Brad Pitt Says the Hardest Part of His Mom’s Death Is Watching His 84-Year-Old Dad Survive Her: “It’s Better To Be The One Who Goes First.”

Jane Etta Pitt died on August 5, 2025, one week shy of her 85th birthday and just six days before what would have been her 63rd wedding anniversary to William “Bill” Pitt.

The two met at Oklahoma Baptist University in the early ’60s, she a cheerleader, he a basketball player, and built a quiet Midwestern life in Springfield, Missouri. Bill ran a trucking company and worked long weeks so he could still take his kids fishing on the weekends. Jane started as an elementary school teacher, later became a school counselor and one of the original “Parents As Teachers” educators, and was also a gifted painter who bonded with her grandchildren over art and one-on-one “Special Days.” In 2009 the family donated $1 million to open the Jane Pitt Pediatric Cancer Center at Mercy Hospital in Springfield.

A year later, Brad still talks to his father regularly and was heading back to Missouri to sit with him on the front porch in the evenings, watching the lightning bugs and listening to the cicadas. “But we’re country people,” he told Esquire. “We don’t go in depth, you know what I mean? Every now and then it’ll just be one line that cuts to the core, and then we kind of skip on.”

Losing Jane, on top of the long estrangement from his six children with Angelina Jolie, has left him more raw than he’d prefer. A friend talked him out of trying to fix the intensity. She told him she believed in feeling the extreme highs and “the depths of the soul-crushing lows,” and he decided to stop treating that as a flaw.

He still calls himself “a congenital optimist” who’s never been suicidal except for “one little period” tied to family stuff, when the pain got so heavy he could feel “the cold steel of the bullet” and it briefly felt like relief.

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