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

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.