Lil Jon On Grief: ‘Don’t Hold It In’

Rapper Lil Jon’s 27-year-old son, Nathan, died in February 2026 in an accidental drowning. He talks with Anderson Cooper about how he mourns and the unexpected discovery he recently made about the identity of his father. For more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Emily Williams and Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher 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

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• 0:31Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is Lil' John. He's a rapper, DJ, and producer known for hits like Get Low and Turn Down For What. In February 2026, his 27-year-old son Nathan, who was also a DJ and musician known as DJ Young Slade, went missing near Nathan's home in Georgia. Three days later, his body was found in a pond nearby. His death was ruled an accidental drowning. Lil' John has a memoir that just came out called, "I Only Shout So You Can Hear Me." While writing it, he says he also learned for the first time that the man who raised him, the man he thought was his dad, was not actually his biological father. I sat down with Lil' John last month in Los Angeles.

• 1:18Anderson Cooper?

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:21Anderson Cooper?

  You wear sunglasses everywhere. And every photo I've seen of you is pretty much in sunglasses. I didn't realize there's a reason why you wear sunglasses all the time, not just for mystique and performance and all that looks good. As a little kid, you almost poked your eye out.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, my mother was a diabetic. And one day I got into her needles and for some reason I was playing with the insulin needle. And I noticed you push the needle and the air would go through the needle. And for some reason, I wanted to feel what the air felt like on my eye, stupid little kid. And I ended up poking my eye. And I didn't tell my mom because I was scared I was going to get in trouble. So I think she noticed a couple of days later that my eye was like bloodshot or whatever. And basically I had a traumatic cataract. They had to remove my cornea. And I had to have all these surgeries and then go to school with an eye patch on.

• 2:13Anderson Cooper?

  You had a metal eye patch.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had a little metal eye patch. And then I had to do all of these exercises to train my eye muscles to get tighter. Because my eye would drift. So the sunglasses was to hide that.

• 2:25Anderson Cooper?

  Can you see out of the eye?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  The eye is, it's like blurry. Most people nowadays wouldn't get it, but like a snowy TV. They don't know what that is anymore. So, but like a really snowy TV, I can see figures in the colors, but I can't. The clarity is not there. So it's twofold, to hide that and, you know, superstar.

• 2:47Anderson Cooper?

  Before your son died, had you had much experience with loss, with grief?

• 2:52Speaker 02

  My mom had a stroke and she was in the hospital for about six, eight months, not responsive. And then she eventually passed. And then before her, early 2000s, my dad had bone marrow cancer. And his death was the first major death I had to deal with in my close family. That one was hard hitting because I remember him getting diagnosed with the cancer. And then I remember him just slowly deteriorating. The last time I saw him, tubes all in his body. He was probably a fraction of the weight that he was originally, just skin and bones and couldn't talk. I went to the hospital and I remember going into the room and talking to him. And I could just see pain and sorrow in his eyes.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  He was trying to talk to me, but of course he couldn't speak. And I just remember distinctly how his eyes were. And I think a tear rolled down his eye. I realized that he was trying to tell me goodbye and that he loved me. Because that night he died. He was waiting to go.

• 3:53Anderson Cooper?

  He wanted to talk to you before he died?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%.

• 3:56Anderson Cooper?

  How old were you when you learned that your dad was not your biological dad?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Writing the book.

• 4:04Anderson Cooper?

  You did not know until you were writing this book?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I did not know. It was basically to dispel a rumor that my father wasn't my father. Because at my mother's funeral, a man came up to me and was like, "I'm your real dad. I'm grieving my mother." And I'm like, "Who is this dude?" And my family was like, "Ah, don't worry about him." And I was like, "Ah, whatever, that's not my dad." And then I thought about it. Once I started to go through the ancestry stuff, one of my cousins, he shared his DNA profile with us. And I did not match him at all. And so that was like, whoa, what's going on with that? And then as we dug deeper, biological brother and sister came up. And it was just like, I got, feel like I got hit by bricks.

• 4:50Anderson Cooper?

  So you have a biological brother and sister through your biological father?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Yes, through my biological.

• 4:56Anderson Cooper?

  You have two brothers you thought were full brothers.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:59Anderson Cooper?

  They're really half brothers.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Half brothers, right.

• 5:02Anderson Cooper?

  What is that like to discover that?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  It's like shock. And then it's like, you go through, how did this happen? How could this happen? Then you go through anger, like, why did my mom do this? And did my father know? Did my biological father know? It's just so many emotions you go through and it's just, it tears you apart. Because I can't go back and talk to my mom and ask her questions like, why? Or how, or anything. And that was just tearing me apart for weeks until I had to say, I gotta stop going crazy over this. And I went outside of my balcony and I just had a conversation with my mom. And then I let everything out that I wanted to say to her.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  And I came to the acceptance that I wasn't gonna get the answers that I wanted. But me speaking to her, letting it out, helped me to get some kind of peace and to be able to accept it. It is what it is. And what's crazy.

• 6:03Anderson Cooper?

  Is he still alive?

• 6:04Speaker 02

  He's not, he's not alive either.

• 6:06Anderson Cooper?

  Was it the guy who came up to you?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  No, it was not. So all of that is crazy. I can't have a conversation with him either. And I don't even think he knew anything about me. And then what came up in the DNA is that he had other kids that he didn't know about too.

• 6:23Anderson Cooper?

  Your dad who raised you was Willie. So when Willie was saying goodbye to you, you don't know if he knew? Because in the book, you write, "When I found out the truth about my father, it felt like something inside me had been torn apart." Before, everything was simple. My mother was my mother and my father was my father. But after that moment, it was as if the foundation of my life had crumbled. My brothers were still my brothers, but now they were only half brothers. And the man I had called my father wasn't my father anymore.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:52Anderson Cooper?

  Is that a form of grief, do you think, that feeling?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's mourning what reality I thought I was living. It's just so surreal to go through something like that. I was 53 years old when I found this out. So I went through more than half of my life and then something like this hits me. And it's just like, it's hard to digest. And it is a form of grieving because that life that I thought was not actually exactly what I thought it was. And it's hard because I can't go talk to my biological father either. And say, "Hey, I'm your son." And he say, "Wow, you're successful. I'm proud of you." Like, I can't have those conversations.

• 7:39Anderson Cooper?

  Does it change the way you view the man who you always believed was your dad?

• 7:43Speaker 02

  I don't know if he knew. And I went through a million scenarios. And I kind of don't think he knew. I don't think he knew. Because I think if he knew, he would have eventually come and said something. It makes me feel sorry for him, knowing that I'm not his biological son.

• 8:05Anderson Cooper?

  Do you still think of him as your dad?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  I still think of him as my dad, you know? I learned a lot from him and I didn't understand things as a kid. But as an adult, when you become a father and you're working hard and trying to provide for the family, I totally get it.

• 8:19Anderson Cooper?

  You talk about in the book, this idea that there's history in families that repeats through generations. And it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately and I totally believe, and I just find it fascinating.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, trauma is stored in your DNA. I believe that whatever your parents are going through at the time of conception, that can be passed along to you. Or whatever they were going through in their life that's stored in their DNA, that trauma could be passed along to you. And we have to try to break the chain. And then it's also actions, like whatever our parents are going through as we are growing up, how they're dealing with that trauma, that is passed to us as well.

• 9:05Anderson Cooper?

  100%.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  You know?

• 9:06Anderson Cooper?

  My mom had the sadness behind her eyes. She had a very traumatic childhood and didn't really have parents. And I started realizing I had this same sadness behind my eyes. And I'm actively working to try to, you know, fix that and not pass that on. But it, but it takes a lot of work.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's something that I went through in grieving my son. Is every day just on the couch and crying throughout the day and just sad. And I realized my daughter and my partner, they deserved a better version of myself. Like my daughter, I don't want that to be her memory of me. I want her to see me laughing, me and her mother loving each other. Because that's another thing that I didn't realize until I was writing this book. When me and my brother was talking, he was like, "Our parents weren't affectionate." He's like, "I never seen mom and dad affectionate." And I thought about it, I had a different view because I remember her loving on us so much.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  And I hadn't thought about it in his way of mom and dad. And he was right. So I had to make sure I show affection to my partner. I'm loving to my partner in front of my daughter. I had to pull myself out of that rut I was in and just try to be happier for them.

• 10:22Anderson Cooper?

  When your son was born, did you feel like you knew how to be a dad?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  No, I did not know what I was doing. I was not ready. I was, it was 1998, late twenties, still trying to figure out life, still trying to figure out my career. I was still at SO SO Deaf, working. I was starting to become an artist, but I hadn't figured it out yet. Yeah, I was not ready to be a dad.

• 10:48Anderson Cooper?

  What happened to Nathan?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  It was an accidental drowning. It was not suicide. It was not with his mental stability at all. I remember getting the call and it was the worst call I ever got. As a parent, we are always trying to protect our kids. When I got the call.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  That he was missing. My heart dropped, of course. Initially, I thought he might have just run off and just been hiding somewhere or got picked up by a friend. I went to his house. I didn't feel his presence anymore. I knew he was gone. I didn't say anything to anybody while I was there.

• 11:27Anderson Cooper?

  You felt that?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  I could feel it. I'm a very spiritual person and my son is a part of me too, you know? So I did not feel his presence anymore in that home and I knew he was gone. And that whole week while he was gone, it felt like I got stabbed in the chest. And every day they kept pushing the knife in deeper and twisting it. That was Tuesday to Friday before he was found.

• 11:57Anderson Cooper?

  He had left the house and they found something like psilocybin in his system. Do you think he was just on a journey and was disoriented?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  He was disoriented, definitely. Whatever happened, he didn't plan on that happening. I think he didn't know where he was. It was cold too. It was freezing. It was thirty degrees in Atlanta.

• 12:20Anderson Cooper?

  They had put divers in the water in a pond near your son's house.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:26Anderson Cooper?

  They didn't find him then, but then they drained the pond.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they drained it lower and that day it was medical examiners and all kind of extra crews there and news helicopters in the air. I guess kind of knew they were gonna find him.

• 12:46Anderson Cooper?

  Once you got to the scene, you were like, oh, this is different today.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I saw a tent and I saw a bunch of guys around something in a tent. So I was like, they already pulled him out. When I finally got the news that he was found, it felt like a part of me had been ripped out of my body. Part of me was gone. Nate was a wonderful young man and he's twenty-seven years old. And recently, he came to me and said, I wanna have a closer relationship with you. And I think it was partially because he was becoming more of a man and he was understanding things. And I think maybe I feel deep down, he knew he just needed to get closer to me for some reason.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  And I think it was because of him leaving this world early. In the last three, four years, we've been really getting closer together, doing a lot of things, traveling together more. I would come in town and I would stay at his house, just watch TV, watch movies and just talk, talk about life, spirituality. He was a spiritual person like me and we just started to get really close, a lot closer over the last three years or so. I always thought that he would be burying me. And here I am going to the funeral home and picking out caskets and talking to the medical

• 14:11Speaker 02

  examiner, getting his body released. And some days I don't even know how I was able to get through it. And it's the hardest thing I ever had to deal with in my life. And when he passed too, I was planning the tour with Pitbull. So I'm having to grieve and lay my son to rest as well as plan this world tour. And that was extremely hard and I got through it. And I remember the first date, finally making it on stage and getting through the show

• 14:48Speaker 02

  was just like, like a release because it was just so hard to, some days just even get out of bed or get off the couch or just crying throughout the day. And my son gave me one year for Father's Day, a blanket, and it was our first fishing trip together. So he put that picture on the blanket. And sometimes I would just lay on the couch with this blanket over me and my daughter would come up and touch his face and say, Nate, Nate? And hug the blanket like she, she knew, you know?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  And sometimes she would see him like she would be like Nate, like she would point. And I believe he wasn't crossing over so he could let everybody know he was okay because he came to me a couple of times too.

• 15:43Anderson Cooper?

  In what way?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  He came to me as a ladybug. It might have been the night after he was found, a ladybug was out of nowhere, was on the side, my side of the bed and it was just on the dresser, a ladybug. And what was ironic was on the way to his house the day he was found, there was a ladybug on the car. And I haven't seen ladybugs forever in Atlanta like that, but it was one in my room on my side of the bed. I think that was him coming to me. And then another time I was on the road, I was in the hotel and I was laying on my back and I just felt, it felt like he came and hugged me like this through the bed. And he was telling me, I'm sorry.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  He was like, I wish I was still there. I love you. And he was just sorry for leaving. He was sorry for what happened. And he just wanted to just tell me just, yeah, how much he loved me and like he just wanted to spend more time here and even with, just with me too.

• 16:49Anderson Cooper?

  It's still so recent, it was February.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's hard. I had a therapy session, I do EMDR, it helps me to get through a lot. I was in EMDR a couple of weeks ago and I had a really big breakdown and I realized that my mother, when we, me and my brothers were kids, I'm the oldest. So I remember she said, take care of your brothers. So I've always had to be the strong one. I was always had to be the one that kept it together for the family. And I realized all of that, keeping it together, even through what I've been through, I just collapsed basically in therapy. And it hit me like, this is why I was able to do that.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  It's because of what my mother always told me, you gotta be the strong one. And at that point, everything just came out and I realized I hadn't given myself time to mourn. It takes time to heal and I kept myself busy. That's what happened when my mom died, same thing, I kept myself busy. I kept myself so busy this year that I didn't let myself mourn. And even the last show that we did here in America, I broke down. It's, it's this one point in the show where Pitbull and myself are on stage together and he asked the crowd to say thank you to me because of me believing in him, giving him opportunities, so on and so forth.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  And so the crowd says, thank you, little John. And then I say, thank you to the crowd. And then I turn to him and say, thank you for bringing me out because I needed that positivity from the people and the crew and everybody. I needed that euphoria of good energy because um, I don't know what I would do if I were just sitting at home in it. And I needed that, like, I needed to laugh again, I needed to be silly and interact with people and feel other people's energy and make people happy too.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  And even share my message to help, I believe that we have to do that. Like we have to share so other people can see that they can get through it too. That was a moment because I, I broke down on stage and I, I just really realized that how much I needed that.

• 19:14Anderson Cooper?

  There's a video of you with Pitbull at that moment, is there, if we play that?

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Thank y'all for being an amazing audience tonight. Thank you for supporting me and my career. And I gotta say thank you, Pit, because I really needed to be out here on this road to get through what I've been through with my son this year. And to, to be in front of people every night showing so much love, your crew, your team, my crew, my team. I wanna thank everybody on this tour because I really needed this love. It's true, I needed it. We don't realize what we need all the time because we trying to be so strong.

• 20:00Anderson Cooper?

  It's not easy being the strong child.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Nah, it's, it's the hardest. And that's what I realized in my therapy session recently is that we are strong and we can, we get through it, but it's, it's hard, it's so much harder on us. And it's gonna hit us harder later.

• 20:18Anderson Cooper?

  I've always said to myself as a little kid, I am the strong child. And it's only recently, the last couple of years, that I've really realized my definition of strength was probably not the greatest definition, that my definition of being strong was pushing everything deep down inside.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:37Anderson Cooper?

  And not grieving and not crying and not

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:42Anderson Cooper?

  dealing with this and propelling myself forward. That's my, that was my idea of strength. And it sounds like that was your idea too.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you kind of tuck it away. It's just like when the police officer came and said, we found your son. It hit me, but then I had to get it together to deal with everything.

• 21:01Anderson Cooper?

  More of Lil' John in a moment. Was he always interested in music?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, from even before he was born. I remember I was in the studio session and he was in his mom's belly and every time we would play the music, he would kick. And when the music stopped, he stopped kicking. When he was a little baby, he would crawl, I had a little back room where I would make my beats and have my turntables. He would crawl back there and hit on the drum pad, the MPC pads and just wanna be back there in the room with music. And then at like eleven years old, I remember we were in the car and he would be able to tell the DJs, like the DJs mixing on the radio, he could tell me what song was coming in. Like most people can't tell you what, they're not a DJ, they don't know what, how the blend

• 21:51Speaker 02

  is going and what song is coming in, he knew. And I said, you know what, I'm gonna get you in the DJ Academy. So I got him a scholarship to scratch DJ Academy at eleven years old.

• 22:02Anderson Cooper?

  Wow.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  I didn't even push him to it. Like I'm the type of parent, I'm not gonna force nothing on you because I want you to do it. It's what you wanna do. And I'm like, if you serious, then you know, I'll get you some lessons and you know. So he was, he was serious and he didn't let it go.

• 22:20Anderson Cooper?

  We also have a clip, I think, of you talking about your son when he was around thirteen years old.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  That's my son's name.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  You know, your kids gonna wanna do this and that. They wanna jump into all kinda stuff.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  You know, I believe you gotta support it, you know, you know, what they wanna do. And one thing, I'm very hard on him and very critical. And I saw that he was actually good for his age. I mean, he had a great DJ ear, a great ear for music. Music has been a part of his life before he was even on earth.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:54Anderson Cooper?

  It's so recent. Is it hard to see pictures of him?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, when he passed, I was like, I want him to open up the tour. I want him to speak. So I created a montage of him talking to open up the tour. Sometimes it hits me and I'm a tear, my eyes water. Sometimes I just can't look at the screen. I feel his presence every show of the tour. I created his logo. I put it on the back of my shirt that I wear every single show. It's his logo, but with wings and his date he passed. So he's on my back. And he had a tattoo on his arm of my autograph. And he surprised me. He was like, check it out, Dad. And it was for him to be reminding of where he comes from.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  And after he passed, I went to the same tattoo artist and I got his signature. So he's forever with me here. And it's right next to my crystal. So it's all of this power and energy and love. So he's always with me in some capacity. And every day I wake up and pray, I speak to him. So I speak to him every single day, too. And then my partner, she got me this coin. It's him and me engraved on both sides, like his pictures of us engraved. So every show I had that in my pocket. And I would hold it to my chest and talk to him. And, you know, say something like, okay, let's do this. I need you to carry me through this. I need you to hold me up and give me the strength to get through it.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  And I talk to him before I even hit the stage. And I put the coin back in my pocket and then I start the show.

• 24:31Anderson Cooper?

  If you're feeling nervous backstage or something, you'd talk to your son.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I say, let's, all right, let's do this. It's time. Like every show, he's with me. He's right there on stage. And I had someone DM me that was a psychic. And she said she saw a green aura next to me on stage the whole time I was performing. And she's like, that was your son there with you performing. Sometimes memories hit me, knocks me back.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  And yeah, some days I just cry because I just know I'm not gonna be able to have another conversation with him. I can't call him every now and then knocks me back. It just, I just cry, you know, just to know that you can't have the conversation anymore, that you can't hug him, you can't kiss him. That's where it hurts the most. I know he's gone, but I just can't accept that he's gone. It's hard. I didn't wanna see him in the casket either. I didn't wanna see, I wanted to keep my last memories of him, good memories. I didn't wanna see, cuz I know, I remember seeing my dad in the casket and it didn't look like my dad. And my mom in the casket didn't look like my mom. And I don't want those to be the last memories I have.

• 25:44Anderson Cooper?

  You were a pole bearer.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:46Anderson Cooper?

  You carried his casket.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I felt like, um, I was there for him coming into this world. I brought him into this world and I wanted to be protector of him all the way to land him to rest, you know? It was a spiritual thing for me as a father and a protector of my son that I had to do that. The funeral was hard for me, really hard, because just walking in the door, it's these big pictures of him. It's all of this energy of grief in the room that's hitting me. And then it's also the casket. And then all of that hits me at once.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  And I'm just, I'm just crying and I'm just, one of the worst days of my life having to go through that, you know?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:42Anderson Cooper?

  In the book, you say that he was struggling with emotional difficulties and pain, physical pain.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:48Anderson Cooper?

  You write, there were days when the pain was so bad that he wouldn't even be able to get off the couch. He couldn't think, he couldn't move, and he couldn't figure out how to get long-term relief.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:58Anderson Cooper?

  That must've been very hard to see him going through that.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, as a parent, it hurts you whenever your child is in any kinda discomfort. And I was literally trying to do everything I can to help him. And I remember he came to LA. We were talking and he was explaining it to me.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  And he would get frustrated because he felt like nobody could understand what he was going through. And he was basically get these knots throughout, all over his body. And it would even be in his head. That's why he couldn't sometimes get out of bed or whatever, cuz he couldn't even think because it was just debilitating. He was getting some relief from stretching release. So I had him doing acupuncture. I tried as a father, everything I could to help him out. It would give him temporary relief, but not long-term relief. And it was something that he was dealing with every single day. And the one thing that gave me comfort when they did tell me he was, he was found is that he was no longer in any pain.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  And he also had fear. He was fearful of how people would judge his music. So he was very critical of his, himself. And he was no longer in fear. Actually, that's in the last text. I went back after he had passed, like a month later, and looked at the last message that we had texted each other. I'm gonna actually read it.

• 28:23Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  I said to him,

• 28:31Speaker 02

  I do care a lot. You're my only son and I worry about you a lot. You are so talented and extremely smart. Nothing should be holding you back. I pray for the days you have no more discomfort and no more fear. You will excel in everything you want to do. Those days are coming. Love you. So it really hit me when I say, I pray for the days you have no more discomfort and no more fear. And that's in the last text that I text him. And that's exactly what he has. He has no more fear and no more discomfort. But I thought that was just,

• 29:11Speaker 02

  like, really crazy and kinda foreshadowing.

• 29:16Anderson Cooper?

  You talked to him on the phone, too?

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, Saturday night, we had a talk. It was a decent conversation, but at one point I kinda got on him for like, I had sent him some supplements to start taking and he hadn't started taking it. And he was kinda trying to tell me, hey, I'm on it. I got a lot going on and da, da, da, da, da. And we ended up ending the conversation in a good way.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  And then that Monday, I talked to my therapist about my, me and my son's conversation and our text messages afterward. And she was basically saying, he wants to be seen. He wants to be acknowledged that he's trying and so on and so forth. And I was like, oh, it made me look at it differently. So I called him and I apologized. I said, I'm sorry. I said, I see you and I hear you. I see you're making efforts and I appreciate you. And I told him all these great things. It wasn't a long conversation, but it was a really extremely powerful conversation. And for it to be our last conversation, I'm glad that it was.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Cuz his best friend told me that he was so happy with that conversation. His best friends showed up at his house that night. And he said that as soon as he walked in the door, he was like, man, guess what happened, man? My dad called me and apologized. And he was running around the house, just like so happy. So it makes me feel at peace to know that he left feeling loved by me. And the fact that me and my son were able to end on such a high note that made me be so much more at peace.

• 31:00Anderson Cooper?

  I found it hard for a long time to talk about my dad or my brother. I mean, I really just didn't. Are you able to do that without like hitching your voice? Or is it too, is it?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  No, I can do it. Sometimes it hits me and sometimes I'm fine. I can cry. I'm open to it more than I've ever been in my entire life. I've cried so much in the last four years because I've just been emotionally evolving and maturing and, and being able to let the emotions and energy flow through me and flow out.

• 31:33Anderson Cooper?

  Grief feels so lonely, certainly to me and I think many people. And so to hear others' experiences, we just don't talk about this stuff very much.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we are the strong ones, too. So we kinda hold it in. But to, to share is to help and to uplift. And that's what I believe is part of my calling. I've been so private with my career my whole life. And now I feel like whatever I can give to help people, I'm gonna give, even if it's my most innermost thoughts and feelings that hurt or whatever, I'm gonna share it cuz somebody else might need to hear and see how I'm dealing with it so they can also get through it. And people ask me how I get through it. And I'm like, I gotta keep living because I'm still here. And he would want me to keep living. Your loved ones want you to keep living. You can't give up. You're blessed to be here. You have a life. You can still love. You can still laugh.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  You need to live. You were put here to live. We are here to live. So we have to keep living and we have to live for those that are not here. Keep their memories alive within us or do through whatever else we're doing, like how I'm sharing my son's memory through every show. But we have to keep living.

• 32:46Anderson Cooper?

  Is it hard sometimes to do that?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  It's not hard to live. It's, it's just hard to live without, it's just hard to live without that piece of you that's gone. But you still speak to them, you still feel them. And you have all of those memories. And I'm blessed that, my son was on this MTV show, I think the year before he passed, and he did all of this press for that show. So I'm blessed to have all these interviews he did. So whenever I wanna hear him laugh or see a smile, hear his voice, I can go look at the interviews.

• 33:19Anderson Cooper?

  I always usually end by asking somebody if there's something you've learned in your grief that would be helpful for others.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  What I've learned is to just

• 33:30Speaker 02

  let it flow out, like give what you can. And, and if the feeling comes over you, let it, let it come over you. And let it, let all the emotions pass through you and, and come out. Cry, cry. Let it, let it come out. It's okay to cry. It's okay to let whatever you're feeling come out. If you wanna scream, you wanna yell, you wanna bang on something, let it all out. Don't hold it in. We have to keep living, even though we've lost, we have to keep living for them.

• 34:05Anderson Cooper?

  Well, thank you so much for, for talking to us.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 34:08Anderson Cooper?

  For telling us about Nathan.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Thank you, thank you.

• 34:13Anderson Cooper?

  If you have thoughts you'd like to share about the conversation with Little John, you can leave us a comment on our Grief Community page, CNN.com/allthereis. You can also leave comments in our voicemail box. Or if there's something you've learned in grief that would be helpful for others, we'd love to hear from you there as well. Leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. On Thursday, November 12th, we'll have a new episode of the podcast with Mary Cosby. She's a cast member on Bravo's The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Her son, Robert Cosby Jr., died in February 2026 after a struggle with addiction. He was just 23.

• 34:49Speaker 04

  Dying from a broken heart is a choice and you can choose it. And I, it did visit me and I did.

• 34:55Anderson Cooper?

  You thought about it?

• 34:56Speaker 04

  I did, I did. And, and that little voice was like, no, mom, go on. When they go, they take a piece of you. He took a chunk of me, so it did visit me and I chose, I chose not to go there. And I don't wanna have those days where I just stay in the bed and I cry and I can't get out of bed cuz I think that's more wearing on my mental. I don't wanna make it a mental thing.

• 35:24Anderson Cooper?

  My conversation with Mary Cosby comes out Thursday, November 12th. Thanks for listening. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone.