Oprah Opens Up

On Thanksgiving Day, Oprah Winfrey‘s 83-year-old mother Vernita Lee died at her home in Milwaukee. Winfrey is speaking out for the first time to People about the time she spent with her mother before her death, and about the greater significance of her passing.

She says she was able to spend time by her mother’s side, but like all of us, struggled for what to say and think. She tells People: “In hospice care they have a little book about the little conversations. I thought, ‘Isn’t this strange? I am Oprah Winfrey, and I’m reading a hospice care book on what to say at the end.’”

Characteristically, she says she looked at her mother’s death as “a teaching, learning, experience. I knew my mother was dying. I got a call from my sister (Patricia, who Lee gave up for adoption in 1963) that she thought it was the end. I was planning to go to launch Michelle Obama‘s book, Becoming, in Chicago. I hopped on a plane and I went early-I surprised my mother.”

Winfrey continues: “I sat with my mother. I said, ‘I don’t know if you’re going to make it. Do you think you’re going to make it?’ She said, ‘I don’t think I am.’ I had a conversation with her about what that felt like, what it felt like to be near the end. I started telling all the people who cared about her that, ‘She knows it’s the end, so, if you want to say goodbye, you should come and say goodbye.’”

“And that’s what happened. People would come in. She would tear up when she saw them. You could see the appreciation and love she felt for them. Then, I said to her, ‘What a wonderful thing to be able to say goodbye,’ because she’s completely coherent and perfectly understanding everything.”

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CLOSURE

Winfrey came and went, thinking she’d seen her mother for the last time, only to return. She says they played music together, including Joshua Nelson and Wintley Phipps. Finally, she says she realized what she had to say to her mom.

She explains: “What I said was, ‘Thank you. Thank you, because I know it’s been hard for you. It was hard for you as a young girl having a baby, in Mississippi. No education. No training. No skills. Seventeen, you get pregnant with this baby. Lots of people would have told you to give that baby away. Lots of people would’ve told you to abort that baby. You didn’t do that. I know that was hard. I want you to know that no matter what, I know that you always did the best you knew how to do. And look how it turned out.’”

Winfrey adds that her sister also gave her mother kind words of forgiveness after years of struggle between the two over her adoption.

She says: “It was just really sacred and beautiful. I would say to anybody-and if you live long enough, everybody goes through it-say the things that you need to say while the people are still alive, so that you are not one of those people living with regret about what you would’ve, should’ve, could’ve said.”