State of Mind does it again! In the latest installment of the YouTube episodic hosted by General Hospital’s Maurice Benard (Sonny), is featured Eden McCoy, best known for her role as Josslyn Jacks. In this interview, McCoy talked school, her work on GH, relationships and even offered an unfiltered and deeply emotional reflection on the loss of her mother, Natasha—a grief she kept hidden from almost everyone for a long time.
During the chat with Benard, Eden McCoy peeled back the layers of what it means to carry unimaginable pain in silence and how that experience has shaped her empathy, and her understanding of life.
“Nobody knew,” she said. “Not even my bestest friends.”
Her mother’s battle with cancer was kept private for a very long time, it was her mother’s wish. “We don’t speak on it,” McCoy recalled her mom saying. And so she didn’t. The weight of the secret, she shared, “just ate at everything and everyone.”
Through this battle, McCoy says she learned a fundamental truth: everyone is carrying something. In reflection, she noted, “It gave me a lot of empathy.” She adds, “I was walking around with something like that, with weight like that. And no one knew. You would have never known.”
McCoy on the Lesson Learned
What Eden McCoy described is something many who’ve grieved in silence will understand—moving through the world as though everything is normal, while inside, there’s possibly a storm raging.
“I remember being like: No one would ever know that this is happening,” she said. “And I need to remember—because now I’m this person—In life, I will be having a conversation with a friend of a friend, and in my head I’m like, I wonder what they’re going through.”
Eden McCoy: Mother Was “Everything”
When the conversation turned to the enormity of the loss, McCoy didn’t hesitate: “She was everything to me. My whole life.”
So how does one go on after facing such an unimaginable loss?
“It’s funny,” she recalled. “An old friend of mine reached out the other day because one of her parents just passed. We’re the same age. She asked me, ‘What do I do?’ And I just wanted to respond, Let me know when you find out. I didn’t, obviously.”
Instead, she wrote her friend a long message. But the truth is, grief is not something you solve.
Finding Comfort in Community
In the days and months after her mom passed, McCoy found herself surrounded—literally—by love.
“I wasn’t alone for months. Like, never alone,” she said. Friends came in shifts, simply to sit, to be there, to create a buffer around the gaping hole left by the loss. “I just went straight into community. My friends became everything.”
McCoy said she embraced happy impulses—roller skating in the middle of the week, spontaneous dinners. “Anything I wanted to do like I would pick up and go,” she quipped. Just two days after her mom passed, she and her friends dressed up and went to Yamashiro.
Eden McCoy: The Truth About Grief
When asked whether her reaction was shock, McCoy reflected on “the weird thing about grief.”
“There’s no solving or getting over anything,” she said. “It’s just acceptance. It’s going to hit you when it hits you.”
She’s had to learn to honor every emotion—even the negative ones she once tried to suppress. “When I feel negative, that is just as important as all of the happy [stuff] that I feel. If you don’t get it out or find a relationship with it—to honor it— it’ll just manifest in more unhealthy ways.”
For a long time, she had been a fixer. A solver. But grief doesn’t work that way. There’s no shortcut. No workaround.
In sharing her journey, Eden McCoy’s story is very inspiring. Don’t just take our word for it. Check out the episode below! (Photo: ABC.)
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