How Whoopi Goldberg found peace amid the grief of losing the ‘center’ of her life

Whoopi Goldberg knows the value of leaving nothing unsaid to those you love.

It’s a philosophy that the “View” co-host only recently realized has played a role in how she’s grieved her mother, Emma Johnson, who died 14 years ago after suffering a stroke. It has also influenced Goldberg’s understanding of why it took her some time to come to terms with the magnitude of her loss.

At first, Goldberg didn’t think she was “responding correctly” in how she mourned her mother, she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on this week’s episode of his “All There Is” podcast, where the two had a candid conversation about grief. That’s not to say that there’s a right or a wrong way to grieve a loved one, but Goldberg felt like her way was different.

“I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t more devastated,” she said. But days before she sat down to chat with Cooper, she said she finally figured out why.

“There was nothing left unsaid with us, so there was no angst to find,” Goldberg said of her mother. “That thing that I’ve seen in movies where I see people go through, I didn’t go through it because my experience was, ‘you know I adored and loved you, and you were the center of my life.’ The same with my brother. We said it to each other all the time.”

Goldberg’s brother, Clyde Johnson, died five years after their mother, leaving her with the realization that she, in her own immediate family, was the only one left.

“I don’t think anything can prepare you for actually being on your own,” she later said.

Part of Goldberg’s revelation harkens back to a lesson she said she learned as a child after her mother, who she described as someone who knew who she was and “didn’t seem to care who liked it and who didn’t,” spent two years at New York’s Bellevue Hospital as she sought mental health treatment. When her mother first returned, she didn’t know who Goldberg and her brother were.

Years later, during a conversation with her mother, Goldberg said she came to understand how the experience shaped her perspective on life.

Her mom’s hospital stay, she said, “was probably the best thing that could have happened for me because I understood instantly that nothing is forever. That was really good for me to know because it allowed me to sort of develop my thinking.”

While she may now have an evolved perspective moving through life without her mother and her brother, it hasn’t come without its challenges. Even though Goldberg is herself a mother and a grandmother, she told Cooper that after her brother’s death, she still couldn’t help but think about how alone she felt.

The question of “why did you leave me? There were three of us,” continued to pop up, spurring a feeling of such loneliness amid Goldberg’s ongoing grief that there was a point, she told Cooper, when she “once flirted with thinking about leaving,” too. It was the thought of her own daughter that made her decide “not to.”

Goldberg now finds herself in the stage of grief “where we gotta find the joy in all of this,” she said.

Part of that is finding ways to keep her mother’s spirit alive.

“If I can be half the person that she was, I will feel like I honored her the way that I’d like to honor her,” Goldberg said, “because she really was that beacon of light.”

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