Sharon Stone's Complicated Grief

All There Is with Anderson Cooper - CNN Podcasts

Sharon Stone shares her profound journey through layered grief—loss of family, near-death experience, and personal trauma—revealing how she found strength in vulnerability and self-reparenting. Her story blends raw hones

Key takeaways

• Grief is deeply personal and not one-size-fits-all

Transcript preview

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 and 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 three closest friends, my 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. Soon after that memoir came out, Sharon experienced the death of her 11-month-old nephew, River. Then 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 euph. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, die and was defibrulated 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 white white white. But white doesn't exactly explain it, this light, that is brighter than anything we've ever experienced, 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, dear ones who had passed, and dear ones who I had aided in their passing when I loved so much were like peeking at me through the top of this light and and smiling at me and welcoming me and I was seeing them like oh oh hey you know like hi like I was so happy to see them like I was seeing them like oh oh hey you know like hi like I was so happy to see them I felt like I'd been kicked in the chest by a mule, you know, just wow, and I expect they must have defibrulated me. And I just remember gasping like a, ughhahh, 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, ugh. I had that that kind of a 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 died and I remember seeing him died. and his machine slowing down, the beeps 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 had gave me the first exam where they give you a, 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 eight or nine hour surgery and then was moved to regular ICU so that I could come down off of this synthetic heroin which was called Dilaudid 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 called my baby girl and said 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 didn't talk about. Women are told that we're not supposed to discuss our grief, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, our heartache, 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, 11 months old. Yes. There's nothing worse. There's just nothing worse than a family watching a baby on a respirator who's brain dead and has to make a decision when do we turn it off and what do we do. And watching the mom change this baby's diapers and watching my brother fall apart and watching my mother who had recently lost her other nephew. a 17-year-old boy with 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