SHARON STONE: A PHOENIX RISING FROM THE ASHES

Over the past few decades, Sharon Stone has suffered two miscarriages; undergone a bitter divorce from her second husband, San Francisco newspaper editor Phil Bronstein; lost a custody battle with Bronstein over their adopted son, Roan, and suffered a massive stroke that entirely changed her life. 

Stone recalls the experience in a bold 2015 Harper’s Bazaar interview saying that she felt unwell for three days before she went to the emergency room. It turned out she’d had a stroke, and she lost consciousness soon after being admitted. “When I came to, the doctor was leaning over me. I said, ‘Am I dying?’ And he said, “You’re bleeding into your brain.” She remembers, “I said, ‘I should call my mom,’ and he said, “You’re right. You could lose the ability to speak soon.”

In another interview with The New Yorker, Stone once said, “You know, I think disease is dis-ease, and these things happen usually when you’re strung out or stressed out, or when things aren’t going great.”

The stroke and its aftermath transformed Stone in ways she’s still discovering. “It took two years for my body just to absorb all the internal bleeding I had,” she says. “It almost feels like my entire DNA changed. My brain isn’t sitting where it used to, my body type changed, and even my food allergies are different.” It took months for her to regain feeling in her left leg and years for her vision to return to normal; she also fought to eliminate a persistent stutter. On the plus side, “I became more emotionally intelligent. I chose to work very hard to open up other parts of my mind. Now I’m stronger. And I can be abrasively direct. That scares people, but I think that’s not my problem.” She laughs. “It’s like, I have brain damage; you’ll just have to deal with it.”

For similar Women's Empowerment Stories and Motivational Speeches, Subscribe to our NEWSLETTER.

Stone says the hardships have strengthened her. “My friend says this prayer: ‘Thank you, God, for everything you gave me, and thank you more for everything you took.’  “I believe that.”

“I don’t blame anyone else for what happened to me,” Stone says. “But once you’ve had your life burn down, it takes time to be a phoenix. You have to stand in stillness long enough that the balls stop moving, and love and forgive yourself. At a certain point you can say, ‘I also made a lot of great choices in my life. And now, if I want to put the balls back in motion, how would I do that?’ ” She offers a satisfied sigh. “What was an endless, desperate plea has become an endless, peaceful walk. I am so free, so blessed. I have the most gorgeous children.”

SHARON STONE: THE BEAUTY OF LIVING TWICE

Stone’s memoir is aptly titled ‘The Beauty of Living Twice’. It looks behind the sex-symbol diva superstar persona and reflects her natural candour. At times reflective, at times a tell-all, and other times reading like a movie scene. 

The memoir begins in late September 2001, where she was in the ER at the California Pacific Medical Center. After five days of her brain bleeding, Stone reveals that she was “unable to get up, stand up or think clearly and function.” She lost 18 percent of her body mass. 

EXCERPT FROM SHARON STONE’S MEMOIR

I opened my eyes, and there he was standing over me, just inches from my face. A stranger looking at me with so much kindness that I was sure I was going to die. He was stroking my head, my hair; God, he was handsome. I wished he were someone who loved me instead of someone whose next words were “You’re bleeding into your brain.”

He stood there gently touching my head and I just lay there knowing that no one in the room loved me. Knowing it in my guts—not needing my bleeding brain to be aware of the ridiculous slap-down of my now-immobilized life. It was late September 2001. I was in the ER at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. I asked Dr. Handsome, “Will I lose my ability to speak?” He said it’s possible. I wanted a phone. I needed to call my mom and my sister. They needed to hear this from me while I could still tell them myself. The doctor squeezed my hand in his. I realized he was doing his darndest to fill in with that special kind of love that comes when someone pursues the vocation that they were meant to, if only for moments like this. I learned a lot from him.

I called my sister, Kelly, first. She was as she always is: the most magnificent person I know. She is kinder to others than she is to herself, naïve in her gentleness. Then I called my mom, a more difficult conversation for me, since I didn’t know if she liked me very much. Here I was, dying and insecure all at the same time. She was gardening outside in her yard on top of a mountain in Pennsylvania. She fell apart.

It’s important to consider that Dot falls apart over radio commercials, so I waited, because, well, I knew she would pull it together. Despite the distance between us, she and my dad arrived in under twenty-four hours. She ran into the hospital still in her shorts, covered in gardening mud, dirt under her nails and fear on her face. Years of uncertainty and miscommunication between us fell away in a look. As I lay there knowing that I could die at any second, she stroked my face with her dusty hand and I suddenly felt that my mother loved me. Bit by bit.

My father stood beside her like a bull looking to charge.

I called my best friend of more than twenty years, Mimi, and said what we always said when the news was exceptionally good or bad: “You’d better sit down.” I could hear her sharp inhale. I said, “I might die and you are the only one I can tell the truth to because somebody needs to take care of everyone and it’s not going to be me. I’m bleeding into my brain. They don’t know why.”

She said, “Oh, shit.”

I said, “There is a very good-looking doctor here, and sadly I might not be able to flirt with him.”

She was trying not to cry as she whispered, “Oh, honey, I’m on the next plane.” As I knew she would be.

Then came the silence again. Echoing off the emergency room tiles and hitting my newly broken heart. I remember feeling something between scared and fascinated that no one was running around yelling, “STAT STAT!” like they do on TV. There was a stunning lack of urgency and movement. The doctor—yeah, that one—told me an ambulance was coming to transport me to another hospital, Moffitt-Long, which was renowned for neurological issues, and that they would take special care of me.

God, that really made me feel bad. There are just times when getting special care can be such a downer. This is not like floor seats at a Laker game or getting the table by the window at your favorite restaurant. Privileges. Fame. Shit.

It was then that I suddenly felt everything moving strangely, as if the film of my life were moving through a camera backward. Fast. I started to experience a feeling of falling, and then as though something were overtaking me, body and soul, followed by this tremendous, luminous, uplifting whiteout pulling me right out of my body and into a familiar brilliant other body of . . . knowing?

The light was so luminous. It was so . . . mystical. I wanted to know it. I wanted to immerse myself. Their faces were not just familiar. They were transcendent. Some of them had not been gone for long. I had cared for some of them until the end of this life. They were my closest friends, Caroline, Tony Duquette, Manuel. I had missed them so much. I felt so cold in the room I was coming from. They were so warm, so happy, so welcoming. Without their saying a word, I understood everything they were telling me about why we are safe, why we should not be afraid: because we are surrounded by love. That in fact we are love.

Suddenly I felt like I had been kicked in the middle of my chest by a mule, the impact was so harsh, and, astoundingly, I was awake and back in the emergency room. I had made a choice. I took the kind of gasp you take when you are underwater far too long. I sat up; the light was blinding. All I could see was Dr. Handsome, standing back, observing me.

I had to pee so badly, but as I turned to get off the gurney, I was so high up, like an Alice in a Wonderland of white and stainless steel.

“What do you need?” the doctor said.

I slipped far, farther down onto the cool tiles, and felt like I floated to the toilet and peed for a long time, wandering back to where the doctor lifted me up like the feather I had become.

————

Through the memoir, Stone takes readers on her journey to finding contentment and healing both physically and mentally: “It took many years and almost dying for me to work my way back to myself.” While in recovery, Stone admits her career went on the back burner, but now, years later, she enjoys acting “more than before” and feels “less pressure” than in her early career. After being close to death, Stone says over time she has “learned how to see differently” and “forgive the unforgivable.”

Do you want to be featured? If you have a story of someone who overcame obstacles in life and rose back up like a phoenix, submit here.