Actress Sharon Stone had a complicated relationship with her late mother, who died last year at age 91. In her memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon shared some details about her mother’s traumatic childhood, and during a recent appearance on “All There Is with Anderson Cooper,” she opened up about how that later impacted their relationship.
“My mom behaved often as if she didn’t like me at all,” she shared candidly on the podcast. She explained that through her own therapy, she eventually realized that the way her mom treated her “was a reflection of her own self-loathing.”
During the episode, Sharon thought back to the end of her mother’s life and explained that she had “wanted her to die in peace,” which required her to make a difficult decision during her final moments.
Sharon got emotional as she recalled the details.
At the end of her mother Dorothy’s life, Sharon was caring for her. However, Sharon had to pretend to be someone else. “She was at my house and I was taking care of her, but she didn’t want it to be acknowledged between us that it was me,” Sharon explained, adding that she had to pretend to be staff and refer to her mother as “Mrs. Stone.”
But it was during this time together that her mother would speak about “all the trauma of her childhood that she hadn’t been able to say.”
At a young age, Dorothy was taken away from her family due to abuse.
After she was moved to another home because she was “so violently abused,” she basically worked as “a child servant” for her new family when she was just nine years old, according to Sharon.
By age 16, Dorothy was married and pregnant. Though she remained married and in love for 60 years, these experiences undoubtedly impacted her. “Nobody should be pregnant and married at 16 and working as a child servant at 9,” Sharon said.
Sharon revealed that just before her mother’s death, she learned that she was afraid of dying because she didn’t want to have to see her parents again. “She was terrified to die because she was afraid her parents would be there,” Sharon recalled, adding that she told her mom “they weren’t going to be there.”
At the end of her life, Sharon’s mother was “really fighting.”
Observing how her mother “was holding on and holding on,” Sharon eventually came to a challenging conclusion: she would need to “let go.”
This is how she described her thought process at the time:”I need to stop walking in the room. I need to go upstairs and ignore my mother so she will die. I need to detach and release. And she’s only going to die if I let go.”
The fact that they had a complicated relationship made this even harder for Sharon, as there was a part of her hoping that her mother would tell her some of the things she’d been needing to hear.
“I wanted her to say, ‘I’m proud of you. I love you. I’m sorry. You’re important to me,'” Sharon admitted, getting emotional as she spoke. “And I wasn’t going to get them.” She added that she “had to make peace with the fact that (her) mom was not going to do that.”
In addition to wanting to hear these words from her mother, Sharon wanted her “to die in peace,” which meant she “had to release her.”
This was difficult for Sharon to process. But when she spoke about it on the podcast, she said, “Sometimes that’s what you have to do. Sometimes you have to step back.”
She added, “And sometimes the person that the person is meanest to, you find out, is the person they’re most attached to, because they feel safest to take it out on you. And it took me quite a while to process that.”
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