LOS ANGELES — Michelle Williams says she struggled for much of 2008 after the death of Heath Ledger, her former boyfriend and father of her 3-year-old daughter Matilda.
"I was holding it together by a string and a paper clip in the fall and winter. I didn't know if I could keep it all together," the 29-year-old actress tells Vogue.
On many days, Williams admits she would, "cry, nap, sit and stare, try to figure out what to make her for dinner, talk to friends on the phone." Finally, she began to turn the corner when her friends arrived and and carried her through a rite of mourning.
"I wish we had rituals about grief," she says. "I wish it were still the Victorian times, and we could go from black to gray to mauve to pink, and have rings with hair in them."
"Women and kids really got us through the winter," continues Williams. "One got me gardening in the spring, and that's when it started to turn around. I think it's something about being in nature that made it more possible. I remember being on my hands and knees. The ground was cold and muddy. I pushed back the dead leaves and saw the bright green shoots of spring. Under all this decay something was growing. Caring for the garden reminded me to care for myself."
As someone who enjoys spending her quiet time immersed in a good book, Williams says she also found strength by reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.
"You console yourself by saying it's all a deepening process," she explains. "But it's weird. After the first year, the pain is less intense; it's less immediate. But the magical thinking goes away, too. And that's a whole new reckoning. But every time I really miss him and wonder where he's gone, I just look at [my daughter]."
Because of the amount of paparazzi attention brought on by Ledger's death, Williams has retreated as far away from the limelight as humanly possible. She admits that it's an ongoing struggle to shield her Matilda from the cameras, a situation that often forces her to get tough.
"It's an OK model for her to see that her mom has boundaries. It's OK for me to be upset and to raise my voice. But it's an ongoing struggle," she explains. "It's hard to be the man and the woman in that [paparazzi] situation. Heath always used to do that for us."
At one point, Williams started dating again, but she has since split from director Spike Jonze.
"The timing was impossible," she says of her relationship with Jonze. "I thought falling in love again was the only thing that was going to save me from the pain. This erroneous idea: It just makes things more complicated."
Today, Williams, who next stars in Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island," is pouring all of her energy into being a successful single mother.
"I'm falling more and more in love with her," she says of her daughter, "and I think she deserves the bulk of my attention. We're lucky. I can work. She can go to a good school. There's a lot there for her. And she can know her dad in so many ways, and so many of his friends who will be able to tell her so many stories. His friends, his family—they were a big part of his life, and they will be a big part of her life."
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