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Rashida Jones tends to keep her personal life very private, but now, the actress is opening up about everything she’s been through over the past couple of years.
The star welcomed her first child, a son named Isaiah, with her partner, Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig, in August 2018. Only eight months later, her mother, actress Peggy Lipton, died from cancer at the age of 72.
Recently, Jones sat down with NPR to talk about how she struggled with the excitement of becoming a mom while also dealing with the grief of losing a parent at the same time.
“This has been a very emotionally intense couple of years,” she told the publication. “It was sort of like back-to-back-to-back-to-back, just wrenching, pulling my heart in all different directions.”
She continued, “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.”
Rashida goes on to explain just what it felt like to experience the polar opposite emotions so soon after one another.
“The thing that‘s the craziest about birth and death is just the utter rawness of feeling,” she said. “I still feel this way, I think. It’s 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 recognizable before those two things happened.”
Jones continued, “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.”
Peggy Lipton was best known for her roles on The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks. She died on May 11, 2019.
The actress’ death was confirmed by Jones along with her sister, Kidada, whose father is legendary music producer Quincy Jones.
“She made her journey peacefully with her daughters and nieces by her side,” the sisters revealed 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,” they added. ”She will always be a part of us.”