Coming Back To Life

In this special episode of the podcast, Anderson reports from Rome following the death of Pope Francis, and speaks to religion professor Elaine Pagels who lost both her 6-year-old son Mark and her husband Heinz. Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline and watch the video version on YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Every day, animals across the country face abuse and neglect. And every day, the ASPCA shows up to rescue animals in crisis. But they can't do it alone. Visit aspc.org/need. Become a donor today to provide the care and shelter these animals urgently need. And for a limited time, the ASPCA will send you a free gift as a special thank you. Visit aspc.org/need.

• 0:41Anderson Cooper?

  "Death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something." Pope Francis wrote those words in February. "A new beginning," he called it, "because," he said, "we'll experience something that we've never fully experienced: eternity."

• 0:59Anderson Cooper?

  I've been thinking a lot about those words the last few days while I've been working here in Rome. I hope he's right, that death is a new beginning. I'm not sure what I believe about what happens to us after we die, but I am certain that when someone we love dies, it is a new beginning for those of us left behind. The good news, which I've learned through doing this podcast, is that the death of someone we love doesn't have to be the end of our relationship with them. We can still talk with them, walk with them, hold them close in our hearts and in our lives. I never believed that before, I certainly never felt it, but I do now.

• 1:39Anderson Cooper?

  I feel my dad with me, part of me, and my understanding of him, my love for him, is deepened as I've become a father and am older now than he ever was. I still struggle to feel my brother, my sadness and pain over his death and the distance that existed between us before it is still so great, but I hope to one day soon be able to turn toward that pain, turn toward him, and feel him in a new way. As Andrew Garfield said in the last season of the podcast, "The wound is the only root to the gift." The death of someone you love is not the end of everything. It can be the beginning of something new with the person you've lost.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  I think there's a sense of an ongoing conversation.

• 2:25Anderson Cooper?

  That's Father Patrick Mary Briscoe, a priest I met in Rome a few days ago.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  What has ended here on this life isn't really the end of the story. We say in the Catholic Funeral Liturgy that life has changed, not ended.

• 2:40Anderson Cooper?

  Life is changed, not ended. And your life with the person you've lost doesn't have to end as well. Wherever you are in your grief, I'm glad you're here. This is all there is. My guest on this special edition of the podcast today is Elaine Pagels. She's a professor of religion at Princeton University. Her newest book out just now is called Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. In 1987, Elaine's son Mark, who was six and a half, died of an incurable medical condition. Not long after, her husband of nearly 20 years, a theoretical physicist named Heinz, fell while hiking and died as well.

• 3:25Anderson Cooper?

  She wrote about it in a book called Why Religion: A Personal Story. We recorded this interview weeks before Pope Francis's death. I started out the interview by asking Elaine about her son Mark, who was born with a hole in his heart. Doctors were able to operate on him when he was about a year old, but they soon discovered he had that incurable condition. It's called pulmonary hypertension. Elaine and Heinz were told there was nothing they could do. What do you do in that situation? I mean, how do you, what happens when you go home?

• 3:57Speaker 03

  You kind of go crazy. I remember leaving the hospital and just wanting to walk out in the street and have a car hit me. I didn't want to die. I just thought, I can't deal with this at all. I refused to believe them.

• 4:12Anderson Cooper?

  You refused to believe that Mark would die?

• 4:14Speaker 03

  I kept thinking, he's not going to die. I just, I could not imagine that. And I was trying to anesthetize myself with whatever I could, with alcohol, with whatever I could use. Didn't work much. They kept saying, "Oh, you have to go to this nurse at baby's hospital." And I thought, "I'm not going to go talk to her. She's the one in charge of parents with dying children, and my child is not dying."

• 4:37Anderson Cooper?

  She was a bereavement specialist?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Yes. Finally, I was desperate enough, and I went. And that's when she said, "There's a name for what you're going through. It's called mourning." She said, "It doesn't start when somebody dies. It starts when you get news like that." But it was a relief, because-

• 4:55Anderson Cooper?

  To have a name for it, to-

• 4:56Speaker 03

  I felt that I was falling apart and disintegrating. So it somehow did help.

• 5:02Anderson Cooper?

  Your husband, Heinz, said something, which you write about in the book, Why Religion. You said, "Once, when he saw me in anguish after we received our child's crushing diagnosis, he said something I often recall. 'Everyone's life has something like this in it.' Angry, I snapped back, 'No, not this. Not a child with a terminal illness.' 'No,' he said, 'not this, but something like this.' Much later, I came to realize how much truth there is in what he said."

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I was angry when he said that. But everyone does experience whatever tests us to our limits, and often way beyond. And when I was thinking about some of the work I do in the history of religion, I was thinking of a text that talks about how, in suffering, we recognize each other in a different way than we ordinarily recognize other people. We identify in a deeper way than just meeting someone and finding out who is this person socially. And that's why it is very helpful to do what you're doing with this podcast, to speak to people who have had experiences different from anyone else's, and yet they connect with each other.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  And you've allowed them to connect with you, and I think that's very important.

• 6:15Anderson Cooper?

  How did you get through each day?

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Well, he lived for another four years and we had a wonderful time. We went to the Museum of Natural History all the time. We went to the wilderness. And he had a wonderful kindergarten and kindergarten friends. And he was making paintings and he was dreaming what he was going to do when he grew up. So we had a great deal of joy with him. But I can't tell you that there wasn't at the back of it a shadow that we always felt.

• 6:46Anderson Cooper?

  How did he die?

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Well, he had been in school every day that week, but because his heart was getting weaker, he wasn't feeling too well. So I took him to the hospital and they took some blood. And at that point, he just went into cardiac arrest. And, and I ran down the hall with him in my arms yelling for doctors. And about, I want to say 20 of them came into that room and started working on his heart. And I talked to him slowly and carefully and clearly throughout that process. And at a certain point, I felt that the connection I felt with him snapped and that he, he was not there. And I fainted. I felt like I was in an ecstatic state. It was very strange.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  It was like I was going with him. But I fainted and they took me into another room and revived me while the doctors worked on his heart. And my husband arrived and he was just deaf. He said, "Oh, it's over." And I said, "No, it's not over till it's over. Let's ask him to come back."

• 7:51Anderson Cooper?

  Let's ask Mark to come back.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we spoke to him from the other room and said we wanted him to come with us. And I felt that he was actually there. And after a few minutes, the doctors came in and said, "We don't want to get your hopes up, but his heart started again."

• 8:08Anderson Cooper?

  You said you felt his presence in that room?

• 8:10Speaker 03

  I felt that he heard us and that he was going back into his body. So we went into the room where he was and very soon his heart stopped. He didn't have enough oxygen. That's the problem with pulmonary hypertension. He could not, his body couldn't sustain his life. And then he, he left. I mean, we could feel it happen. He breathed out and it was like I could see like a little trace of silver up on the ceiling and a feeling that that was... He was departing, and after that, he didn't seem to be there anymore. That's just how it felt. I just felt that he'd gone. He was no longer in the room. And I also felt that he was delighted to be out of the body. He was full of joy.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  And that really surprised me, because I was absolutely broken-hearted. And you know, I went into that experience with a very different view of death. I had assumed that when a person dies, they're just annihilated. All of the molecules disperse. There's nothing left. That was my conviction.

• 9:12Anderson Cooper?

  Had you seen somebody die before?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  No, not like that. And so after that, I thought, something else has happened. Something I didn't expect. The sense of that person, or that entity, going somewhere else. I don't know what to make of it to this day. I don't have a conclusion about what happens. But that changed my view of death. It certainly didn't seem simply like annihilation.

• 9:38Anderson Cooper?

  It opened up a possibility of something.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yes, and it could be wishful thinking, of course. But it was not a thought so much as an experience of, almost a visceral experience of presence and absence, the way you would feel if somebody's in the room or if they're gone. So, very mysterious.

• 9:58Anderson Cooper?

  I was there when my mom died, and it is, it's incredible to see the life force, or the soul, or the spirit, however one wants to describe it, leave.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Yes. Did you have that sense that...

• 10:21Anderson Cooper?

  I mean, I was holding her hand and looking at her face, and I could see the moment.

• 10:30Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I feel very privileged to have been there. And that transition moment, I mean, you see it in the person's face.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes, I was very glad I was there for him and also for me. It was important to see and be present.

• 10:48Anderson Cooper?

  But your study of religion, did it help when confronted with a loss which is unimaginable?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Not at the time. Some people said, oh, your faith must have helped you. And I thought, I don't know what you're talking about. I felt like all of that talk about faith and God and everything was like being at the bottom of the sea and hearing someone from up there talking about something. So, no, I didn't feel any sense of faith or anything like that. I was kind of so overwhelmed and devastated and grieved.

• 11:23Anderson Cooper?

  You write about being at Mark's funeral and at the church and standing at the back of the church.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 11:29Anderson Cooper?

  And you talked about a feeling you had, and I just want to read what you said. You said, "I seemed to see the whole scene embraced by a huge net made of ropes with enormous spaces between the knots through which we could be swept away at any moment out of the world. I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved and that nothing else could have kept us in this world."

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Yes, I just felt that there were so many people at the church that day from all parts of our lives, and I just wanted to be out of there. I just couldn't bear the emotion, the intensity of it. At the same time, I felt held in that space by the connections with the people there, without which I would have just wanted, I think, to leave the world. Later, someone told me about the image of Indra's net, the Indian goddess who casts a net which connects us all in a kind of, the image is to me like a sparkling spider's web or something like that.

• 12:29Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I read that Indra's net in both Buddhist and Hindu mythology symbolizes the universe as a web of interconnectedness.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  That's exactly what it felt like. And also, that brought me to the work I was doing on the Gospel of Thomas that talks about the connectedness of all beings in the universe.

• 12:46Anderson Cooper?

  What is, what's the Gospel of Thomas?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  The Gospel of Thomas is one of the secret gospels that was discovered in 1945, about the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But in Egypt, with a group of other sacred texts, they were censored when the church became a sort of unified institution in the fourth century. And this one claims to be the teaching of the Apostle Thomas. But it's about the connectedness of all beings.

• 13:10Anderson Cooper?

  It says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." I love that.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  I love it, too. That was the saying that really startled me when I read it. And I thought, "Well, you don't have to believe it. It just happens to be true."

• 13:31Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah. "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, if you suppress it, if you reject it, what you do not bring forth, it will destroy you."

• 13:43Speaker 03

  I totally believe that. And of course, Anderson, I took it psychologically. But I also understand it has a spiritual meaning because the suggestion there is that every human being has within us a connection to the divine source from which everything comes. And they talk about it as energy or light. Light is a metaphor for that energy. And so, what that saying can mean on another level is if you recognize that deep within you there is this light energy, or this energy, or call it light, which is, we'll call the image of God in you, it's a kind of spiritual connection between you and the source of all being, which you may not even know is there. But if you bring it forth, it's a great deliverance.

• 14:25Anderson Cooper?

  In a lot of places in the Bible, suffering is punishment. But in the Gospel of Truth, suffering is not punishment. It's through the eyes of wisdom, suffering can show how we are connected to each other.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:36Anderson Cooper?

  So that's the Gospel of Truth?

• 14:38Speaker 03

  It is.

• 14:38Anderson Cooper?

  Is that different than the Gospel of Thomas?

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yes. There were about five or six named, secret gospels found in the same collection. An Orthodox version of Christianity says that Jesus had to suffer and die to forgive the human race from sin. The Gospel of Truth says, "Jesus came into the world to teach us what's written on our heart, that we belong to each other in the same family." And suffering is... Is the result of the fact that we're born into a world and we're mortal beings and we die. That's just part of nature. It's not punishment. But it's read, say, in the Hebrew Bible as if it were punishment. Adam and Eve wouldn't have died, right? If they hadn't sinned, that's the story. But actually, reading death as a punishment, as Jews and Christians have for thousands

• 15:25Speaker 03

  of years, amplify those feelings of shame and anger and frustration. But seeing it as part of a natural process is quite different. For so many people, certainly like me, if you're brought up in a family that doesn't know how to deal with grief, it can just eat at way at you inside.

• 15:42Anderson Cooper?

  I mean, did you allow yourself to grieve, Mark, at the time?

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Well, I couldn't help grieving. But I had been brought up in a family that would just try to avoid the topic of death. Even my parents wouldn't talk about it.

• 15:57Anderson Cooper?

  Your parents did not come to Mark's funeral?

• 16:00Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:01Anderson Cooper?

  Nor, when you visited them, did they want to look at a video of the funeral or talk about his death at all?

• 16:08Speaker 03

  They just kind of were totally silent.

• 16:12Anderson Cooper?

  I mean, that's...

• 16:13Speaker 03

  They didn't want to discuss it, and that's how I was brought up, too.

• 16:15Anderson Cooper?

  It's stunning to me that this is your mom and dad not acknowledging the death of your child.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  I think they didn't have any language for that. I don't understand that. I think it's much better to have ways to openly grieve with other people, or celebrate, or weep, or something. But many people do keep it very shut down, as you say that you did.

• 16:44Anderson Cooper?

  It's interesting that you say with other people, because it's only now that I sort of remember that, as a child, there was some sort of shame in the fact that my father had died. And so the idea of the funeral and all of that just felt like something I was obligated to do and wanted to get through but was embarrassed by the whole thing. I was ashamed in some way.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Well, Anderson, I think shame is a big part of it. I mean, if you're a parent and your child dies, one of the responses to that is shame. It's like, your job as a parent primarily is to keep your child alive. And if you fail, and it doesn't matter if you did everything possible... That you could. It doesn't matter because you still failed. And that's how I felt very ashamed of being a parent whose child had died. And I think that's deeply part of it, for many of us, anyway.

• 17:41Anderson Cooper?

  We'll be right back with more of my interview with Eileen Pagels.

• 17:50Speaker 00

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• 18:34Speaker 00

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• 19:25Anderson Cooper?

  Bienvenido de nuevo a "Todo lo que es", en mi entrevista con Elaine Pagels.

• 19:30Anderson Cooper?

  Antes de que Mark muriera, Elaine y Heinz adoptaron otro hijo. Ella continuaría adoptando un segundo hijo también. ¿Cuánto tiempo después de que muriera Mark, murió Heinz?

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Oh, bueno, fue aproximadamente un año.

• 19:42Anderson Cooper?

  ¿Qué pasó con Heinz?

• 19:43Speaker 03

  Fue a salir de huida, como había durante 22 años, dos veces por semana. Pero en una huida, estaba mostrando el camino a uno de sus estudiantes de graduación. Simplemente se quedó en el camino de regreso, 2000 pies, y probablemente murió en segundos.

• 19:58Anderson Cooper?

  ¿Un policía llegó a tu casa?

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Sí.

• 20:02Anderson Cooper?

  ¿Qué pasó?

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Bueno, él no había vuelto de la huida y había helicópteros buscando a él todo el día. Podía oírlos. Y a la tarde del día, este policía me dijo que mi esposo había caído y había muerto. Y dijo: "Sabes, Dios nunca nos da más de lo que podemos soportar".

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Y eso me hizo tan enfadada que ni siquiera podía hablar. Solo pensaba: "¿Cómo sabes lo que puedo soportar? ¿Sabes que nuestro hijo murió hace un año?" Solo estaba livida. Tenía mis manos sobre la puerta del piso para mantenerme un poco segura. Y cuando dijo eso, no sé cómo me rompí los controles, pero lo hice. Estaba en un estado de locura de que no sabía ni qué. Por tres días no podía dormir. No podía hacer nada. Solo pensaba: "Esto no puede ser". "No puede ser". Pero sí fue, por supuesto.

• 21:06Anderson Cooper?

  Tú también escribiste sobre la ira. En tu lectura de textos religiosos, te das cuenta de que solo Dios es autorizado a tener ira.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Sí, sí. En la Biblia, el Señor se enoja muy a menudo. Y hace cosas horribles. Murió a 70.000 personas en un golpe y envía al ángel de la muerte a deshacer a la gente porque está enojado con el rey David. Así que me di cuenta de que lo que la Biblia hebraica te enseña sobre el sufrimiento... Is that it's all right to feel sad. You tear your clothes, you you put away mirrors, you weep and cry and you have your friends come over and you do all the rituals of grieving, but you can't get angry. It's only the Lord who has the right to get angry. And the only people who are approved to get angry is, say, Moses, when he's he's articulating the anger of the Lord.

• 21:57Anderson Cooper?

  And yet, in grief, there is justifiable anger.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  There often is.

• 22:02Anderson Cooper?

  I was stunned to read the date that Heinz died. Heinz died July 23, 1988.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:09Anderson Cooper?

  And my brother Carter died July 22, 1988, one day apart.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:16Anderson Cooper?

  And both fell, different circumstances. My brother leapt over the balcony of of our apartment building and then let go. But I just find it so strange to think you were in Colorado, I was in New York, a day apart. Our lives changed forever.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Yes. And we lived in New York, of course, and

• 22:40Anderson Cooper?

  And my brother went to Princeton, where you taught.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:44Anderson Cooper?

  For years, and even still to this day, that date, July 22, is so fraught for me. Was July 23 fraught for you for a long time?

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely, for a very long time. It would come up like a tidal wave. You'd feel it coming and you'd feel it coming and feel it coming until that day, and then it would kind of crash and maybe release a bit, but it was a sense of traumatic loss. It doesn't feel that way now, but it was 30, 35 years, Anderson, before I felt I could really go into the black hole of the grief for both the people. They were they were my entire family, I had, my husband and my child, at the time. And I couldn't go near there.

• 23:28Anderson Cooper?

  You had to suppress or bury grief to a certain extent, to function.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Yes, and I did it quite successfully, as long as I had children to deal with at home. They keep you busy all the time, especially if you're a single parent and you're working full time and you're writing books. I didn't have time to think, and that was part of the point, just keep busy.

• 23:49Anderson Cooper?

  It doesn't go away. I didn't wake up to the fact that I hadn't grieved until two years ago, and I'm still like slowly turning to it and sort of touching it in increments, and it still feels like there is a An overwhelming thing that I'm keeping at bay.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Yes, keeping it at bay was keeping you safe. Because after all, your father, your brother, that's a huge load of grief, especially when you were a child, and it was held in. So it was enormous. And part of your functioning is protecting you from being overwhelmed by it, until you could gradually let more and more and more in.

• 24:34Anderson Cooper?

  So for you, what was the point that you decided to turn to it?

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Well, it was seeing this really good therapist after my children were out of the house and in college and into their own lives, when I was by myself. And then I went into the black hole and I started to write about what happened and re-experiencing it. It was very, very painful.

• 24:55Anderson Cooper?

  That became the book, Why Religion?

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Yes, it did. And I never thought I'd publish it because it was so personal. And then I thought finally, yeah, but this happens to everybody, really. So that helped a great deal. And then talking about it and letting it out, bring forth what is within you. And then only after that, a year and a half after that, I was able to, I met someone that I could dare to love without being terrified of loss in the same way. And when that happened, I started to cry and cry and cry.

• 25:29Anderson Cooper?

  Had you cried much before that?

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Not much, which is amazing, isn't it?

• 25:35Anderson Cooper?

  I'm right there with you on the not crying thing until now.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  I was not crying a lot. And then I began to weep for my son. And he's a marvelous man, and he could understand and allow that to happen, and he wasn't alarmed by it, and I wasn't alarmed by it.

• 25:52Anderson Cooper?

  So you can cry in front of him?

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. I hadn't had anyone like that. I'd been really alone, except for children. And you can't keep doing that to children at all. So that was a great release. But also, what you're doing, the work that you're doing with grief, and I think also writing about it, talking with other people. There's nothing very unique about any of us in this regard. I mean, in one sense, every experience is totally unique and has its own particular shape, but in another sense, there's such deep communality.

• 26:27Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I had a woman come up to me outside my house the other day, and we ended up talking for 20 minutes, and I'm still in touch with her. Her husband died just recently. But it is extraordinary to me that anybody you pass on the street has experienced this or will experience this.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  What has been the effect of that?

• 26:50Anderson Cooper?

  I mean, I still feel like I am, this is very early days for me, and I'm, I have to figure out a way to spend time with grief and allow myself to. It's something I, you know, I cry in inopportune times, but I feel like I'm still, I need to keep a lid somewhat on it because I worry like there is a flood there that will overwhelm me.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  Well, that's right, and it's a gradual process.

• 27:18Anderson Cooper?

  A therapist said to you, you have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  She was right. She'd been through it. And now I can allow for much more space, much more openness. The currents go through like a river more, and they're much more livable, and they don't require me to be playing a type A personality, which I think could have, could have done me in if I'd kept doing that.

• 27:48Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Because it's when you get to be older.

• 27:50Anderson Cooper?

  It's exhausting.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  It's hard to keep that up, and I think.

• 27:53Anderson Cooper?

  Tell me about it.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  So it's, it's a relief at this point, and I would imagine for you very much as well, to begin to let some of that open up and release.

• 28:04Anderson Cooper?

  I aspire to that, yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  It's happening.

• 28:07Anderson Cooper?

  I'm still going through these endless boxes of my mom and my dad and my brothers, and I've been going through photographs, thousands of photographs, to organize them, and it's been very difficult. But I had always heard people talk about, oh, I feel somebody I've lost with me, or they're always with me, or things like that. And I never understood what they were talking about, but I have.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Platitude.

• 28:31Anderson Cooper?

  I have begun to feel.

• 28:36Anderson Cooper?

  Feel my dad and I began to feel even the little boy that I was. And that's been incredible. Like actually feeling the little boy that I was and being able to kind of turn to him and communicate with him.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:57Anderson Cooper?

  It doesn't happen all the time, but it's when it does, it is, I feel like that is the, that is the root to something.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  Yes, to your own experience, right? And acknowledging more of it, allowing more of it to be felt. And that must be different now than it was when you started this process.

• 29:21Anderson Cooper?

  I mean, yeah, it did not exist when I started this process really to any degree. And now I feel it much more.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  And it makes us much more compassionate about other people. And then I was thinking, you know, having children of your own and seeing how sensitive a child is.

• 29:40Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  I mean, you want to protect that child and allow his emotional responses to be heard.

• 29:47Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I talked with Frances Weller, who's been on the podcast twice, and I talk to him now once a week on Zoom. And it's one of the things we were just talking about the other day. He pointed out in, you know, me talking to the little child that I was and feeling him, if that was my son, what would I do? And I would immediately grab that little boy and hold him and tell him that, you know, everything was going to be all right. And I'd talk to him. And so that idea is very powerful for me. Is there something you've learned in your grief that you could say that would be helpful for others?

• 30:24Speaker 03

  That if you try to hold it in and pretend it isn't there, it's not going away.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  That if you don't find ways to release it gradually or suddenly or however it happens.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  You will be suffering more than necessary. And now I feel a lot more gratitude. Gratitude for that wonderful child that I had. For the fortunate marriage I had for 22 years without grieving for it now. Because I have a life that is full in a very different way. And I finally realized that I could be happy again. That was a surprise.

• 31:09Anderson Cooper?

  I get a lot of direct messages on Instagram. And I was reading a couple going home after work last night. And there were several people who had just experienced a loss, devastating losses, and could not imagine how they will get through the next month, days. What would you say if somebody asked you, how am I going to get through this?

• 31:37Speaker 03

  I would say it's hard to imagine that you can get through this. It's certainly been hard for me. The surprise is that it can change eventually.

• 31:49Anderson Cooper?

  And it does change.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you can have a wonderful life again, which didn't seem possible to me then. This is not a sad story. This is a story about coming back to life.

• 32:03Anderson Cooper?

  You exude life.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Well, thank you.

• 32:06Anderson Cooper?

  And by the way, that's how I responded last night. In the end, I said, this was actually a mother who'd lost a child. And I said that I wished my mom was alive to give her advice and that I didn't feel qualified to. But I know that my mom was able to laugh again. And that that's possible.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  It doesn't seem possible then, but it is. Yeah. And I think it helps to hear that from someone, even though, no doubt, she didn't feel that at all at the time.

• 32:39Anderson Cooper?

  Elaine, thank you so much.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Thank you. I'm very happy to see you today. Thanks.

• 32:47Anderson Cooper?

  Elaine's book about the loss of her son and husband is called Why Religion: A Personal Story. Her newest book is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. Thanks for listening to this special episode of the podcast. I may release a few more single episodes in the weeks and months ahead, and I'm already planning for a fourth season of the podcast as well. All There Is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan DeZula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is our executive producer. Support from Nick Gottzel, Ben Evans, Chuck Hadad, Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Kerry Pritchard, Shimmeri Chitrit, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Deonora,

• 33:31Anderson Cooper?

  Laney Steinhardt, Jameis Andrest, Nicole Peseru, and Lisa Namro. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.