'I FEEL Joy, I Feel Sorrow'

THE COUNTRY MUSIC SUPERSTAR SPEAKS HER TRUTH ON LOVING AND LOSING HER MOM AND FINDING HEALING THROUGH MUSIC

-  LIZ MCNEIL

she had to live, she was determined to die." For Wynonna Judd, remembering her mom, Naomi, five months after her death at age 76from a self-inflicted gunshot wound following a long struggle with severe depression-is full of heartbreak and mystery. "I can't quite wrap my head around it, and I don't know that I ever will that she left the way she did," she says. "That's how baffling and cunning mental illness is. You have to make peace with the fact that you don't know. Sometimes there are no answers." 

And so Wynonna, 58, has done the thing she knows best and returned to the music she and her mother loved making together. On Sept. 30 she began her 11-city concert series The Judds: The Final Tour, which was announced just weeks before Naomi's death. It was supposed to be a reunion, their first joint road trip in more than a decade. But now she's singing the songs that catapulted them from eastern Kentucky to superstardom-classic country tunes such as "Grandpa (Tell Me 'Bout the

Good Old Days)" and "Why Not Me"-with special guests like Faith Hill, Trisha Yearwood and Martina McBride. "It's my opportunity to step into a situation that I don't know if I'm ready for but I think is going to heal me," says Wynonna, who released 14 No. 1 singles, sold 20 million albums and won six Grammys with Naomi. "The very thing I'm teaching is what I want to learn. I want people to know there is hope."