Sharon Stone's Complicated Grief

"Welcome to all there is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is actress writer, artist Sharon Stone. In 2001, she had a near-fatal stroke in brain hemorrhage. Took her nearly seven years to recover, and she says she's now living her second life. In her 2021 memoir, she wrote, "The lessons of my second life are of recovering from loss, the loss of all things we call dear. My father, my three closest friends, my marriage, my health, the custody of my son, my career, my financial stability. One might say my identity, the grief and sense of failure that this cause was terribly awfully overwhelming." Well soon after that memoir came out, Sharon experienced the death of her 11-month-old nephew, River, and two years later, his father, Sharon's brother, Patrick died, and in 2025, Sharon's mom died as well. Sharon Stone is 68 now. She most recently starred in Euphoria on HBO. She has three sons through adoption, Rome, Laird, and Quinn. I spoke to her several weeks ago. When you think of grief, what do you think of? I think of the way that I've dealt with it in my life, losing so many members of my immediate family. But I then think about it in the way that it's imposed on us with the no offense to hallmark, but the sort of greeting card industry, how we are supposed to societally respond. When tribally around the universe, people respond to it in varied ways, from celebratory to beating themselves and wailing and all kinds of things. There's a myriad of ways that people experience loss. So I think of it with a very open heart. You came very close to dying. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, some would say I did die and was defibrillated and brought back. I had that white light experience, which has stayed upon my shoulder and made me feel quite safe in this continued existence. Can you talk about what you saw? I saw and felt myself being pulled upward into this incredibly bright white, but white doesn't exactly explain it. This light, this light that is brighter than anything we've ever experienced, like like moving directly into something bright as the sun, but not yellow. And as I was whooshing upwards, the top of it appeared to open and friends of mine, deer ones who had passed and particularly deer ones who I had aided in their passing, who and I loved so much, were like peeking at me through the top of this light and smiling at me and welcoming me. And I was seeing them like, oh, hey, you know, like, hi, like I, like I was so happy to see them. When all of a sudden I felt like I'd been kicked in the chest by a mule, you know, just wow, and I expect they must have defibrillated me. And I just remember gasping, like that kind of thing when you've been underwater too long, like you're swimming in a lake or somewhere and you just all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm underwater way too long and you come up for air and you're just like, I had that kind of experience and I sat up. And then I remember they said, they're going to take you to a neurological hospital. You'll be okay. We've got you. And I passed out again. And then I woke up in the neurological ICU and the girl next to me was screaming relentlessly and the man directly across from me died. And I remember seeing him die and his machine slowing down, the beep slowing down and stopping. And then them coming to get him his body and then them taking the machines out and then remaking his bed. And it was just, it was one of these kind of surreal experiences. They gave me the first exam where they give you, they go in the female artery and go up and look around and they missed it, which was just a nightmare. And so I hemorrhaged into my brain for nine days. And I had a my eight or nine hour surgery and then was moved to regular ICU so that I could come down off of this synthetic heroin, which is called delotted, that they had been giving me. And so the next thing I had to do was get off the drugs. It's important to remind people, you were at the pinnacle of your career. You had just adopted a child. It took seven years to really fully recover from all of this. And in the meantime, I was sued for divorce and I went to court six or seven times over the custody of my child, which I lost. That will give you some grief. I'd already had any number of miscarriages trying to have a child. My fifth and a half month pregnancy in the middle of the night my baby died and I pulled my baby girl and set a prayer over her. The other four pregnancies I'd miscarried and I was going into sepsis. It was a absolute nightmare. My mom had a miscarriage before me and she never talked about it. And my mom talked about everything and I found it interesting that that was something that she she didn't talk about. Women are told that we're not supposed to discuss our grief, our heartache, our losses. And then now we're being punished for them, which is a level of selfishness that is unprecedented. I don't think the full depth and breadth of the female experience is really explored. You know, we get Disney movies where the mom's dead and the theme is just keeps women. You know, that's not really how it goes. I've had to become the person that looks out, excuse me. It does make me very sad. I had to be the person in my own family that looks out when people are dying. My 11 month old nephew died of sudden infant crib death and was on a respirator for five days. This is your nephew River. Yes. Who died? 11 months old. There's nothing worse. There's just nothing worse than a family watching a baby on a respirator whose brain dead and has to make a decision when do we turn it off? And what do we do? I'm watching the mom change this baby's diapers and watching my brother fall apart. I'm watching my mother who had recently lost her other nephew, a 17 year old boy with a 170 IQ who had died of a heroin overdose. To watch this level of endless suffering that had happened to my family and to try to be the person who maintained, you know, the ballast on the boat and made decisions and made thoughtful decisions and tried to help them find a path forward to talk to them about organ doning. And so that we gave my nephew's organs to five different people and saved five different people's lives so that they could feel the power and the forward motion of this baby's heart, this baby's lungs, this baby's kidneys allowing someone else to live, to see, to feel, to breathe. River died in August of 2021 and then his father, your brother, Patrick died less than two years later. Yeah, he had a widowmaker and dropped dead at home in the middle of an unbelievable snowstorm where there would have been no possibility of him getting help or care. And he really wanted to have this one more child and this kid was a very special kid, a very angelic kind of kid and the effect that he had on my brother was very serene and very beautiful. And that morning my brother had said, let's all do this something great together with his other two kids and his wife and they were having this special day. He had chosen to make a special day that day and it broke me. It broke me because you're not supposed to say I know but he was my favorite. He was everybody. favorite, my little brother. What about him? Oh, he was a sort of a giant man. He was tall and and just big. And he was a kid that he could always just grow anything. I mean, he won everything at the county fair every year. He grew tomatoes that were like this that were actually delicious. But he was the kind of person that could just get out of the car and throw seeds by the side of the driveway and a garden would grow. And he just had this magical ability to grow everything and a magical ability with, well, I think my dad gave that to certainly to he, my brother Patrick, and to me, where animals will come to us. Like, dear, we'll walk out of the forest and we can pet them. And animals will just come up to us. Like, you know, frightening animals, you know, like tiger, I can pet a tiger. You're like a much wiser snow white. It just, well, people do laugh with me. They say, you know, you walk down the street and birds come up and talk to you. And he was a really kind of magical creature and very lovely and tender and funny. We're going to take a short break when we come back. Sharon talks about caring for her mother Dorothy at the end of her life. I wanted her to say, I'm proud of you. I love you. I'm sorry. You're important to me. And I wasn't going to get them. And I had to make peace with the fact that my mom was not going to do that. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life Podcast. We're going to talk about rethinking how we die, how we think about death in the first place, greatly informs how we live. Our guest is Dr. BJ Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician. We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group. It's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interest, services and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject. It makes us cling to life. Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts. When you were in the hospital, your mom came and it actually changed the way you thought about her. You'd had doubts about your relationship, how much she loved you. Or even liked me. My mom behaved often as if she didn't like me at all. And it took me quite a bit of therapy and trauma therapy to understand that it was a reflection of her own self-loathing. She had a very, very awful childhood and was removed from her home when she was nine because she was so violently abused and was given to another family to be their housekeeper, laundry, shopper, cook, everything at nine. The man was a dentist and by the, by 12, she was also running the bookkeeping for the dentist office. This was incredible child abuse on top of a child abuse she'd already suffered. And she was pregnant at 16 and married to my dad who they loved each other very much and had a really passionate, loving marriage for 60 years. However, nobody should be pregnant and married at 16 and working as a child servant at nine. And I think she was quite resentful of the fact that I was in a special Mensa program in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade. I was in college at 15. I was having a life that was not only a normal kid life that she never even got a glimpse of, but I was having an accelerated education, special attention. I was the treasurer of junior achievement, which sounds maybe silly, but to her that was something she would make fun of me when I came home from because she was angry and jealous and upset and understandably so, not understandable when you're little, certainly not understandable when it's your mom who's the mom on the school trip and she's getting drunk and playing cards and smoking with the other kids. And you're like, oh my god, that can't be my mom, you know. And the other kids say your mom is so cool and you think, oh, if she's not your mom, of course. But I didn't, it was really hard because then I turned out to be super uptight and square because I didn't want to look at my mom. And then when my mom died, 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. So I had to pretend that I was staff. So I'd come in with a towel over my arm and say, good afternoon, Mrs. Stone. And I would at yes, and I would take care of her if anyone else was there. But when we were alone, she unloaded all the trauma of her childhood that she hadn't been able to say. And she was terrified to die because she was afraid her parents would be there. So I had to lie to her and tell her that her father was in jail and her mother was in a mental hospital. And they weren't going to be there. She was going to be safe to die. And so she felt safe to tell me all the things they had done, which was, of course, a nightmare. How do you know much of that before? I had known a lot of it, but not the real underbelly of it. And so then in the night that she was dying, she did not want to die. And she was really fighting it. And it was down to those moments where they titrate the morphine that we had in home, you know, medical staff. And they're like, oh, she's going to die in four hours because they really know how it goes. And my mom was holding on and holding on. And I finally realized, I have to let go. I need to release my mother. 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, which was hard because I wanted those things, Anderson. I love you. I'm sorry. My mom was going to tell me every awful thing. My mom, no matter how many priests, my sister brought in and she brought in a few in an effort to help her that I was the priest. She was going to tell everything to. And I had to know that what I had to do was be the unlikable person. I had to go upstairs and close the door. And I did it. And then someone came upstairs and said, she's dying. She's dying. She's dying. Come down. And I said, no. Nope. Are you sure? Yes. And I had to hold so she could die. And then they came up and said, she died. We're going to take her out. Do you want to come down? And I had to hold because I had to allow her her release. And it was so hard because I wanted her to die in peace. And in order for her to die in peace, I had to release her. And sometimes that's what you have to do. Sometimes you have to step back. And sometimes the person that the person is mean as 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. You know, the few days after she died, I felt like I was like out of my body, almost drunk with being out of my, I just felt like, wow, I don't know kind of what's happening. And then this march rolled around, which is when my birthday is, is in March. And my friend said, well, this is your first birthday without your mom. How do you feel? And I thought, you mean, it's a year, you mean, it wasn't this March that she died? And I realized I had spent the year reparenting myself. I had taken everything out of my room, I repainted, made myself a nurturing, feminine space and they had taken the whole year to come up and again take that big deep breath as if I'd been underwater and recognize. Okay, this is a woman, a girl, really, who had needed reparenting from someone who loved her, me, someone who wasn't afraid to love her, see her, stand up for her, tell her she was okay. Tell her she was smart, I'm proud of you, I'm proud of you, I love you, I forgive you, I will accept you and I love you and I had to give it to me that it wasn't going to come from her and that I could do it and that I could be okay, relieved. I've only recently kind of realized the little kid that I was, how much that little kid I buried and how much that little kid is at the basis of the way I see the world and all my thought processes and I'm trying to learn to turn to that kid and give him love and compassion. I'm wondering, do you feel like the adult that you are or do you feel like that child that you were? Anderson, I would say that probably for the first time in my life, I feel sure-footed as an adult, I feel like I am both a whole child and for the first time a whole woman, understanding what part of the childhood trauma that I carried belonged to me and what didn't. And what part of it that I can compassionately understand that my mom was not capable of dealing with and why, even though I had afforded her therapy and all sorts of things. Still, my mom was a highly traumatized person and all of the shame and fear that she carried around that was was something that she couldn't really break through. And what I learned in my own therapy and it's been so illuminating for me to see, oh right, of course she couldn't know everything. Of course, I don't know everything and it's okay for me to feel free from my mom, free from her trauma now that she's gone and to feel growth from her passing. Did you feel relieved after her death? Yes, people often think that's a bad thing that you're not allowed to have these feelings, any positive feelings from death or dying. But in fact, there can be a lot of positive feelings, particularly when you care for someone who's dying over a long period of time. The caregiver can just be worn to pieces and the relief a caregiver can feel when that is over is enormous. People talk about complex grief, complicated grief, ambiguous grief. We get voicemails from thousands of people about their grief experiences. There's a whole range of emotions over death that are completely understandable. Yes, because if you have been abused by someone or even if someone has not stepped in and stopped abuse or if someone who is meant to be your protector did not protect you. There are many complicated reasons why people can feel relief when someone passes. And culturally, we don't have a lot of allowance for mixed feelings about these kind of things. We're all supposed to have these pre-prescribed feelings where everybody feels terrific when you feel miserable. And after somebody's died, everybody's great. But in reality, some people were not so great in one's life. Yeah, and it's okay to have every feeling you might have. And it's okay to feel relieved by that pressure leaving. Talking about your grandfather's death, you wrote, "It's a very weird thing when you're a kid and the first experience you have of death is glee and relief and emptiness." Because he was an abuser who abused my mom and did everything he could possibly do to get near us to be abusive of us. And he was a, not a grandfather, he was a creature that we tried to avoid at all cost. And so when he died, and I was, I think, 14, and my sister was 11, and we went to this funeral, and the coffin and all these folding chairs, and no one sat down. Everyone gathered in the back in these little tight clusters, which was also very peculiar because people usually kind of meander in, sit down, talk. There's a kind of usually a gentle caring and a hand holding and a thoughtfulness at a funeral. None of that. And I walked up to the coffin and looked in, and my sister came up and sort of stood behind me and looked over my shoulder, and she said, "Are we sure he's dead?" Wow. And I said, "I don't know." And she said, "You better check, you better check." Oh my God, wow. And I said, "Okay, okay." You know? And then we had to see who was going to poke him to make sure he was dead. And I think it was me, of course, because I'm not that one. And I think I reached in and shoved him in the shoulder, and he was stiff and didn't move. And I looked at him and I went, "Yeah, yeah." And I think I said, "It's over." And I think we still backed off. And no one was around, like everyone was in the back. And yeah, it reminds me of that movie where Eugene Levy was in a car and someone said, "Well, take a picture," and he went, "Like that." Because it's one of those things where you take a picture with your mind, and it's just indelible for the rest of your life. You know, it will be a picture in my mind forever of that weird sense of emptiness, good emptiness. It's over. It's over. Another early experience you had with death, the boy you went to the prom with, Ray Butterfield. You said Ray had been riding home on his motorcycle and drunk driver had hit him. I'll never recover from seeing my 17-year-old prom date with our prom picture in his pocket in that casket with the lost look of all of his friends standing by, never. They had asked me to speak at his funeral. And I walked up to the podium. His casket was there. His mom had put our picture in his pocket. And then the entire football team came and filed in and stood in the back of the funeral home. And I looked at them, and they looked so young. I just remember thinking, "You're all children." And then I had this incredibly weird thought. I will never be young again. And I got down off the podium and left. And I didn't talk. I just got down and walked out of the funeral home and walked down the street and left. This drunk driver ran him off the road. You could see the swerve of the tire tracks and kept right on going. And his motorcycle flipped over and he broke his jaw. And because this drunk did not stop, he choked to death on his own blood. He was nothing else wrong with him. And I was working that night. I was the manager of a Bob's Big Boy. And I had closed out, closed out the register and come home quite late, one or two o'clock in the morning. I knew something was terribly wrong. And I remember sitting in the living room on the edge of the sofa against the arm of the so for all night, and it just had dawn as the sun started to come up the phone rang. And I answered the phone and his mom when I was young, they called me Sherry. And she said, "Sherry?" And she started to cry. And I said, "Is he dead?" And she said, "Yes." And I hung up the phone. I just knew. - I don't think many people maybe know this about you all that you have been through. But just probably from afar, somebody looking at you would think you have had this sort of charmed life and go from one fabulous thing to another. My mom, she developed this belief that she had inside a rock hard diamond that nothing could get at and nothing could crack. It was like a pearl of great value that she kept protected inside. And she had that throughout her life. And so even when my brother died, I knew that she would survive it. And she didn't survive it like a brassy, you know, caveracing or like tough as nails. She was the most vulnerable person I've ever met and she remained vulnerable. And I realized now what that was such an extraordinary strength of hers. It wasn't a weakness of hers, which I used to view it as a child. The fact that you have propelled yourself forward not running from but walking with. I'm wondering, how do you do that? - You know, Anderson, this is a wonderful question. I've learned a lot working with young women and homeless mothers and their children. And Anderson, I think your mom was so correct when she decided this part of me is my treasure. It's mine and all these things that happen around me, no matter how illicit, I get to see them through the lens of my goodness, my choice. There's so much oppression around this, particularly for women because when we make choices, that our soul is absolute and belongs absolutely only to us. We are often met with comments like you're crazy. What are you thinking? How can you be that way? Anger, rage, resistance, oppression, because it can feel very threatening to someone who wants to control you. For it to be very apparent that there is this amorphous part of you that, no, it's not there for the taking. It just isn't. - So to someone listening who's suffered a loss, what would you say? - If you've suffered any kind of loss, including a violation to yourself, your soul is yours, it's clean, it's pure, it's beautiful, and it's available for you to make it, as big and beautiful and full as you choose. - Sharon, John, thank you so much. - Thank you. - Sharon's memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, came out in 2021. If you have thoughts you'd like to share about my conversation with Sharon or about your own experiences with grief, we'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment on our grief community page at CNN.com/AllThereIs or send us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. On Thursday, July 2nd, I hope you join me at 9.15 p.m. for my streaming show, All There Is Live. You can watch it on CNN.com/AllThereIs. Streams live there for free. It'll also be free to stream on our community page for a week. On July 9th, for the next podcast episode, you'll hear my conversation with David from and his wife, Danielle Crittenden. Their daughter Miranda was diagnosed with an advanced brain tumor in the fall of 2018 and died in 2024. Danielle has just published a memoir, disbaches from grief, a mother's journey through the unthinkable. I suddenly understood, and this feels like a terrible thing to say as a mother and a wife. But for the first time, I understood that pain could be more powerful than living. That death could offer this retreat from the pain. And I could go into the ground with Miranda and be with her. And then your brain starts to strike. Yeah, David will be fine. The kids will be fine, but I can't keep living. And it's that bad. That episode of All There Is comes out July 9th. Thanks for listening. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone. You and A's with CNN's journalists. Subscribe now. 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