I thought I loved Judy Collins because her voice was ineffably crystalline, because her songs were the soundtrack of my youth, because her “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” becomes ever more relevant as I get older.
But now that I’ve heard her converse with Here & Now host Robin Young, I understand something more: that infusing her inimitable voice were the pain and the power that come from a life that has included glory but also rock-bottom despair: alcoholism, depression and the 1992 suicide of her son, Clark.
Not that she has kept any of her travails secret. Now 77, she has written and spoken about them so publicly that this week she received the McLean Award from McLean Hospital for “her work to increase awareness about mental health through her many interviews, compelling memoirs and advocacy efforts.”
“She has courageously and very publicly shared her experience with depression, alcoholism and the struggles she faced following her son’s suicide, thus helping dispel the stigma of psychiatric disorders,” says the award’s text. “She has reached countless people with her message and is a true champion of mental wellness for all.”
Here’s some of her conversation on Here & Now, lightly edited:
RY: What was it like? You became sober, I’m sure still, in some part of your heart, mourning your father, the alcoholic, and then having to watch your son…
JC: The worst, the worst. He committed suicide in relapse. I don’t know how I got over it, really. You don’t get over it. I shouldn’t put it that way. You get through it, however. And people reached out to me — people were so kind. There was a kind of cluster of women — Mariette Hartley and Iris Bolton, Joan Rivers.
“This is not a big terrible dark secret.”
Joan called me one night from Las Vegas, while she was in the dressing room, getting dressed, and she said, “I know” — it was about four days after his death — she said, “I know you want to stop working.” I said, “You bet, I’ve already canceled everything for the next year.” I said, “Bury it. I don’t even want to look at it.” She said, “You can’t do that because you won’t recover unless you keep working.” And she knew that because she’d lost her husband to suicide. Continue reading