Katherine Heigl 'witnessed the worst thing' when she was only a child
Katherine Heigl experienced a terrible tragedy as a child, and it shook her core beliefs.
The Grey’s Anatomy Actress is a mother of three beautiful children. She adopted her first daughter Meg with partner Josh Kelley in 2009. Followed by Meg, the TV star adopted their second daughter in 2012. Years later, she announced that the celebrity couple was expecting their third child in 2016.
Family is everything to Katherine and the actress is candid talking about an accident that shaped her life and family values.
Katherine Heigl was witness to ‘the worst thing’ that changed her life
Heigl lost her older brother Jason in a horrific truck accident when she was only seven. Jason, who was 15 at the time, suffered a brain injury and died while going to lunch with his friends in a pickup truck. The grief of losing her brother shattered not only the actress but her family who took the help of the Mormon church to deal with the tragedy.
“For a long time, Jason’s death made me afraid of being too happy because things happen so unexpectedly,” she shared with Sunday Times adding, “Your world can change and every aspect of your life is different.” The tragedy affected her views towards life and even made her look at parenthood differently.
“When I first became a mother, the idea of loving my children the way I did terrified me. Because it could be all taken away,” Katherine noted adding, “Many people have suffered through something like that,” she added of her brother’s death. “I have witnessed the worst thing that can happen to a parent happen to my parents. And I think that it definitely affects how you feel and what you think and what your core beliefs are about life and parenting and love.”
Surviving the worst without negating the ‘worthwhile love‘
Katherine doesn’t let the worst define her as the actress says, “I’ve come to understand that you can survive it, and it doesn’t negate the worthwhile love. So it shouldn’t hinder that love and your passion for that love in any way — because then you’ve lost before you’ve even begun.”
To honor her brother, the Jackie & Ryan star set up the Jason Debus Heigl Foundation in 2008. The goal of the foundation is to put an end to animal abuse. Speaking of the foundation’s main motto, she wrote: “The foundation carries on my brother’s legacy — he had a social consciousness that not many kids have at fifteen.”
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