Gwyneth Paltrow confessed that she still suffers "excruciating" pain over the death of her father.
The Iron Man actress was devasted when she lost her father, Bruce Paltrow in October 2002 following a battle with cancer, now, Gwyneth has revealed she has learned to process grief but she still feels a "dread" and a "heaviness" set in as she approaches the anniversary of the loss.
In her Goop newsletter, she wrote: "My father died six days after my 30th birthday on October 3, 2002.”
"We were on a road trip together in Italy that began in Tuscany and was meant to end in Portofino but we never got there; he was airlifted to intensive care in Rome from Lucca on October 2 and died early the next morning,” she revealed.
Gwyneth continued, "I had experienced loss and grief before that day, but something about the bereftness, wrapped in shock, was a new kind of anguish - astonishingly acute - and it would last for years...”
"The pain was so heavy, so inescapable, I wondered if it would ever relent. Eventually it did - or rather, it changed. It became more abstract,” the Seven star further wrote sentimentally.
"As I had my own children and made more self-affirming choices in my life, the lost-child part of the grief softened, and the experience became integrated into my story as if it had been written into my DNA,” the actress, who was married to Chris Martin, mentioned.
Gwyneth admitted every year, as her birthday and the death anniversary of her father approaches she gets really anxious but she has learned to experience grief rather than ignore it.
Gwyneth went on to reveal she still feels anxious as her birthday and the anniversary of her dad's death approaches every year, but she now tries to experience her grief fully rather than pushing it away.
She explained: "Even now with my birthday on the horizon, I feel the heaviness start to creep in. It feels like dread - a subtle compression of the heart.”
"I used to try to push it away, to distract myself, to think of other things,” the Shallow Hal talent wrote.
She adds: "Now I let it in. I move through the events, if I need to, I replay them all and allow myself to feel it all. It is not comfortable - it can be excruciating. But I have learned... that what you resist, persists. So, I open my heart to the memories and to the pain.”
"I let them wash through me and, somehow, I become fortified by them,” Gwyneth Paltrow concluded.