Sharon Stone is further explaining why she felt “glee and relief and emptiness” after her maternal grandfather Clarence Lawson’s death.
The “Basic Instinct” actress detailed the reason behind those feelings — which she chronicled in her memoir,“The Beauty of Living Twice” — during her Friday appearance on the “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” podcast.
“He was an abuser who abused my mom and did everything he could possibly do to get near us to be abusive of us,” Stone, 68, told Anderson Cooper, 59.
Stone continued: “And he was not a grandfather, he was a creature that we tried to avoid at all costs.”
In her book, Stone revealed that she and her younger sister, Kelly, were abused by their grandfather — aided by their grandmother, whom Lawson also abused. She would trap the girls in a room with her husband when they visited, starting when they were just toddlers.
At Lawson’s funeral, Stone recalled reaching into the casket to make sure he was dead.
“I poked him, and the bizarre satisfaction that he was at last dead hit me like a ton of ice,” she writes. “I looked at [Kelly] and she understood; she was 11, and it was over.”
“It’s a very weird thing when you’re a kid and the first experience you have of death is glee and relief and emptiness,” she continues.
In her Friday interview with Cooper, Stone looked back on the funeral, remembering how it felt colder than most memorial services.
“People usually kind of meander in, sit down, talk. There’s usually a gentle, caring, and a hand-holding, and a thoughtfulness at a funeral” Stone said, before clarifying that there was “none of that” at Lawson’s ceremony.
But, the feeling of “glee and relief and emptiness” was all she felt.
“It will be a picture in my mind forever of that weird sense of emptiness, good emptiness,” she told Cooper.
