Two days before Heath Ledger passed away, Michelle Williams spoke frankly about her painful breakup in an interview with Elle Magazine. She talked about feeling out of place and without a purpose after they broke up. If that was how she felt when she was just estranged from him, it must have been awful when he passed so unexpectedly:

At the time, she was still mourning their breakup. “I didn’t know where to go” after their 2007 split, she says in the magazine’s April issue. “I couldn’t imagine any place in the world that was gonna feel good to me.”

Williams, 27, dove into work on several films, because “when I have too much free time, that’s when things start to get a little messy.”

She also naturally focused on Matilda, 2, her daughter with Ledger. “She’s bigger to me than any relationship, bigger than the awards,” Williams says. “She’s what came out of it.”

[From People.com]

Elle has a segment of the interview on their website, and Williams’ statements are almost haunting in retrospect. She talks about how she faced what sounds like depression for a long time, and how she was a solemn person from a young age:

“I have that feeling inside, like when something really tickles or delights me—it’s not singular. I recognize all the awful things in the world, and in spite of them, I can still laugh.” This hyperawareness has come at a price. “For so long, I felt like a walking open wound everywhere I went,” she says. “There’s this Joan Didion quote about being afflicted from an early age with a presentiment of loss. Did I come into the world like that? Or was I kind of gifted that?”

[From Elle.com]

I know how it is to wait for the other shoe to drop. Sometimes when I’m with my son I start to worry that something will happen to him. It’s like you love and cherish someone so much that you think that there’s another side to it and that everything could come crumbling down. When it does, as in the case of a breakup or death, it’s especially painful because you think you must have done something wrong and you wonder how you could have prevented it.

Williams said in that interview that she threw herself into her work to avoid thinking too hard about her breakup. I hope that she’s able to find some peace, and that having her daughter there will help her through this very tough time. It seems somehow sadder for her that she didn’t feel grounded before Heath passed.

Michelle Williams is shown on 10/4/07 at the NY Film Festival, thanks to PRPhotos.