CBS
News of Kate Spade’s suicide was sad for many of us. But for Sheryl Underwood, it took more of a personal toll. She shared her own experience with the suicide of a loved one on a recent episode of “The Talk.”
“I’m kind of emotional about this because, as you know my husband killed himself. And you will never know. For people who think they know, you’ll never know if it’s clinical depression. You’ll never know if it’s financial stress. You’ll never know. I’m sad for her daughter for that to be in the note because my husband left a note. And what the note does to the person who’s still alive, it shows that the person who’s no longer alive has now had the final word. There’s nothing you can do about it now.
And that pain does not…it doesn’t go away. So I really hope that the family can come together for her daughter because it just doesn’t go away. So for people that need help, they need to get the help that they need. And for those who are left behind, you get help also.”
In a 2016 interview with Inside Edition, Underwood shared that she uses humor to deal with many of the tragic events she’s experienced in her life. “You have to laugh to keep from crying.”
During the interview, she shared incidents of sexual abuse throughout her childhood. One in which her mother actually blamed her after walking in on one of the attacks. There was the physical abuse between her parents, where she witnessed her mother stabbing her father. Later, Underwood joined the military in an attempt to get away from her dysfunctional family.
One day, on her way to an Air Force Reserve station she was raped by a stranger. The attacker was never caught.
Later, the ending of her marriage served as another tragedy. Her husband Michael, took his life in 1990, just three years after they married. She said immediately after his death, she asked herself, “What did I do? I asked all those questions.”
When the “Inside Edition” interviewer asked Underwood how she survived all of this and still managed to keep her head up, she said, “One, I believe that God doesn’t put on you more than you can bear…You can go on. As long you’re still alive and as long as you’re above ground, you can go on.”
