Days before her son Michael took his own life by jumping off the eighth floor of his Los Angeles apartment building last winter, Marie Osmond remembers a conversation she had with him, she tells Oprah Winfrey in an interview airing Thursday.
She says her son, an 18-year-old student at L.A.'s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, told her, "'I have no friends.'"
"It brought back when I went through depression because you really feel so alone," says Osmond, 51, who battled post-partum depression after the 1999 birth of her son Matthew. "I'm not a depressed person, but I understand that place, that darkness."
Osmond, in Las Vegas for her stage show, remembers telling her son not to do anything drastic.
"I told him, I said, 'Mike, I'm gonna be there Monday and it's gonna be okay,'" she recalls. "But depression doesn't wait till Monday."
Her son took his life Feb. 26, leaving behind a note to friends and family in which he expressed a need to be at peace.
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Osmond says she's "been through some tough things" in her life, but his death was "probably the hardest thing I've been through."
She says she still struggles with the "what ifs."
"I think there's always 'what ifs,'" she says. "What if I had just put him on a plane and said come be with me, or gone there? I think if you live in 'what ifs,' you stop living."
A day after her son's funeral, she returned to the stage for her Las Vegas show.
"It was really hard. It was a calculated decision," she tells Winfrey. "I'm unique, I guess. I'm a female in the entertainment business who has been working 48 years consistently. My stage is my safe place. It doesn't scare me, like I guess it scares some people. And I knew that if I didn't get back on stage that I may never get back on stage."
Watch the complete Osmond interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show Thursday (check your local listings).
