Sharon Stone's Complicated Grief

In 2001, Sharon Stone had a stroke and brain hemorrhage that she says killed her briefly. She was defibrillated back to life, and during those moments she experienced what she describes as a white light pulling her upward, where deceased friends she had helped in their own dying "were like peeking at me through the top of this light and smiling at me and welcoming me." Then she felt "kicked in the chest by a mule" and gasped back into her body. That near-death experience left her feeling "quite safe in this continued existence," but the life she returned to would bring losses that tested that sense of safety repeatedly.

The Weight of What Was Already Carried

Before the stroke, Stone had already endured multiple miscarriages, including one at five and a half months when her baby died in the middle of the night. She was at the peak of her career and had just adopted a son when the hemorrhage hit. The recovery took seven years. She writes in her memoir that the losses accumulated: her father, her three closest friends, her marriage, her health, custody of her son, her career, her financial stability. "One might say my identity," she says. "The grief and sense of failure that this caused was terribly awfully overwhelming."