The talk show host of late-night was unable to hold back tears.
Jimmy Kimmel and Regina King shared a touching moment in the course of their Oscar-nominated actress appearing on his talk show late at night to promote her film Shirley. Kimmel was emotional when she saw Regina King, for the first time in a while since the passing of her sole daughter, son Ian Jr., who died in the month of January 2022, from an apparent suicide. He was 26-years-old. “It’s very good to see you. How are you doing right now?” Kimmel asked. “Right now, I’m good,” King responded smiling. “Good, I’m glad to hear that,” Kimmel responded, crying. “I know you’ve been through a lot the last year.” King extended his hand to grab Kimmel’s hand and said, “It’s good to see you Jimmy.”
When she gave her interview for the first time on the life of her son since his death, King spoke with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America days before her conversation with Kimmel. She said it would be her only opportunity to speak in depth about the death of Ian in this way.
“I’m a different person now, than I was then on Jan. 19,” King told the media. “Grief is a journey, you know? I understand that grief is love that has no place to go, and that we all handle it differently. I know that it’s important for me to honor Ian and the totality of who he is,” King declared and added that she would prefer not to “speak about him in the present, because he’s always with me.”
King discussed Ian’s personal mental health issues. “When it comes to depression, people expect it to look a certain way and they expect it to look heavy,” she stated. “To have to experience this and not be able to have the time to just sit with Ian’s choice, which I respect and understand, that he didn’t want to be here anymore — that’s a hard thing for people to receive because they did not live our experience. They did not live Ian’s journey.”
In one moment of poignancy King was able to talk about the need to accept Ian’s decision. “All of the things that we had gone through, the therapy, psychiatrists and programs and he just, Ian was like, ‘I’m tired of talking, Mom,'” she said. “My favorite thing about myself is being Ian’s mom and I can’t say that with a smile, with tears, with all of the emotions that come with that, I can’t do that if I did not respect the journey. When a parent loses a child, you still wonder what could I have done so that wouldn’t have happened,” she confessed. “I know that I share this grief with everyone, but no one else is Ian’s mom. Only me. And so, it’s mine and the sadness will never go away. It will always be with me, and I think I saw somewhere, ‘The sadness is a reminder of how much he means to me.'”
