Rashida Jones was in “grief-shock” when she lost her mother Peggy Lipton just months after welcoming son Isaiah into the world.
The Parks & Recreation star spoke to NPR about her “emotionally intense couple of years”, after her mum’s death in May 2019 and her son’s birth in August 2018.
“It was sort of like back-to-back-to-back-to-back, just wrenching, pulling my heart in all different directions,” Jones explained.
“I was in grief-shock. I don’t even know if that’s a word, but I was just not in my body at all and just had a baby. I was doubly not in my body,” she went on.
Musing: “the thing that’s the craziest about birth and death is just the utter rawness of feeling”, the actress described her feelings as being “like something cracks in you”.
“It’s very binary, both things – becoming a mother and losing my mother – like, there’s my life before and there’s my life after. And strangely, there’s something that’s not recognisable before those two things happened,” she said, noting that her way of coping with the upheaval was to be present with her emotions.
“it’s just this utter rawness of emotion where it doesn’t matter where I am, what I’m doing. If I’m overwhelmed by that grief or that joy, that’s it. I have to feel that thing. I can’t suppress it. I can’t run away from it. It’s just there,” she shared.
Rashida and her sister Kidada confirmed the death of Twin Peaks star Lipton after she lost her battle with cancer, saying in a statement at the time: “We feel so lucky for every moment we spent with her. We can’t put all of our feelings into words right now, but we will say: Peggy was and will always be our beacon of light, both in this world and beyond.”