with the demanding Cynthia and filed for a divorce. Soon after, he married her. I have no idea if he was in love; I suspect it was lust. True to our family pattern, we never spoke about his emotions or ours. However, I refused to accept her as a family member, this woman who appeared out of nowhere and had more influence over my father than my siblings and me or my mother.
Mother behaved like a vengeful fury once the reality of the situation sank in. For a number of years, she would not communicate with me at all. I didn’t know why she shut down so completely against me, and she never explained. I believe it’s because I didn’t take sides and I wouldn’t testify against Daddy at the divorce hearing. Because of her refusal to have anything to do with me, when I would visit Ashland, I would drive by our house and sit outside, watching her pace in front of the windows. I would bring a gift for her birthday or Christmas and leave it by her front door, run back to my car, and speed off. It broke my heart, knowing Mother was there alone.
Soon after Daddy died of kidney failure in 1984, I was tipped off by my cousin Chuck, whom Daddy thought of as another son, that Cynthia was attempting to keep the money and certificates of deposit Daddy had designated to go to my brother, sister, Chuck, and me. Now I knew for certain the exact type of greedy stepmother Cynthia really was. I took action and rushed to the bank the next day and marched into the manager’s office with Chuck and my Daddy’s lawyer in tow.
I lowered my voice and said, “I think you know why I’m here. A representative from the FDIC is right behind me, so I suggest you hand over the CDs within the next five minutes.”
It worked. I didn’t have a car at that time, so I used that money to buy one that belonged to Conway Twitty. Wy and I had been performing as the opening act for Conway’s tour in 1984. He collected vintage automobiles of great style and offered to sell me his sublime turquoise ’53 Cadillac. My daddy loved Caddys, so I used $10,000 of the money he left me to buy this extravagant car and drove it proudly.
But, a showpiece classic car was a shallow replacement for what I longed for most, a close and loving family. Looking back, fighting for the ten thousand dollars Daddy had left to me seemed an easy feat compared to winning unconditional acceptance or, at least, approval from either of my parents. I thought about how ironic it was that I had won the accolades of millions of fans, music critics, and songwriters from around the world, but was never able to believe that my own parents were happy for my success. Each time I had any expectation that they would be proud of me, my hopes were dashed.
A stinging heat flooded from my neck up to my face, the exact way it did the day I called my father from a pay phone to tell him that Wy and I had secured our very first recording deal after moving to Nashville. I had been living by my wits for years, and then working multiple shifts as a nurse to give Wy and me time to perform. On that golden day, after finally getting a chance to sing for RCA executives, we were told to wait in O’Charley’s restaurant next to the studio while they deliberated whether we were talent they wanted to invest in.
I was ecstatic when the label men arrived with a handshake of congratulations and a promise of a recording contract. I grabbed a quarter, ran to the pay phone by the front door, and called my father. When he picked up the phone, I gushed out the fantastic news. I could hear Daddy exhale and I knew he was smoking one of his unfiltered Camel cigarettes.
“Isn’t it exciting, Daddy? Our hard work is finally paying off. We have an RCA recording contract.”
I could picture the exact setting my father was in more than three hundred miles away. He would be sitting in his red La-Z-Boy chair, with a TV tray by his side holding a Pepsi and a bowl of salted Planter’s peanuts. His two little Westie dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, would be on his lap as he watched Bonanza. I heard him take a long drag on his cigarette again. Then he responded to my enthusiasm, without a single congratulatory word.
“You’re not going to quit your nursing job, are you?”
“I don’t know, Daddy.” My elation turned to regret that I had called him. I wanted to slam the phone down.
After a couple of minutes of his telling me that it would be foolish to leave a stable job like nursing and that show business was not for “regular folk” like me, I could hear him set the dogs down on the floor and sit upright.
“Well, Cynthia has my dinner ready. Thanks for calling, honey.”
My memory still holds that sting of rejection from the most important man in my life, ever.
There was only one thing that seemed to impress my father, out of all of my accomplishments. While watching one of his “regular folks” shows, he got to see Wy and me sing our number one song, “Mama, He’s Crazy,” on Hee Haw. To him that was the most impressive thing a simple girl from Ashland, Kentucky, could possibly do.
My bruised heart soon recovered from that phone call. Somewhere inside I flipped a switch from building a career to please my divorced parents to only doing it for Wy, Ashley, and me. As much as I could, I stayed true to that conviction, although I continually faced disappointment from my parents’ inability to be happy for me, no matter what I did. I don’t know why I had ever expected it, since neither of my parents ever had a moment of curiosity about what I wanted to do in the future or encouraged my educational pursuits or helped me to explore my options at all.
When I started my senior year of high school, I watched as my friends applied to various colleges. I was jealous that their parents would drive them to see the campuses and for interviews. My parents never once broached the subject of higher education; the word college was never spoken in our home, so I assumed it was something that I shouldn’t even think about, though I dreamed of attending the University of Kentucky. They lived meal to meal, chore to chore, and season to season.
I had broken away, jumped off the treadmill of dreary and monotonous daily life in the small town of Ashland, Kentucky. I had created a world for myself full of rich textures, new experiences, travel, and exciting ventures. But now that life had screeched to a halt.
As 2012 dragged on,
I languished in my darkening misery on the kitchen couch. None of the antidepressants the psychiatrist had given me had improved my depression in the least. They actually caused my anxiety levels to break through to an even higher level. The psychiatrist tried me on a fourth antidepressant.
I would enthusiastically pop the next antidepressant, hoping, Maybe this one will work. I’ll be free of this endless melancholy and get back my even disposition and optimistic outlook. After three weeks, which is about how long it takes for an antidepressant to have a full effect, I realized that the fourth was ineffectual, and if anything, I found facing a new day harder than ever.
My normally logical and commonsensical mind became impulsive and hair-trigger with thoughts that something had to happen or change “right now.” After a week of dark days, both in the weather and my mood, I demanded that Larry sell our home and farm and that we move to California. To pacify me, Larry pretended to be searching for homes for sale in Del Mar, California. After endless misery, both day and night, a semblance of balance returned to my brain and I was frightened by my irrationality.
One day Larry encouraged me to go to the grocery store and pick out ingredients for dinner. It was the one trip out of the house that I could still be convinced to do. It was a way to be around people, but I didn’t have to hold up a conversation or look nice. The bright lights and the colorful aisles gave my brain waves a temporary lift. As I stood in the produce aisle, I almost started to laugh. But it wasn’t a chuckle of relief; it was the macabre laugh of a doomed person who realizes that there will be no escape.
Is this it? Is this all there is? I asked myself. This is now the highlight of my week? My whole life has now been reduced to squeezing melons in the produce aisle?
Larry asked me to try out a new church with him, thinking that a spiritual community would be a great support for me. I didn’t want to go. I had not been to church in years, after attending every Sunday when we were in town.
We had always gone to the same Pentecostal church where Larry and I were married and Ashley was baptized. Wynonna had married her first husband there. I thought it would be the church I attended for the rest of my life, until one Sunday the pastor decided to warn the congregation about the sinfulness and degradation of homosexuality. He advised the congregation that our children needed to be protected from gay people. I was stunned. Many of the people I’ve worked with over the years have been gay, both men and women. Far from needing to “protect ourselves” from gay people, I’ve always found it to be quite the opposite. My gay coworkers and friends have always protected me, taken care of me professionally, and stood up for me over the years. A number of my fans are gay. They have been loyal and loving for three decades and seeing their faces in the audience at my concerts with Wynonna has always made me feel a deep gratitude. The offensive words of the pastor had barely traveled to the back of the sanctuary before I was on my feet to leave, never to set foot in my home church again.
I thought about all of the hardships I had overcome in my life: being sexually abused as a child, losing my brother to cancer, teenage pregnancy, betrayal and abandonment by the birth father, my divorce, single motherhood, poverty, being on welfare following my divorce, sleeping on a deloused mattress from Goodwill, having to escape Los Angeles because of an ex-con stalker who raped and beat me, then living in a fishing cabin with no heat while putting myself through nursing school and working two other jobs, and overcoming a life-threatening disease, hepatitis C. Through it all, I had prayed.
I was done praying. Why would a loving God let me sink so low now? Why would he let the disease in my brain become so unpredictable and my thoughts so dark? I felt that God was a phony and had abandoned me to this hideous mental illness, and I was mad as hell at him. My faith withered away. I went into spiritual exile.
I told Larry that I couldn’t go to any church with him. Larry would hold me in his arms, but he was running out of words to comfort me.
One gloomy November morning, sitting on the edge of the bed, I was thinking about being onstage and how much joy I felt at the end of each concert. I wanted everyone in the audience to leave feeling really good, too. Wy and I would sing the Judds’ most widely known hit, “Love Can Build a Bridge.” It’s a song I wrote for our millions of fans the year I became ill with hepatitis C. It won a Grammy for Best Country Song. During my acceptance speech at the awards show I joked, “I don’t deserve this, but I have hep C and I don’t deserve that, either.”
“Love Can Build a Bridge” is an anthem of strength and recovery. Some of the lyrics: “I would swim out to save you, in your sea of broken dreams. When all your hopes are sinkin’, let me show you what love means.”
Here I was drowning, but I couldn’t save myself. I didn’t know where the hopelessness came from, so I could only think of one way to get rid of it. Love can build a bridge, but in my despair I was considering other ways that a bridge could end my pain.
Chapter 7
Do Your Genes Fit?
I knew exactly how I was going to carry out my suicide. I wouldn’t park at one end of the bridge, where people might stop me or question what I was doing. I would drive my car to the very center, the highest point, and in one swift motion open the car door and climb over the railing. I’d keep my focus on the beauty of the surrounding countryside, spread my arms out, and step off. After the 155-foot drop to State Route 96 below, it would all be over, now and forever. I would be out of this relentless torment.
The Natchez Trace Parkway Bridge was completed in 1994. It’s thirteen miles from my house and was built as one of the last sections of the Natchez Trace Parkway. There’s a palpable sense of history along the Natchez Trace: Native American ceremonial mounds, Civil War battlefields, Victorian homes, forests, and farmlands, a record of more than two hundred years of history. The Natchez Trace Bridge is one of only two post-tensioned arch bridges in the world. Perhaps it could provide a post-tension solution for me.
Despite winning awards for design and originality, the Natchez Trace Bridge holds another distinction. There has been at least one suicide per year from the bridge since its completion. Ironically, the sheriff of our town had recently approached me about helping him acquire the funds to add safety nets on both sides of the bridge to save any poor soul who decided to commit suicide by jumping. I told him, “I’ll get back to you on that one.”
I have been a personal friend for more than twenty-five years of Dr. Francis Collins, who was the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. We met when we were both being inducted into the Academy of Achievement, a nonprofit that honors notable people for student educational purposes. He was being honored in the Science and Exploration category and I was for the Arts and as a Social Advocate. He’s an introspective and brilliant physician and genetic scientist who has spent much of his professional life decoding human DNA. His work has given us the ability to “read our own instruction book.” His discoveries have helped develop a method of screening the human gene for diseases. One of his main interests is the way inheritance from our ancestors influences disease.
Francis and Diane, his lovely wife, who is a genetics counselor, came to vacation for a week at our farm. Going through years of recovery from hepatitis C gave me a ravenous appetite to listen and learn from the experts, wherever and whenever I can find them. Luckily for me, I had the chance to host Dr. Collins at my own kitchen table, where he answered my questions and coached me as we ate chicken and dumplings.
Now, in my darkened state of mind, I heard echoes of a tantalizing fact I had learned from Dr. Collins. He explained to me that mental illness is often a family disease. If a parent has depression or anxiety, then their child has about a 50 percent chance of having it. When both parents have a mental illness, the child’s chances of having one as well goes up to 75 percent. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, in Toronto, had determined that about 90 percent of people with suicidal thoughts have at least one mental health disorder. I had also read that studi
es from as recently as 2011 were uncovering a strong genetic biomarker in families with suicidal tendencies.
This was one of those circumstances where “ignorance is bliss.” The statistics of inherited mental illness terrified me. Though I’ve always considered myself the one who broke the mold of what a determined girl from Ashland, Kentucky, could do with her future, there was no denying that my family history on both sides was like the variety pack of mental illness. More than that, every generation in my family had a suicide that changed the family dynamics forever. Would I be another statistic? Other families pass down treasured heirlooms or historical artifacts. My family shuffled a horrendous tendency to suicidal ideation onto subsequent generations, starting with my great-great-grandfather David Oliver.
My mother’s grandfather, David was a stonemason in Portsmouth, Ohio. He cheated on his young wife, Tilly, mercilessly; after years of dealing with his infidelity she fled to her parents’ home in Portsmouth. David’s unpredictable and destructive behavior would later be diagnosed as mental illness, but at the time he was labeled as an unpredictable drunk. In a fit of rage and revenge against Tilly, David, inside the house, sealed the doors and windows of his home and turned on the gas. But he wasn’t alone. Their two innocent little sons, Howard and Norman, ages seven and five, were in the house with him. He sat them on the couch and then proceeded to make a rope noose and throw it over a beam across the ceiling. David stood on a chair, pulled the noose over his head, and kicked the chair out from under him. The little boys were already suffering the effects of asphyxiation from the wide-open gas pipe. Terrified and starting to feel sick, the older son, seven-year-old Howard, knew that they, too, would soon die.
Howard crawled to the window at the end of the room. He opened the window and fresh air poured into the room. He crawled out onto the flat roof, pulling his five-year-old brother, Norman, to safety. Peering back over the windowsill, little Howard slowly realized his own father was trying to murder them while committing suicide. No one knows why Tilly would leave her children’s fates in the hands of a man with such an unstable mental condition, but history would reveal a long line of relatives who passed on a narcissistic personality disorder. She didn’t even return for her sons following their father’s suicide. The boys had to go through a court system, until eventually one of Tilly’s relatives rescued them from an orphanage.
