Kate McHale

Senior Staff Writer

@KateMcHale42

Many people were devastated by the sudden passing of Cory Monteith a little over a year ago, no one more than his mother Ann McGregor. A little over a year since Cory’s passing, Ann decided to break her silence and speak to ABC News’ Bianna Golodryga in a very heartfelt interview.

Ann is just now beginning to wrap her head around her loss in fact she’s only just now been able to look at pictures of Cory, “The loss is horrendous … until three days ago I couldn’t look at a picture of Cory. So there’s been progress.” While she had made tremendous progress in dealing with her sons tragic death, she is still unable to talk about the night Cory died, or watch the tribute episode Glee did in his honor.

Ann does still keep in touch with Cory’s girlfriend and co-star Lea Michele, “She’s hurting too … you see the sadness. I know her pain.” Cory or “baby bear” as Ann affectionately calls him had seen him two days before his death. Cory was planning on signing a lease in Vancouver and she felt “he was easing himself out of it (Hollywood).” Most people know Cory from his boyish grin, and mischievous streak, which according to Ann he has always had “By the time he was three he could read and comprehend books. They pushed him a year ahead. Take a boy out of kindergarten at five years old, throw him into grade one and he was still beyond them. They actually pushed him into grade two that same year. But he still kind of, you know, left them in the dust. So he lost interest in school. He was always kind of, you know, looking for – stimulation.”

Cory was never one to shy away from his troubled past, but Ann gives people a different viewpoint of his struggle with drugs and alcohol, “[When] Cory was 15, he did a code blue, and I think that was the turning point. He had a lot of emotional things he was trying to figure out — lot of it was he really wanted a relationship with his father. I think when a child gets invalidated they keep reaching even harder. They want to find out why.” His father, Joe Monteith, was estranged from his son and family for quite a while to the length that he was not invited to Cory’s memorial. Joe Monteith only seemed to become interested in his son the two years before his death, right around the time “Cory became successful,” according to Ann.

Joe has always been vocal about his absence from Cory’s memorial, a close friend Ward Kondas feels like Cory was never interested in forging a relationship with his father. Kondas spoken to Joe about neglecting to invite him to Cory’s memorial, “In my own grief I neglected to invite him. I apologized to him and took responsibility for my mistake in a telephone call where I informed him of what the last six months of Cory’s life was like and how he died.”