Yiyun Li: ‘The Wound That Won’t Heal’

Author Yiyun Li lost both of her children to suicide. Vincent at 16. James at 19. She talks with Anderson about why she doesn't use the words "grief" or "process," instead describing her pain as "an abyss," and a "wound that won't heal." Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams Associate Producer: 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.

• 0:01Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in your grief, you're not alone, and I'm glad you're here. It's my brother's birthday in a couple of days. It's another one of those days on the calendar that I've always dreaded. Carter Cooper would be turning 61 on January 27th. He killed himself when he was 23. It's incredible to me that it has been 38 years, and still, how he died, the horror of it, the violence, it overshadows everything about his life for me. And I wish that wasn't the case, and I hope that one day it won't be. I spoke recently on All There Is Live, my streaming show on CNN.com/AllThereIs,

• 0:44Anderson Cooper?

  with a mom named Chrissy Kay, whose son Forrest died by suicide six years ago. And she talked about how her grief this year has changed in a way that allows her to see her son again as he was, not just as he died.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  This year, like, a change happened. It wasn't like there was like this precipitating event, like, "Oh, now things are different." This year, I entered September without my gut twisting, without, like, having this feeling of dread. And I was like, "Ooh, this is curious. What's going on here?" And then I continued to feel not just okay, but like, good, that I was feeling him in ways that I haven't been able to. And not like, not like signs, but just like, like love.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Like, it just, I'm like, "Oh, I can, I can reach you now. I can find you here, however you appear. I find you in my heart." And before, I feel like it was, the anchor to him ended up being like, finding him. That was the anchor. That tether was like...

• 2:03Speaker 01

  The closest memory of him that I had

• 2:07Speaker 01

  that wouldn't fade because trauma likes to make a nice little bond there. And this year, I think I finally realized I don't need that to remember him because he was more than how he died, or finding him, or all those feelings tied with it. It's really about

• 2:25Speaker 01

  what it felt like to be with him and knowing how much he loved us. And I it escaped my grasp this whole time until this year. And I can't tell you why, but it's here and it's a gift and it feels amazing.

• 2:41Anderson Cooper?

  I hope one day with work, I can see my brother Carter in that same way. My guest today on the podcast is an acclaimed writer, Yoon Lee, who lost both her sons to suicide and writes about it in a new book, Things in Nature Merely Grow. We'll be right back.

• 3:02Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome back. Today's podcast includes mentions of suicide. And if you're in crisis or distress, you can call 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. It provides free and confidential support 24 hours a day. My guest today is Yoon Lee, an award winning author and a professor of creative writing at Princeton. She's written a number of highly acclaimed novels and memoirs. Her latest is called Things in Nature Merely Grow, and it's about the death of both her children by suicide. Her son Vincent killed himself in 2017 when he was 16. Her son James was 19 when he died in 2024. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, she writes, and I wonder

• 3:46Anderson Cooper?

  whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. I don't want an end point to my sorrow, she says. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word? Thinking about my children, she writes, is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life. I sat down with Yoon Lee earlier.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  The thing about children died from suicide is, I think most people, the first thing they would say is, "What wrong did these parents do to the children? What kind of monsters are they?" And that's a very natural question. The question that nobody asks is,

• 4:45Speaker 02

  "What have those parents done to help the children before they lost the children?" I talked to parents who lost their children to suicide after Vincent died. And all these parents, all of us, we saw signs, we knew things were going on in our children's minds. We did as much as we could. But we parents were limited, we are always limited. I think being a parent is the most limiting job. Sometimes people feel spooked by us, and there's a discomfort. And I accept no one knows what to say. I would not have known what to say either. But I think when people don't know what to say,

• 5:30Speaker 02

  they find the worst things to say.

• 5:32Anderson Cooper?

  Or say nothing.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  One of the mothers said, "Oh, it's okay, you don't have your children. My children, they're in college too. We don't see our children often either." Then I just thought, "You just lied to me so you can feel better. You don't want to feel uncomfortable." So you said, "Oh, we're in the same boat." But there are friends who can just acknowledge, "There's nothing I can say or do for you, but can I just sit here with you in your pain?"

• 6:01Anderson Cooper?

  You don't like the word grief, or you don't use the word grieving?

• 6:04Speaker 02

  I don't use the word grief the way people use it. I think grief is becoming a shortcut for many things. For instance, people talk about their grief as a process, as though there's an end of that process. It's a state that we're going to be in forever and ever. And we just have to live in that state, and I choose to be here.

• 6:26Anderson Cooper?

  You choose to be?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yes, because the alternative is you forget your children. You forget your lost people. And I don't want to forget. I think remembering is more important than processing.

• 6:40Anderson Cooper?

  I sort of wonder if somebody listening will say, oh, you're stuck.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Huh. I don't feel stuck because I am living from day to day I'm doing. But I think the word stuck or the word grieving or process, they sort of make demands of people.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  I think these demands are not realistic. These are the demands for those people's comfort who make the demands. If you're not stuck, people feel better, less awkward around you. People feel that they can talk about other things. But that tells me so much about other people rather than me or us or people who are experiencing these pains.

• 7:26Anderson Cooper?

  I experienced loss very early on, and I didn't allow myself really to feel those losses. And it's only in the last few years, two years or so, that I've begun to really feel them.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Right. Can I ask you why originally you did not allow yourself to feel?

• 7:42Anderson Cooper?

  Well, I was, when my dad died, I was ten.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:45Anderson Cooper?

  And it was so terrifying for me. My dad was everything to me, so his loss was,

• 7:54Anderson Cooper?

  and still is extraordinarily painful. The trajectory of my life and my brother's life was forever altered.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Did you dream about him when you were younger?

• 8:03Anderson Cooper?

  Not that much, and my brother and I never talked about him again. And I think how crazy that is now. We never discussed anything, and the loneliness of that is so sort of heartbreaking.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  I think, I think death always puts people in a very lonely place.

• 8:20Anderson Cooper?

  Can you tell me about Vincent and about James?

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Well, I had never met two people who were so amused with each other. They were close, they were the closest brothers. And Vincent was this fantastic boy with long hair, poetic, musical, talented, moody. Vincent lived life at a very high pitch and feeding things very acutely.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Pains and joys. So his death wasn't a surprise. His therapist said, you must prepare. This could come any day.

• 8:58Anderson Cooper?

  You had been worried for, I think you said, six years. That he might die by suicide.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  When he was ten, I looked at him, I just thought, oh, I need to do everything I could to to keep you here.

• 9:10Anderson Cooper?

  What at ten did you see?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Just this acuteness of feeling everything in life. Most children feel, but children don't often articulate their feelings. And I think Vincent at ten articulated his feelings about the world, about how bleak it was, but also how much he felt about everything, both good and bad. And I just, I suppose I saw the sign. He wrote poetry about death. Sometimes I would sneak into his bedroom to make sure he did not die.

• 9:49Anderson Cooper?

  To make sure he hadn't died?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  To make sure he was there, did not run away or did not die.

• 9:54Anderson Cooper?

  Both your children seemed brilliant. He said James would teach himself several languages, Welsh, German, Romanian, and Russian, on top of Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, the languages he took at school. His phone, I once found out by accident, was set in Lithuanian.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  It's very odd to have those brilliant children, but it was also very, very good. Just, I think in a way, I never thought of them as children, but I thought of them as their own individuals from the very beginning.

• 10:24Anderson Cooper?

  What was it that Vincent said?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  When he was five, his best friend Mari decided not to marry him because she thought she might marry her brother.

• 10:33Anderson Cooper?

  Okay.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  And Vincent came home and stayed in bed for four hours, not moving.

• 10:39Anderson Cooper?

  He was inconsolable?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Yes, just staring at the ceiling. I just thought, how could a child feel so much? So then he set up and he started to write song lyrics. It's like big letter, oh, oh, love, oh, love, oh, heartless love, for your heart, through your life. And I just thought, where did this come from? So I respected that, that intensity of feelings he felt.

• 11:08Anderson Cooper?

  And James? Felt intensely but didn't speak.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  He was not a verbal child, but he was extremely eloquent with Vincent, which, when Vincent died, he sort of stopped talking. Yeah, I think that spoke of his loss.

• 11:25Anderson Cooper?

  Because Vincent was the person he talked to.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Vincent was pretty much the only person he talked to, nonstop. He talked when he was little with me, but I think after Vincent died, he started to be even less verbal about the world.

• 11:40Anderson Cooper?

  At six, James said something to you.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  He said, "You know, mommy, I'm still suffering from monophobia."

• 11:47Anderson Cooper?

  Monophobia?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:48Anderson Cooper?

  Which is?

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Extreme fear of loneliness.

• 11:52Anderson Cooper?

  How did he even know what that word was at six?

• 11:54Speaker 02

  I don't know. He probably looked up in the dictionary to find the exact word to describe his situation to me.

• 12:03Anderson Cooper?

  The fact that he said, "I'm still."

• 12:04Speaker 02

  I'm still.

• 12:05Anderson Cooper?

  That this had been going on for a long time.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:07Anderson Cooper?

  The only sign you really had with James, in terms of his reaction to Vincent's death, was that he never cut his hair again.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:15Anderson Cooper?

  For the six years after Vincent's death.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:18Anderson Cooper?

  He let his hair grow long.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:21Anderson Cooper?

  Which is the way Vincent had his hair.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  So I think that's a sign of remembering, at least, or acknowledging, without having to speak aloud the message, I think.

• 12:31Anderson Cooper?

  There was a line you wrote. "It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children, so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self, was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I love them, and I still love them. But more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives."

• 12:55Anderson Cooper?

  It's an extraordinary thing to say, to feel.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  I think that's the best I can do for them as their mother, is...

• 13:07Speaker 02

  They made a decision. I'm sure you have talked to people who had suicide attempts. I had, I attempted suicide too. And it's not that you don't want to live for people who commit suicide. It's not you don't want to live, or you don't love people, you don't love your mother, or you don't love your friends. It's the pain, and you're experiencing. There's no way to stop the pain, but to wipe your body out, that's the only way. So, so I think when Vincent made the decision, I've, I had watched him suffer for six years. And I thought, I must respect, you know, he's,

• 13:54Speaker 02

  I mean, he tried. And so I, I think I, I want, I just want to respect and say, yes, you have tried six years. And James died six years after Vincent died. And those six years, he was lonely. And that kind of loneliness was not something a mother could do. That's why I asked you about losing your brother. Because one, two brothers were so close. One brother died. I suppose whoever remains, part of this person also died with the brother.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  So when James died, I wanted to respect his decision. I respect both their decisions. Because I need to think on their behalf, rather than on our behalf. Parents, I think, suffer. But that is doable, manageable. I think loving children seems to me the only thing we can do for our children. It's very little, but if we can understand them, it's more than little. So I, I want to believe I understand my children, and I understand their decisions.

• 15:15Anderson Cooper?

  You talked about a concept radical acceptance. You said, "A few days after James's death, radical acceptance was what sustained me then. The questions of whys and hows and wherefores, or the wishful thinking of what ifs. These questions naturally arise after any catastrophe as they did after Vincent's death. But this time it feels to me that those questions, which function as a series of counterarguments against a fact, are useless, even a violation of James's essence. My only grasp of the situation then, as well as now, is to accept that James, like Vincent, chose death, and James particularly chose the same way to die as Vincent. Reality, which can be conveyed in many ways, is better spoken of in the most straightforward language."

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yes, that to me is radical acceptance. You start with a fact, rather than wishful thinking or questions. I borrowed that term from Martha Lennan's, the menu, the DBT menu. If I feel pain, or if I feel momentarily unsettled, I'm going to come back to the fact first. And the fact is Vincent died, and then James died, and they both chose death. I must accept that fact. You don't argue with that fact. You don't say, "But I don't like it," or "But I don't want this." No, that doesn't help. I could scream, but it would not change the fact. I live with this fact, but this fact cannot defeat me.

• 16:41Anderson Cooper?

  Was it important for you ever to try to completely understand Vincent's thought process, or James's thought process? Or, in my case, I mean, I spent a lot of time trying to understand, what was my brother thinking? What, why did he do this? What, was this a choice? Was this a compulsion? Was this a voice in his head? And there are times I still go down that rabbit hole, and there's not any, a way to get an answer.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Right. There are questions that cannot be answered. And also, how can we not ask those questions? I ask those questions all the time, too. But I...

• 17:22Speaker 02

  I think I accept not being able to find the answers.

• 17:26Anderson Cooper?

  I'm a new father. I have a three and a five year old and I love them so much. And I want it to be enough to protect them from everything. And I kept thinking of that while reading your book. Having these two brilliant children and loving them so much and yet not being able to take away all the hurt.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  I think that's one sad thing about parenting is we cannot take the hurt away from them. On the other hand, I remember when Vincent was in preschool. There was a piece in the newspaper, how to prepare your children for their future. And the preschool teacher was quite upset. She said, what do you mean prepare them for their future? They are living their lives now. And I always remember that because your children are living their lives now.

• 18:20Anderson Cooper?

  That's for sure.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  When Vincent was five, I realized he was living in his life, expressing his feelings, wishes, dislikes.

• 18:30Anderson Cooper?

  Very fully.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Very fully. When I asked him to go play soccer, join the soccer club, he said, you want that for your happiness, not my happiness.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  And he was five. And so, so I do believe children live their, in their own lives.

• 18:48Anderson Cooper?

  We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back. More with Eunlee in a moment.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. We're going to talk about rethinking how we die. How we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live. Our guest is Dr. B.J. Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group. It's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interests, services, and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject and makes us cling to life.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:40Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome back to my conversation with author Yoon Lee.

• 19:45Anderson Cooper?

  You don't use the word grief. You talk about the abyss.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yes. I use abyss as the precise word to describe how I feel about my life is I'm in an abyss.

• 19:58Anderson Cooper?

  You're in it right now.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Yes. And we will always be in this abyss because we'll always be parents who have lost two children. And nothing in life is going to change that. So I don't want to say I want to get out of this abyss. What I want to do is to live in this abyss a little better. So it doesn't feel abysmal. And each person lives in his or her own abyss. And I never want to go out. I don't think it's possible to get out.

• 20:33Anderson Cooper?

  Though it's painful.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  It is painful. One wants to hold on to these memories, however painful they are. People always think pains are not good. There's nothing good or bad about pains. They're just facts. They're the facts in your life. My husband and I, we are in pain. We have the pain, but that doesn't stop us from laughing. I think that pain or that abyss is you coexist rather than getting rid of. And I think what we do is how to live with that pain a little bit more wisely or better or cheerfully.

• 21:11Anderson Cooper?

  Was there a time after the death of Vincent and after the death of James that you laughed again and it shocked you?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I think it took us a long time after Vincent's death to start laughing again. And I remember the precise moment my husband and I were talking about something.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Very trivial. And we both just broke into a laughter. And I just thought, oh, we, we, we, we regained that ability to laugh.

• 21:41Anderson Cooper?

  It's nice that the first time you both laughed was with each other.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Yes, it was quite astonishing, I think. With James, it took a little less time. You go through it once. It seems like you learn how to do things a little better.

• 21:57Anderson Cooper?

  You learn how to suffer better.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I think so. I like that, really. You, you suffer better the second time.

• 22:05Anderson Cooper?

  After my brother died, um, my mom lay in her bed for days and I'd lay on the bed with her and friends of hers and, and my brothers would come. She would tell over and over again the story because he killed himself in front of her. And I remember her saying to me at one point, this was several days later, she said, you know, it will get better. And I said to her, it already is.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 22:26Anderson Cooper?

  And she looked at me and she said, oh, you're right.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 22:30Anderson Cooper?

  And I mean, it was in a little tiny increment of better.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:33Anderson Cooper?

  But it was better than it had been two days prior.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:37Anderson Cooper?

  And, yeah, that was meaningful.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  I know. Well, that's very good. See, that's the other thing about after you lose someone, these pains come back, like in an acute form sometimes. I go to teach at Princeton. Every time I go on campus, there's a moment, it just hit me so hard. It's just acute pain. And then I can sort of take stock and say, oh, this pain. And then it stops, but it never goes away. That's the other reason, I think, it doesn't work to say it's a process. Twenty years later, you would still be thinking about this thing, right?

• 23:22Anderson Cooper?

  For me, thinking about my brother is still very painful. Um, there's so much sort of un-said between us. Can you think about Vincent and James without pain?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a good question. So far, it has not happened. No, I don't think. I don't think it's possible to think about them without pain because we are parents, right? When we think about our children, it's not only about their past, but also about their future. But when I think about my children, there's no future for them. That's the pain that will always be there. I think about their past. Sometimes I find little things. Sometimes I open an old book. And there's a note from James saying, "By the way, you owe me two dollars."

• 24:21Speaker 02

  I have no idea where it came from, when it came to my book.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  There was a moment of intense joy seeing those words, but then also intense pain. But both are, I think, I can live with.

• 24:38Anderson Cooper?

  After James's death, you had a piano lesson and you went to

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 24:43Anderson Cooper?

  to do your piano lesson.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yes, three days after after James died.

• 24:46Anderson Cooper?

  Can you talk about that? Because when I read that, I was I was kind of stunned by it.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  I just started learning piano. I thought, well, I either have to cancel the lesson or I go to the lesson.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  But canceling would just mean another hour of not knowing what to do. So so I thought I would just go to the piano lesson. I mean, my piano teacher, she's a brave soul. She came with these flowers. We didn't know what to say. And she said, "Let's go into the piano." She started me on the drill. I was just up and down, up and down the keyboard. So we just had the lesson and later she said, "How could you do that? How could you come to the lesson? If I were you, if my child died, I would have stayed in my bed all day long." But I think it offered a sort of comfort. You just have to move your fingers. You have to move your body. You have to use your brain entirely in that moment.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  It's such a basic thing, but it's important. It's just to keep your body physically active. Because

• 25:57Speaker 02

  It's very easy to slip into depression when you lose someone or when you experience this monumental loss. And then you stop moving. And then time really stands still. So I feel that I learned something from that piano lesson. Because if you just do it, you can do it.

• 26:16Anderson Cooper?

  You had one person who came to your house and complained that Vincent had not sent a text to her daughter

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:29Anderson Cooper?

  before he died.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:30Anderson Cooper?

  He had sent a text to two friends.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 26:33Anderson Cooper?

  But not to her daughter.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:35Anderson Cooper?

  And she came to tell you she was upset by that.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  She said, well, she always treated Vincent as a best friend. And he texted two other girls without texting her. And again, you cannot write these things into fiction. But I felt for her. Because I thought, you felt so hurt by something so tiny. And you have to make the complaint about this.

• 27:08Anderson Cooper?

  Vincent had texted you?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  He did, he did. And I knew he was going to die when he texted me, so.

• 27:17Anderson Cooper?

  What did you do?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  I called back, I text, I said many things in my text, trying to stop him from doing it, I suppose. But what if belongs to fiction? Because in fiction, you can say, what if I did this? What if I did that? You can change the course of life. But in real life, you cannot talk about what if. It's about what now? Things happen, what now? And that's for the living, yeah.

• 27:50Anderson Cooper?

  My mom

• 27:55Anderson Cooper?

  had the oddest times.

• 28:03Anderson Cooper?

  At the oddest times, my mom would suddenly, out of nowhere, suddenly say,

• 28:09Anderson Cooper?

  "What if I had hit him in the head with a, you know, an iron from the fire? What if, what if I had knocked him out somehow?" But it was so interesting to me that, you know, my brother died in 1988 and

• 28:23Anderson Cooper?

  in 2017, my mom suddenly turns to me in the middle of a sunny day and says, "What if I had hit him with something from the fireplace?"

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  It's not a process, right? There's not an end point. We think about them all of the time, I feel.

• 28:43Anderson Cooper?

  You said, "Children die and parents go on living." Those parents go on living because that's the only way for them to go on loving their children, whose deaths easily turn them into a news story one day and gossip the next day, and then eventually statistics. Children die and parents go on living, except they go on living in a different way than they did before. It's like living with a new knowledge of reality. I love that idea that parents go on living, it's the only way for them to go on loving their children.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  We parents are the only people who will remember every single day of their life to our death, and we are going to carry them.

• 29:20Anderson Cooper?

  I want to ask you about anger, because you say you're not angry.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:25Anderson Cooper?

  Do you think James was angry at Vincent?

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I think that's the most interesting question. I suppose there's always, when you are the one left behind, it's natural to have anger.

• 29:35Anderson Cooper?

  That question, though, "Why am I the one left behind?" is something I understand well.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Do you think about that?

• 29:41Anderson Cooper?

  All the time.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that's what James was thinking about. Yes. That's why I say I have lost children, so I know how parents who feel who have lost children, but I don't know how siblings feel. Do you feel guilty?

• 29:57Anderson Cooper?

  Um, I feel, yeah, I feel guilty in that I...

• 30:03Anderson Cooper?

  I was not mature enough, or I was able to save myself, but I wasn't able to save my brother. Had I been able to communicate or talk openly with my brother, I think it would have been helpful for him. He was not able to do it with me. But I saw a photo of him last year. It was taken probably a year before he died and right when he graduated Princeton. And I didn't recognize the person in the photo. I looked at him and I was like, I don't know who this person is. And that's a very sad thought.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:38Anderson Cooper?

  You talk about objects and you said, "Objects don't die. They're journeys in this physical world up to a certain point or parallel to the trajectories of the humans to whom the objects belong. Then comes the moment when separation happens. Vincent's phone became a phone, James's backpack a backpack. All of Vincent's belongings and all of James's belongings have outlived them. Not a single item has left our care. Everywhere I turn in the house, there are objects. Their meanings reside in the memories connected to them. The memories lend the voids, which cannot be filled by the objects."

• 31:12Speaker 02

  I have not known what to do with the objects. I find that very difficult, even just to think about what to do with the objects. Because they are all I have of my children. When we moved James's stuff back from the dorm from Princeton, I just couldn't open the suitcase. The suitcase still not opened. I just, I think objects are very difficult. What do you do? What do you do?

• 31:47Anderson Cooper?

  Well, first, let me read what you wrote about James's clothes. You said, "For months, I had been walking into his bedroom, thinking that I should return the clothes to the closet and his underpants and socks to the chest of drawers. I cannot do it. The only thing I did was to pick up some loose clothes hangers and hang them in his closet, free of any clothes. All the same, in some small measure of order, I brought to this life of extremity."

• 32:09Speaker 02

  I think...

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Objects are the most concrete reminders of this life extremity. There are days I can just say, you know, I get up, I do these things. It's life. But then you turn around, it's Vincent's painting on the wall. And what do you do with that? No, I don't know what to do with that.

• 32:33Anderson Cooper?

  And yet you have Vincent's paintings on the wall?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yes, because, because he was a good artist, he was a good artist. I think the objects are the one thing that I haven't figured out about this life.

• 32:48Anderson Cooper?

  I will say, sitting here with you, it's the one time you seem to have doubt.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Oh, I think you're probably right. Because I, I realize I'm not, when, when, earlier you asked me if I get stuck or I feel stuck, I don't feel stuck. But maybe I, maybe I am stuck with the objects.

• 33:10Anderson Cooper?

  Are there rooms?

• 33:12Speaker 02

  They have their own. Yes, the rooms, it's the same.

• 33:18Anderson Cooper?

  Do you go into them?

• 33:19Speaker 02

  I always have to prepare myself if I go into them. Because I know it's extremely painful. You just have to have a moment of, of gathering courage and say, I want to see those things. And I would go in and see those things. Oh, yes, it's very painful to see them. But, but I still want to see them, you know?

• 33:44Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I think you keep, you keep them for as long as, I think at some point, I, I've been told, at some point they've become less charged. And I've noticed that a little bit with some, some things.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Like?

• 33:59Anderson Cooper?

  They've become less charged with emotion and pain. For the person listening to this, who's wondering, how do you go on? How can I go on? What do you say?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  There are only two options. One is not to go on. The other option is we go on living. Day by day, when Vincent died, we were thinking about Vincent all the time. I remember my husband's therapist and my therapist both said this to us. In six months, you're going to think about him eighteen hours out of twenty-four hours.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  And at the time, I thought, oh, this is a very interesting way to look at it. You're not going to say, I'm not going to think about Vincent. It's you have those six hours doing other things. And yet you're still thinking about Vincent. I don't think we will ever feel that we can heal the wound. But you go on living, acknowledging this is the pain. And this is the wound that won't heal.

• 35:04Anderson Cooper?

  You said, um, I've replied to friends' queries with this line. Our life is never going to be all right again, but we're doing all right.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  I still say that we're doing all right. We do.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Yes, I suppose we will never be all right again. And I'm fine with that, too.

• 35:26Anderson Cooper?

  That's all right.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  That's all right.

• 35:28Anderson Cooper?

  Thank you so much.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 35:32Anderson Cooper?

  Our next podcast comes out in two weeks, Thursday, February 5. And next week, on Thursday, January 29, you can join me for my live streaming show, All There Is Live, at 9:15 PM. To watch, just go to cnn.com/allthereis. If you miss the live stream, it'll be posted the following day for a week on the site. Also, if there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others, or you want to tell us about your own experience with loss, feel free to leave us a voicemail at 1-404-827-1805. You can also send us a video message and email it to us at [email protected], or send it to us on Instagram, at AllThereIs. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Have I Got News For Your Ears, the podcast. I am your host, Michael Ian Black. We are talking about, will Bill Maher be invited back to the White House? Survey says, no. Obama and Trump hit the campaign trail. Trump's latest giveaway, the latest in the midterm lawsuits, and Israeli elections. Will it be bye bye Bibi? Have I Got News For Your Ears. Check us out on Apple, Amazon Music, wherever you get your podcasts. Even better, you can watch the podcast on Spotify.