Anderson Cooper and Michelle Obama: Navigating Grief, Making Loss Less Lonely, and How to Know the People You Love Before It's Too Late

What Anderson learned from losing everyone he loved, what we owe our parents, and how grief shapes all of us--a conversation from the podcast "IMO." On IMO, siblings Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson aim to bring you candid perspectives on the everyday questions shaping our lives, relationships and the world around us. Each week, they're joined by a guest to tackle real questions from real folks just like you offering practical advice, personal storytelling, and plenty of laughs. In this episode, Anderson Cooper shares what he's learned about holding space for grief. The three talk about how they managed (or avoided) the grieving process and how their moms prepared their kids to live without them. Plus Anderson shares his thoughts on the Vanderbilts inspiring an episode of "The Gilded Age." You can hear more episodes of IMO at https://lnk.to/imomichellecraigTH Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. Today, we're doing what's called a feed drop. That means we're taking an episode from another podcast and dropping it down our feed. We do this occasionally when there's a show we really like and we think you might like. This is a great way to just kind of let you know, to taste test. The show we're highlighting today is hosted by Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the United States of America, and it's co-hosted with her big brother Craig Robinson, and the show is called IMO. Anyway, you know how on this show, our whole goal is to translate complex ideas from modern science and ancient wisdom and turn them into actionable advice that you can put to use in your everyday life. Well, that's quite similar to what Michelle and Craig are aiming to do over

• 1:02Dan Harris?

  on IMO. Their goal is to bring you candid, useful perspectives on the everyday questions that shape your life, your relationships, and the world around us. Each week, they're joined by a guest to tackle real questions from real people just like you, and then to serve up practical advice, personal storytelling, and some laughter. In the episode you're about to hear, Anderson Cooper from CNN shares what he has learned about grief. Anderson has done some incredible work publicly on the often very private issue of grief with which he has unfortunately a lot of experience. So what you're about to hear is Craig and Michelle and Anderson talking about how they have managed, or frankly, avoided, the grieving

• 1:44Dan Harris?

  process, and how their moms prepared their children to live without them. I hope you enjoy it. Real quick, before we dive in, I just want to tell you about the meditation challenge we're running over on my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. The challenge runs from March 23rd through the 27th. It's a five-day meditation challenge inspired by my new Audible original. It's an audiobook called Even You Can Meditate, which I co-wrote and co- ...recorded with Sebene Selassie, my friend, the great meditation teacher. Here's how the challenge will work. Every morning you'll get a new guided meditation from Seb. And then twice during the course of the five days, Seb and I will do a live video meditation and Q and A session where we can all practice together and you can get your questions answered.

• 2:29Dan Harris?

  There's no need to register. It will be available exclusively on the 10% with Dan Harris app. So head to danharris.com to join us. All right, we'll get started with Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama, and Anderson Cooper. And just to say, you can get more episodes of IMO wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  The only connection to the Vanderbilts I had as a kid, my dad once took me to Grand Central Station, which was founded by Commodore Carmelies Vanderbilt, who was not a nice guy. And there's a statue of him outside Grand Central Station, which by the way, he paid for and had made and set up there. It wasn't like his workers loved him and he did it. It was his. And he made photographs, he had paintings painted of himself and gave them out to all his children, not that they wanted them either. But, but I remember my dad taking me to see this statue when I was like six. And the only thing I took away from it was that grandparents turned into statues when they die, which is very relatable. I know, everybody feels this.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Nish.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Hi Craig Robinson.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  How are you?

• 3:40Speaker 03

  I'm good, I'm good. How are you?

• 3:42Speaker 02

  I'm fine. I'm having such a good time out here in LA.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you've got some company with you this, this trip.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  So this trip, Erin, our youngest, our fourth is here and, and Kelly Robinson.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Kelly.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Made it. Yes, yes.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Kelly, Kelly.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Go ahead, give it up for her.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Kelly left Milwaukee to be here. Kelly in the house.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Kelly's known to the whole staff only by her emails.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, Kelly's emails are infamous. Kelly, I can count, this is what I love about my sister in law. Details, you know? There is no detail, which is why I don't communicate with you. You have no information, you give nothing. If I want to know what's going on, I'm like, excuse me, Kelly. Tell me what's happening in your life and I will get the rundown, right?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  You will, you will.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Your wife is like, I tell her, she's, you know, I'd hire her in a minute as a chief of state to run anything, any office, any project. She, you know.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Well, you'll love this because, you know, we, Aaron and I have been staying in our Airbnb, which has been terrific.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Have a normal life while you're away for a week.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  We cooked breakfast this morning.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  What'd you make?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  So.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  We as in?

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Aaron and I.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  So we boiled eggs last night so we could have our.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  You know, it's all, he says he cooking breakfast, like everybody here knows. I cooked breakfast and he boiled some eggs.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  I haven't gotten to the.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Okay, alright.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  We had to fix some other things to go with the eggs.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  And don't say. Don't say toast and fruit.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  And toast and fruit and Aaron made himself waffles.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Oh, now that's.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Frozen.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Oh, well.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  In the toaster.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Okay, alright, well.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  You know, we're two bachelors. We're two bachelors.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Two bachelors living life in your Airbnb.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  We're living life and so.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Did you have to rent a car this time?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  No, no, we haven't, but Kelly, of course, rented a car because she figured out that that was cheaper than taking Ubers, so.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  And that's the other thing about Kelly. Not a penny wasted, not a penny. It's like, yeah, she, she knows the cost of Uber. She's probably.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  She's calculated.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Priced out all the Uber trips that are going to be taken in this trip and decided, we're renting.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  We're renting a car.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  It's better.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if, if we could rent a car that we wanted, I'd, I would have rented a Rivian.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  You know, they're, they're sleek and clean and Kelly's just now starting to drive the Rivian. Are you now, is she, Kelly's, Kelly's getting in on the Rivian action?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, our, our listeners, as they know, Rivian gifted both of us cars this, this past year and we've had fun driving them.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Well, we've got a. Great, great show, great guest.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Someone who so many of us know, he's been in our living rooms for good or bad.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  For, for most of our, our lives, um, doing the hard work of telling us what's going on in the world. Anderson Cooper is with us today.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Anderson Cooper, who is the anchor of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, host of The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper, Cooper and the popular grief focused podcast, All There Is with Anderson Cooper. And I'm really interested to talk to him about that.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  He is also a regular correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes, which is on in the Robinson household every Sunday, right before we watch the evening football game. And he's a New York Times bestseller. So without further ado, Anderson, come on out.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Anderson Cooper. How are you, sir? Welcome to I Am All. Thank you for being here.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Welcome to I Am All.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. Great to see you.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  We're kind of dressed the same colors.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  I know.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that says about me, given your fashion sense, but I, it's a little alarming.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  That's good. You guys look cute.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  This is, this is very close.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yes. But I like your style.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Nobody has ever said that to me.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  No, I said, no one ever. Well, it's, it's, it's great to have you. I was just saying, you've, you've spent some time with my husband over the years.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  A little bit, yeah. I, I actually saw you, I did an interview with your husband in Ghana. And you were there, I think with your kids at the, the last door.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  That enslaved people would go to before.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  That was the first term.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was incredible. It was an incredible experience.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Powerful experience.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's nice to be here.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's good to have you here.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  You've been busy in the meantime.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, you know, it's been, it's been, it's been a little busy.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Well, let's get right down to it. Why would you do a grief podcast?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  You know, it started, I, um, my mom died in 2019. She was 95 and I, she was the last person left. From my family, my brother had died by suicide when I was 21. He killed himself in front of my mom. And my dad had died when I was 10 of a heart attack. And so grief had, I mean, I'd kind of known loss early on. But so my mom was the last and I was kind of, you know, I was prepared for it. She lived an extraordinary life and we were very close. But I suddenly found myself going through all the things that she had left behind, which is a process all of us will go through at some time in our life, unfortunately. And it turned out to be also all my dad's things, all my brother's things, which my mom could never go through.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  She can never bring herself. So I found it to be such a lonely and overwhelming experience of, I don't know. I mean, I hadn't heard people talk about it. I obviously knew it as an intellectual concept. This is something that that happens. But my mom saved everything. And and I just, the way I deal with things is I tend to kind of narrate them from a distance in my head. And I just started recording stuff on my phone. And then I thought, it's weird that there's not more stuff out there about this process that is so universal. And I had never actually, I mean, I'd only listened to one podcast. I wasn't a big podcast listener. I didn't really know what I was doing. But I just started talking to people because I needed help in figuring out,

• 10:12Speaker 01

  how do you, how do you do this? And it's been extraordinary evolution since then. I, yeah, it's been amazing.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Wow, wow.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Well, you've had a pretty interesting childhood. I just recently watched a documentary about your family, mother's history.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I did a documentary for HBO about my mom.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  I mean, that was, she was an amazing.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  She was cool. She was cool. Yeah, my mom was Gloria Vanderbilt and she was kind of, in some ways, larger than life. And but she lived this extraordinary life of very early loss and this kind of crazy childhood she had and never really feeling. She felt like a changeling most of her life and, and we, uh, yeah, so I was very glad that I was able to put together this documentary for HBO called Nothing Left Unsaid. And for me, it was really important that I felt like with my brother and my dad, there was so much left unsaid because I was so young when they died. And when my mom, actually, when my mom reached the age of 91, she wrote me this really funny text about being 91 and yet feeling like 17.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  And I, it just kind of clicked in my head of like, you know, I, I want to engage with her in a real conversation for the next year of her life. And, you know, because I think so often we, we know our parents as our parent, we don't naturally know them as a human being. And it's only afterward, we kind of realized, wow, there's all this stuff we don't know about them. So I asked my mom if she would like have this intentional conversation with me for a year, which she was thrilled about because it meant I would be talking to her a lot. And we did it over email and, and phone and we ended up making into a book called, uh, Nothing, um, The Rainbow Comes and Goes. And then we made this documentary called Nothing Left Unsaid.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  And it was really important to me that when she died, she knew me and I knew her and there was nothing left unsaid between us. There was no, you know, there were no secrets, there were no things, I wish I had said that. We had said it all and it was really, it was extraordinary.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Wait, what was the, the thing that you found out about your mom as a human being that surprised you the most?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I had known, I mean, as a kid, I was very concerned about, um, stability. And my mom, my mom was an amazing person, but she was not very parental and my dad had died and I very much wanted to know what was happening. And, um, I used to read my mom's journal. I used to monitor her phone calls when I was a kid. Like I wanted to know what was coming down the pike. And I started working when I was 12 to earn money because I was very concerned about, like, my mom's on shaky financial footing and even though the world probably thought she was super rich, but she, you know, spent a lot of money and had no sense of money. And I knew this from a little kid and I remember I was actually walking up the stairs one

• 13:13Speaker 01

  day and my mom was on the phone and she said, she was talking to somebody on the phone. She said, well, I'll always be able to make money. And I stopped and I was like, this ship is going down. If she thinks she's always gonna be able to do this, like.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  And how old were you when you heard that?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  I was like 12.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  So you knew.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I knew. I knew early on.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Were you the oldest?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  No, I was the, I was the youngest. My brother was two years older and, but he wasn't as like focused on this as much as I was. I was really determined and yeah, I started, I mean, it was ridiculous. I started working as a child model at 12 to like.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  To help, help the family.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Not that they, you know, I wasn't, I was saving the money because I was like, I'm gonna need to, I'm gonna, I'm building a life raft here.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  But, but she was remarkable and, and, you know, I was always very sympathetic to my mom because she really didn't have parents of her own. She was kind of, her dad died when she was an infant. She was raised in hotels in Europe by her mom who just wanted to party. She was the subject of a vicious custody battle when she was 10 years old. It was called the trial of the century in the depression. And, uh, you know, I kind of saw sadness behind my mom's eyes her whole life and I, I didn't understand what the sadness was from, but I was sympathetic to her. And so even if she wasn't the most kind of mom mom, she, she was incre- I, I viewed her as a, I mean, from the time I was little, I viewed her as like a, a space alien whose rocket ship had, had like,

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  You know, failed and landed here on earth by accident. And it was my job to like, help her like rent an apartment and learn how to breathe oxygen.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  That's, that's a level of worry that most young people.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, but look who's talking.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  I, I listened to you and I think about him.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Really?

• 15:00Speaker 03

  And he's the oldest. Um, I think you called it catastrophic.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a catastrophist.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  He was a catastrophist at that age in the same way that you were, you know, really thinking, okay, all the worst possible scenarios. And I think he felt like the one that had to know it all.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  He was gonna be you.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Like if things fell apart, if our dad ever could never function.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Then Craig was the one who was gonna make sure.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  It's interesting because the, the title of this book my mom and I wrote together, which ended up being basically our correspondence over the course of the year, was The Rainbow Comes and Goes, which is from a Wordsworth poem. Um, and it was a poem my mom liked. And for her, it meant, well, the rainbow comes and goes. It's always gonna come back. And so like bright days are just ahead. They're just around the corner. The phone can ring and your whole life can change. And for me, the title was like, yeah, the rainbow comes and it goes.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  And it's

• 15:53Speaker 01

  And yeah, the phone can ring and your whole friggin life can change. Like, I saw it from a negative lens. And she saw it, she like could not, it was so, such an interesting kind of

• 16:02Speaker 02

  And you're just trying to be realistic.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  You're just trying to be realistic. Just cover all the bases in case something happens.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  It's a fine line between realistic and pessimistic, I think, but.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  I think you two fell on the pessimistic side.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Somewhere in the istick family, but.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Do you think that your mom, did she know that you were kind of the, the backup child?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  She did, yeah, she did. She knew, you know, I didn't really know my mom so well. My dad was such a present dad. And, uh, and, and she didn't really know how to be a parent. She, you know, and she loved watching him. You know, being a father and she'd never had a father. Um, and so when my dad died, it was something like, who is this person I'm with? Like, I gotta get to know her. And I had a nanny who was, was my mom and my mom hated her and, uh, because of that. And, um, but, you know, my mom, my mom knew she could feel how attentive and, I mean, I, I, I was there.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  I was always the one she would sort of call and, and, uh, it's funny, she would, uh, she would call and I would have to steal, I would steal myself like, okay, who is she killed now and whose body do I gotta bury? And I would like, she'd be like, I'd really like you to come over. And finally I'd go over and one time, uh, more, more, nine out of 10 times it was because she had redecorated something and, uh, and, and wanted to show me. One time she, uh, uh, I, I had started going out with a guy who was now the, the co-parent of my child. And, uh, we'd moved into a place together and she'd seen the place and then she called me. She was like, honey, there's something I'd like to talk about. And she's like, uh, dropped this a couple of days in a row. I finally went over. I was like, okay, what is it?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  And she's like, you know, when you love something, somebody, you sometimes do things you wouldn't ordinarily do. I was like, what are you talking about, mom?

• 17:49Speaker 03

  He's dead in the basement.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  No, and she was like, I'm talking about the taxidermy. And there was a taxidermy, like this guy had some taxidermy. And she was like, you know, it's just too much, the taxidermy. I was like, this is what, I've been worrying all week about what you've dragged me here to get from me about.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Well, with your father being, you know, the way you describe your father, I mean, he sounded like a wonderful man. He was your stability. He was your, he was your truth. He was your, you know, he made everything seem right for a child. And this is what we also don't realize. I mean, that's all children want is stability. They don't need money. They need, they need certainty, you know? It's like, I got a schedule. I know when I'm gonna eat. I know when my dad leaves and comes back, that he, you know, he does what he says. I need to go to sleep on time. I need, all those things make for security.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  And your dad provided that to you for 10 years, and then he was gone relatively suddenly.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, very quick. I mean, yeah, very quick. And it's interesting, because I used to think, growing up, like, God, 10 years. I mean, I was so young. And, but, but what I came to, one of the things I came to realize, and I'm many things, is just, you know what? 10 years was enough. I mean, I wanted more. I wish I'd had more. But in 10 years, he was able to do, to give me that sense of, this is what security feels like, and this is what love feels like. And that's, you know, again, I wish I had more, but it's, it's been extraordinary. To suddenly realize, oh, you know what? Like, it was enough.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Well, that's if it's done right, right? Because there are a lot of kids who have 10 years of parenting from somebody, and it's not enough, right? And it's funny that you mentioned that, because one of the, one of the reasons why I think I talk about death and mortality probably more with my kids, and our mom always said this. I mean, it was funny, as we were talking about, you know, briefing and prepping for you coming on, we realized we had different memories of how our parents talked about death. And I was like, Mom talked about it all the time. And you felt like she didn't talk about it at all.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  She didn't talk about it in the way that she's talking about it. She would always prepare us for her death. Like, she's been dropping dead for 20 years, right? Like, well, when I drop dead, you're gonna have to do this, this, and this. And I think she, she looked at the two of us and tried to give each of us what we needed.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  At the time, because she did not talk to me about death.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  But I.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  A lot, but she apparently talked to me a lot about it.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Maybe me as a daughter, as a, as a mother.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  As a mother.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  I think she wanted me to know throughout my life, she wanted to hand us our lives early.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Like, you're responsible, you did this for yourself. My mom would always say, and she would say this publicly, I didn't have anything to do with raising Michelle and Craig. They, you know, they always knew this. But I think she told herself that because there's some security in knowing that when you are gone as a parent, that your children are gonna be okay. And I didn't understand that until I had kids. And I realized that's the scariest thing is not just losing them or something happening, happening to them. It was some, it's something happening to me. And I, and my kids are gonna go through life not feeling like they have what they need to get through. And I think my mom was constantly telling me, you're fine.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  You have common sense, you're already making decisions as a child. I think she was trying to tell me what you came to realize. That if you know your parents' values and their core, you've seen them, you've experienced them, if there's a loss, you're gonna be okay.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. My, my dad wrote a book about two years before he died called Families. And it was a memoir about, he grew up, he grew up kind of poor in Mississippi on a farm during the depression. And it was about the, the life of families then and the family that he was born into and the family that he created with my mom and, and my brother and me. And it's really a letter to my brother and me that he wrote, knowing there was a good chance that he would die. His dad had died at 50, his dad before that had died at 50. I've gone through my whole life thinking I would die at 50, I'm 58 now. And like, I realized I had this just, this crazy idea, which a lot of people have if you lose a parent early on, that you're gonna die at the age their parent died. Thankfully, there's advances in medicine.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  But, but it's really, it's such a blessing to have this book because it's, it's, it's the family history. And it's all these names of people and stories that never get told in history books of people who were, you know. Poor farmers who gathered for family reunions and their stories don't get written up in the history books very often, but you know, I know about my great uncle Raspberry, who you know, cried so much that people thought his bladder was just located too close to his eyeball. And all these kind of obscure, you know, characters that made up, might be like the opera of my dad's childhood on this farm.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  It's amazing to hear his voice and actually, I just about maybe two months ago, got an email from somebody from Mississippi Public TV. And I've had no, I got a radio interview my dad did about 10 years ago. That was the first time I heard his voice. Cause I have no recordings of him or anything. I had no moving images of him and a lady from Mississippi Public Radio, an archivist, found an old TV interview my dad gave promoting this book and she sent it to me. And I, for 20 minutes, I watched my dad sit there talking and moving. It was the first time I'd seen him moving. It was just incredible. What did that feel like? It was interesting. I mean, it was, it brought back, it's so interesting to me, the cycles of history,

• 24:10Speaker 01

  the repeated families that we don't even know about. So like, my son is named Wyatt because my dad was named Wyatt. But I've recently just randomly started calling my son Buddy, which I've never called anybody Buddy in my whole life. I'm not like, hey Buddy, thanks very much. No, I'm not really. And I've been going through these things still and I've found all these letters that my dad's brothers and sisters sent to him, they're all addressed to Buddy. And it turns out that was his name, that's how he was known back then. I mean, he wasn't Wyatt Cooper, he was Buddy Cooper.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  And you had never heard anyone call him Buddy?

• 24:43Speaker 01

  I hadn't ever heard anybody call him Buddy. And I mean, maybe somebody as a kid said this to me, but I had no memory of it. And then watching this TV thing. My dad, like, literally, I had just been, I've got a place in the, in the country, and there's a little stream on it, and I've been really liking, my son and I like to clear all the leaves from the stream and, and like, get the, the stream moving.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a unique, uh, thing.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, I mean, you know, and, uh, you know, it's, it's very satisfying, you're out in nature and it's fun and there's snakes jump out and stuff.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that sounds like a blast.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  But my dad is on this TV show talking, and he suddenly says that, he's like, well, I go with my sons into Central Park and only we know about this little stream and we spend a lot of time clearing the leaves from the stream.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And I, I was just like, oh, and then the memory came back to me of like, oh my God, I remember doing this with my dad. Um, and the fact that I am doing these things with my son without even realizing it, I just find kind of extraordinary.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  So, do you have any, any recollections of when your dad was alive?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  I do, yeah, but they're, they're not, you know, they're more like, the memory of the softness of his stomach when we, I would lie on, on the floor with him watching television and my head was on his stomach, or, he, he was a writer, so I remember the sound of typewriter keys, you know, late at night, uh, things like that, um, I, but there's a lot, they're, they're very fragmentary, there's not, it's not, and, and it's been so hard for me to, it's only now that I've sort of started to remember more, like, I ran from, you know, at 10 years old, I, I was so terrified by his death and just shocked and angry and filled with rage, and I just buried it, I just stuffed it all down.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  And when my brother died 10 years later, I stuffed that down too, and I propelled me into the world, and, and in some ways, it was a very effective strategy for a kid to... You know, to have rocket fuel of rage and anger and heartbreak. But what I've learned in doing this grief podcast and in actually going through the things is I realized, I came to the realization about two years ago that, or about a year ago, that I'd never grieved. And I had this realization when I had stopped doing the podcast. I was like, this is too overwhelming. I can't do this. I listened to a lot of these voicemails.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  And finally, one day I was like, oh, I'll start, you know, maybe I'll just go back down the basement and start again. After a couple of months, I opened up a box and hadn't, I just randomly selected this box and there were like a hundred of them in the basement. And it turned out to be a box of my dad's papers and a bunch of files, moldy and mildewed. I opened the first one up and there was an essay inside he'd written. I looked at it, put my glass on it and looked at the title and it was called, "The Importance of Grieving." And in it, he wrote about, and he quoted some psychologists, child psychologists, about what happens to kids who don't grieve and how they go through their life or can go through their life with sort of this melancholy they can never quite put their finger on. And I realized like, oh my God, that's me. That is what I've done my entire life.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  And that was for me, the beginning of, okay, how do I, you know, turn to that little child who's still buried deep inside me and who's the framework through which I see everything?

• 28:08Speaker 01

  And how do I, you know, start to grieve? And so that's, that's, yeah, that's why I keep doing this podcast.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Well, that's the answer to the very first question.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Right, yes. It's a long answer, but.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  No, but I mean, I'm just, I'm just picturing 10-year-old you.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  I mean, my, my heart breaks.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  So after having done this for a while and then turning it off and back on again, have you learned a strategy that is helpful for people to grieve? Or is it individualized? Because I gotta tell you, I felt like we grieve, when our dad died,

• 28:50Speaker 02

  my mom was the type where, okay, like, like Mish was saying.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Get up, keep going.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Feel sorry today, maybe tomorrow, maybe a third day, but then after that, just get on up. Whether you're finished grieving or not. Get up, go to work, go do your thing. Is there a right, wrong? Is there a way to grieve?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I certainly, you know, in the world, I certainly am no expert. And, you know, I ran from it, I buried it. But it doesn't go away. And it is, it has stopped me from being able to, you know, I am wary all the time, which helps in my job at times, especially going to war zones and stuff, which is how I started my career. But it makes me, it keeps me distant from people. It keeps me, everything is a threat. Everything is seen through the lens of this 10-year-old boy who's still there.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  And why would you want to get close to somebody who could leave you?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Well, die, yeah, exactly. For me, the voice in my head is this voice that I developed to protect that little kid long ago. And it is telling, all the signals it sends me are, hey, don't trust this person. You gotta be wary about this, I'm not sure about this. I read rooms like nobody's business. Any room I walk to, I clock everybody, even if I'm not looking at them, even if it seems like I'm unaware. And it's exhausting and it's not healthy. And so I've been trying to figure out as an adult is how do you start to?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Let go.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also give room or space for grief. And like you can hold it softly. And I wanna, I don't want there to be a sadness behind my eyes like my mom had and that I saw. And, um, and so it's, I'm highly motivated. And it's, it's, it's an incredible thing that there is, you know, it will still be painful, but that, that the wound is the root to the gift. It's only by allowing yourself to feel the sadness that you actually feel the joy and you feel them again. That my dad is alive inside me, that, you know, I can feel even the little boy I was, you know? And I talk to them.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  And our current culture is not helpful.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  I think it's strange that, that society has set up that we no longer talk about grief. I mean, it wasn't always this way when my dad... Dad grew up in this, you know, small town in Mississippi. Everybody went to funerals every weekend, like grief was a much more, it was something spoken about. People wore black. You, even if you didn't know the person, you went to the funeral. You brought, you know, food and my grandmother played piano at funerals. My dad would go and his job was like to hold babies at funerals. And there was a, you know, a, there, there were, there was more of a commons of the soul. There was more of a, a community aspect to grief that, that has been shunted aside as taboos change.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  You know, it used to be you couldn't talk about sex, but death and grief you talked about. Now you can talk about sex, but you can't talk about grief. It's a weird shift.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  And, you know, and grief is a ritual.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're losing a lot of ritual.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And rituals are so important, which I had never really thought about Francis Wellers, who this writer I mentioned. He's a, he does grief rituals and he did a, a small ritual of, for it was about 200 people in this room. And there were bowls in each corner with stones in it. And you could take a stone and basically whisper the name of, of a loved one. And then you would put it in this bowl with water with all the other people's stones. And at the end, all the stones were collected. And I kind of was like, mm, I don't know about this. It seems kind of, it's kind of cheesy to me and.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  In five minutes, I was like weeping over my stone. I mean, it was incredible. And, and I don't like, I'm trying not to be a person who displays emotion in public. But like they're all, I mean, it was, it was a beautiful, like, everybody was into this. And so I was like, all right, I'll go pick up a stone. And, and suddenly I'm like, oh my God, I need another stone. And like, finally they were like, Anderson, enough of the stones. Like you gotta give, move it along, kid. But, um, it was incredible. It was really incredible. And, uh, and I think there's. Tremendous power in that ritual and communal aspect of it.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  And respecting aging. We don't do it well. We don't celebrate the moving on into that stage, which should be beautiful, of wisdom and knowledge, where retirement is honored. We didn't have nursing homes and senior centers because families reincorporated. You didn't lose the elderly. They stayed with you. They became a part of the fixture. They played a critical role in not only the family unit, but the community unit. I think of just a crazy example. When I was a young attorney, and I was a first year,

• 33:43Speaker 03

  and I worked for a big law firm. They had like 30 floors in a building downtown. One day, I got an assignment from a partner to take a memo over to one of the retired partners who still had an office. And I didn't even know this part of the firm existed. It was almost like this shadow system of firms. And they had everything that the regular office had, but it was older. It wasn't remodeled. There was an older receptionist. It was a quiet floor. And the offices were still set up. There were corner offices.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  And I went and I found the person. I gave the thing. But I left there feeling really creepy. Because I thought, okay, yeah, this is the floor where old partners come to die. It made me think about how, and I continue to think about how we treat. People and why people don't want to move on. And I think my husband said this recently. I mean, one of the problems with society today is that nobody wants to move on from leadership. People hang on too long and they hang on beyond their usefulness or even their practicality. I mean, as we get older, we think a different way.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  You know, leaders are supposed to move on to make room for the next generation that has new ideas, new energy. But because there's no place for our, our senior leaders to go with honor and dignity, I think people hold on too long. And I, I think we suffer as a society, as a, as a nation, as a world, because we haven't figured out how to honor our elders, to give them a space to leave gracefully, to really give them a place of honor so that they, they feel ready and anxious to go there. And it doesn't feel like the end of the road. It's the beginning of something new. And we don't do that well in America or in the world.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And I think people are, are, you know, I think younger people especially are just sort of freaked out by, scared by the aging process, don't want to deal with it. And so shunt it aside, just as I think with grief, oftentimes when, you know, somebody in your office has lost a loved one and they come back after, you know, what, two days of bereavement relief or whatever ridiculous, some tiny amount people are given. And people don't know what to say. And sometimes, and I, I hear this all the time from listeners of the podcast, you know, people either don't say anything because they think, oh, I don't want to, maybe they think, oh, I don't want to, you know, bring this up and upset the person as if it's not constantly in that person's head all the time.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  You know, I think about my dad and my brother and everybody I've lost all the time. It's always there. It's not like somebody's going to upset me by bringing it up. But also people don't know what to say. And sometimes when people do start to say things, it seems like people are kind of probing to see. How bad they should feel like, well, how old was the person?

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  And were they sick for a long time?

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  And were you close?

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  And kind of a checklist of like, okay, well, you weren't really close and they were old, so it was kind of expected.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  I'll never ask you about this again.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Right, I don't have to worry about it. And it makes me feel better now. I was like, okay, not too close. Oh, grandmother, okay, fine, fine.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  I have a question because I think you, I mean, you've talked to so many people through your show, or connected with so many people. What would, what would be the first thing you said, you would say to somebody who had lost someone? When you, when you ran and walked into work? Because, and, and it's okay if you don't have an answer.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I, I have people all day long now. The nice thing about doing this podcast is I have people, I mean, I flew from New York to LA this morning. I had some, I had two people in the airport stop me and tell me about somebody they had lost. And it is, I, it's beautiful. It's the most real conversation you can possibly have. And the fact that they took a moment to tell me about their loved one. And, and, you know, I, I asked, I asked them the name of the person. And, um, you know, sometimes it really depends on the situation. I mean, look, sometimes, sometimes someone doesn't really want to talk about it and they just want to let you know that they, they, they have had this loss.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  So a lot of it, I think, is kind of just getting a sense from the other person. But, um, you know, sometimes, I generally won't ask, well, what would they die of?

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, what happened?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Or how old were they? Or you tell me what happened. I'll usually ask like, um, how do you, how did you meet? How'd you meet your husband? And immediately someone smiles and has this story of like, the first time they met. Or, um, is something that brings up, uh,

• 38:58Speaker 01

  That lets the other person know you're interested and you care. And yet also that maybe allows them to touch for a moment that that person and feel that person for a second. I think that's the most powerful. Again, I think it largely depends.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like such a schmuck, sorry, Meech. I feel like such a schmuck because of the way I deal with grief. I put on the person who's grieving, right? So I'm very perfunctory.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Well, how so?

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, what do you mean?

• 39:30Speaker 02

  This is exactly how so.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Sorry for your loss. You know, that's like, that's like the go to when you wanna say something, but you don't want any more facts.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  And that's me and just hearing you say, asking, just asking more questions. I'm like fearful of doing that.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Fearful that it's gonna upset them because it's gorgeous.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  Or is it gonna upset?

• 39:55Speaker 02

  It's gonna be a tsunami. Upset you.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  That's why I feel like a schmuck, cuz I'm thinking about myself this whole time. When I see your reaction to how moving this is for you, I'm like, dang.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  No, the question is, have you grieved?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Well.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  In my opinion, I've grieved the way I thought I would grieve, which is, okay, I had my three days and then off back to work. Right?

• 40:26Speaker 02

  There are times, and Kelly knows this, where something will remind me of my mom.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you can't talk. Yeah. And that's.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  And that's probably why I don't say stuff to people.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Because.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Because before it would be something remind me of my father. And then when it got far enough away, I was like, alright, I'm better now.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  But I mean, I gotta tell you, for, you know, for somebody who's grieving, to have that interaction with you and to see the tears in your eyes, as I'm seeing right now.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  That would be an extraordinary moment to share with some, someone you may never see him again.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Never see him again.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Probably won't.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  But you've had a genuine, like, connection with another human being about the most important fundamental thing, which you both share, even though you don't even know that person's name.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Did you?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  When my mom died, I was ready for her death. What I wasn't ready for was the realization that I'm the last one left. And that hit me, I mean, I was, my mom had like, my mom had been talking about dying her entire life. And usually in the vein of like, well, I'll never be a burden. And you can always find 50 second all. I was like, can you? I don't like, why are you saying that to a 14 year old? That's kind of freaking me out. Do I need to call authorities or something? But after a while, I tuned it out because it was just, you know, people say stuff. You have no idea when the end of your life comes. My mom was, was holding on for as long as she could.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  But that feeling of, oh, wow, I'm, I'm the last one left who knows all like just the, the little tiny memories that seemed important when I was a child or the little sounds in my house and all of that just kind of, and I'm so, I think that's why going through the stuff has been so hard for me because everything is infused with memory and meaning, even if it's, you know, 100 Christmas cards that my mom received in 1973. Like, I go through each one because some of them are for some pretty interesting people. I was like, oh, I didn't know Charlie Chaplin sent Christmas cards. But some of them are just, you know, some random person and, and, you know, those I'll

• 42:45Speaker 01

  throw out, but it's, it's very hard to kind of, I find it very hard to kind of let go of these things that, that, because I feel like it's letting go a piece of them, basically.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  I think I'm just the opposite.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Really?

• 43:00Speaker 03

  And it may be protective, right?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  You have no, you have.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  I am not, I'm notoriously not a saver.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  I mean, and even with mom, right? Our mom, you know, she lived with us in the White House, but she kept our childhood home. And when, when she left the White House, I, we didn't want her to go back to a home. Because we just thought for security reasons, right? So we got our condo downtown Chicago with doorman and everything. But the house was still there. It was sort of like an albatross for her, right? Because you still had to check the furnace and, you know, mow the lawn and all of that sort of stuff. But I used to push her to go through the basement and get rid of stuff, right? Because she had my law library books.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  I was like, Mom, they don't even have. You know, law books don't last. The law changes, they are obsolete. Don't save them. You know? And so she finally did. You know, it may have been.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  We did.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Well, Kelly, I'm sure Kelly did.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Kelly actually.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  My sister in law did.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  But we finally, she was like, okay, I'll get rid of this stuff.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  But I didn't feel.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  You didn't feel attachment to that.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Because I just felt like that's, that's a, that's a lot. And I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be in a position where my mother would be gone and then I would be left sorting through all of that stuff. Now Kelly did that for me. And maybe my sister in law will have a harder time. It was just as hard for her. And thank God she did it. But I, I don't think I would have. And I didn't, I didn't want to have that work left to do.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Do you think if you had gone through that thing, that it would have been emotional for you?

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  It would have, yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it might have helped with the grieving process.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  So was, was not wanting to go through it, not wanting that emotion? Or just this is incredibly inconvenient? And like this is, who wants to spend however, a hundred hours?

• 45:11Speaker 03

  I think it was probably a little bit of both.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  And, and, and, and really you have to remember, my mom was still alive. So when we were going through stuff, she was like, throw that away. Throw that away. Don't throw that away. You should keep this. And we finally got it down to them.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a nice way to do it.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  It was a nice.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Because she tells you the story.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. It was, it was, it was a better way to do it. But then when she died, she still. Had a bunch of stuff and we just like took it all to our house. And then what we're trying to do is not have it so that our when we our kids take it to their house. Right. But I will say that you got across to mom because she was at a point when she was still alive, still living on Euclid, where she was like, come on over. Euclid is the place we grew up in. Come on over. Let's get rid of this stuff. And I think we got rid of just about everything. And that's why we probably can't find your spiral notebooks.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  I know. My mom had a storage unit in Queens that she had never been to.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  And she would just send stuff to the storage unit.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  We didn't have that.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  I didn't believe that. I don't to this day believe in a storage unit.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  They sent your dog to the farm.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  My mom would send stuff to the storage unit. And like, sometimes, like 20 years later, she'd be like, you know what? There's this chair, I remember. And she had a lady named Nora who'd worked with my mom for 60 years as her housekeeper. Nora would schlep to the storage unit.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Find this chair, bring it back. And my mom would embrace it like it was a long lost child for a week. And then be like, hmm, it doesn't work anymore. And the chair would go back. So like, it was just, it's like the last scene in Citizen Kane where there's this warehouse and like, they're just going through it, throwing things in the fire.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  I mean, I think you said this earlier. It's like, there's not one way to grieve, right? And I can imagine for your mother, whose childhood was so precarious, like she didn't have, she didn't have one.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  She didn't have a parent, you know? And the parent that she had through the custody battle, they took her.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  From the woman that, I mean, I hear her story and I grieve for her.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And going through my brother's, I remember the killer himself in front of her, going through his things were just, it was impossible for her.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So I can understand her, like that chair, like that's a memory.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  That's like the thing that she didn't, she didn't have lessons.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Right. It was funny, actually, once, like, I don't know, the last couple of years of her life, she called me up one day breathless. She was like, Like, I found this screen on first dibs that was made out of some Chinese wallpaper that was once in a dining room my mom had in a house we had when I was a kid.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  She found it where?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  On first dibs.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Okay, first dibs, yeah.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  I guess when she sold the house, somebody took this Chinese wallpaper down, sold it to some store and they made screens out of it. So my mom just randomly found these screens and she was like, oh my God, that's the wallpaper. So my mom was like, you have to get it. I was like, I have to get it. I was like, okay. And they turned out to be like crazy expensive screens. I didn't know screens were so, I was like, who do you?

• 48:21Speaker 03

  It's like a screen, what are we screening?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Screens, like, what are we doing? We're not, anyway, she was like, you really got to get it, it means so much to me. So I was like, okay, fine, I got it. And, I mean, we're talking like, it was like fifty thousand dollars. I mean, this was like, I did extra, like, I took on a couple of speaking gigs to get, to get these.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  These screens.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Frigging screens. And she embraces them like, this, this was gonna solve her life, her problems in her life. She brings them, gets them in a room. A week later, she calls me up, she was like, I've had to redecorate the dining room around the screens. Which means I'm redecorating the dining room around the screens. And then, two weeks, four, uh, four weeks go by and she's like, do you have any room for these screens? They're just, you know, I thought it was the answer, but they just, it doesn't work. Yeah, so.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  And I've come to believe that things aren't the thing.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're not, right. No way. As my mom would acknowledge, like, she would redecorate constantly, but it never quite got it, what the issue really was.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  And it cost a lot of money along the way.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm a, you know, I, I, I'm trying to practice, I try to practice that as maybe part of my grieving process. That it's, it's not stuff, you know? I don't want it as a memory of me. I don't want my kids to feel that, you know, keeping this thing that I just got forever and lugging it around with them for the rest of their life is a way to stay connected to me. Or to stay connected to my mother or my father.

• 49:55Speaker 03

  It's for me, stories matter, right? That it goes back to story.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  You know, I'd rather sit and talk about all the times. Remember the time? And do we remember and relay the pass those stories on to our kids? As a better way of honoring our elders, our ancestors? Then with a storage room full of their stuff. Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't recommend that.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  And so Anderson, and I know.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Which by the way, is for one of the reasons I'm so motivated to go all through this stuff. Cause I don't want to leave for my kids.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  This room full of stuff, they're like, who are these people?

• 50:37Speaker 03

  It's like, and it's these screens.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 50:39Speaker 03

  What am I supposed to do with screens?

• 50:41Speaker 02

  That was just what I wanted to to talk about. How does this work? Now that you know, and you've gone through this, how does this inform your parenting? And how are you preparing yourself to sort of convey the right message to your boys?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  To me, I mean, like telling the story of my, my, of my parents and their parents to my kids is really important. Like, I want my kids to, to know that I like, I didn't pay any attention to my mom's family, her history, her family history growing up. Like the Vanderbilts. I consciously wanted nothing to do with them. I at my, in my 12 year old, you know, lizard brain, looked at like the poor Coopers, farmers.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  As the family you wanted.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  The messed up Vanderbilts. And I was like, I'm, I'm a Cooper. I'm glad I don't have this name.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  It's like, I want to connect with Uncle Raspberry.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, so I'm, I'm that, I'm a Cooper, I'm not a Vanderbilt. And, and it wasn't like there was a pot of gold waiting for me in like the Vanderbilt archives. They like, they spent all that money very quickly, the Vanderbilts did, from what I. But I, once I had kids of my own, suddenly I was like, I know nothing about the Vanderbilts. I know, I can tell you about the Coopers. And so I actually, I actually ended up writing a book about them mainly because I wanted to study them and understand who they were. So I could figure out. What to tell, like, explain to my kids, like, this weird lineage they have. Like, my dad, the only connection to the Vanderbilts I had as a kid, my dad once took me to Grand Central Station, which was founded by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was not a nice guy.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  And there's a statue of him outside Grand Central Station, which, by the way, he paid for and had made and set up there. And it wasn't like, his workers loved him and he did it. It was his. And he made photographs, he had paintings, painted himself and gave them out to all his children. Now, they wanted them either. But, uh, but I remember my dad taking me to see this statue when I was like six. And the only thing I took away from it was that grandparents turned into statues when they die, which is very relatable. I know, everybody feels this.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  We all have. Yes, none of us has not made that mistake.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  I know Andy Cohen makes fun of me. Anytime I tell a childhood story, he's like, "Oh, the Vanderbilt boy."

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Oh, the Vanderbilt, though. You're too Truman.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  But I wanted to, like, have a narrative to tell my kids about, like, this weird family that they came from, who achieved remarkable things, but also, you know, this guy who wasn't nice to any of the women in the family. And he sent his wife to a mental hospital because he wanted to have an affair with the babysitter. And, you know, so it's, uh, I do think, you know, for me, learning the history has been fascinating, but it's not something I ever paid any attention to. I just thought, no good can come of believing you're part of this thing that doesn't exist.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I'm picturing.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  I'm picturing the statue, you in front of the statue, thinking, that's where grandparents go.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. Of course, then, like, a month later, I went to the Museum of Natural History with my, you know, I don't know, it was my first grade class, Miss Kritz was the teacher. But we went to the Museum of Natural History with my class, and we were outside, and there's now that, you know, now infamous statue of Teddy Roosevelt on a horse with two indigenous people. And the teacher was like, "Does anyone know who this is?" And I raised my hand, I was like, "I think it's my grandfather." Which, again, relatable.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  It's just like, yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  And then they beat me up and, uh...

• 54:14Speaker 03

  But I, the, the thing that I like, I mean, I know we've got a listener question. And we'll, we'll get to this, but when I saw the documentary of you and your mother having those conversations, that's the thing that I, I, that I, I would encourage people to do now. It's like, collect those stories, you know, have those conversations now. I mean, grief is the thing, we, we have work to do to understand it, but there is just so much power in getting to know your own story while people are still alive.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  And those stories are not being passed on.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  They are not.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, with each generation, the details fade away more and more.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  Fade away. It gets a little murkier and you don't know who was that. And, you know, in our family, it's like, well, are, were they really a part of our family? Is that a real cousin or was that a play cousin? It's a, you know, you wanna, you wanna know all that stuff. And that's, that's work, that's better than having a storage locker full of stuff.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Because it does, I, I will tell you, once I read about the Vanderbolts and, and wrote a book about them, it made me feel more connected to America in a way. It made me feel more connected to New York City, like this city that they were in hundreds of years ago. And I became fascinated with, you know, the hidden history of New York. And, you know, I, the, there's the Starbucks near my house that was the site of, of, of the, the Astor riots, when there were competing groups in New York are rioting over two competing opera houses in Lower Manhattan, which makes no sense. But-

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Well, now that's on, what's the show? Gilded Age.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Oh, is that on the Gilded Age?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  That's the Gilded Age.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  See, I'm stopped. Well, I know, David.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  Oh my God, that's you. That's your family.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that is, that is literally my family. Yeah, yeah.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that, we, we saw the-

• 56:04Speaker 01

  A lot of the plotlines.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  We saw the, there was the opera-

• 56:07Speaker 01

  The opera riots. Okay. Well, there you go.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Gotta watch the Gilded Age. We'll talk about it.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  I don't need, like, yeah, I've never seen it. I've never-

• 56:15Speaker 02

  I don't blame you.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  I've never seen it. It hits too close to home.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Their portrayal of Dugan Babi. Shocking.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  That's not right. That's not right. Country home is never that small.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Hey, we catastrophists can only take so much.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  But it did make me, and knowing my dad's history, and I did the Skip Gates Follow Your, you know, Find Your Roots show, which was incredible. But it makes you feel more connected to the world and to where you are and to your community. And it just makes, it just makes you feel grounded in a way that I think so many of us don't grow up feeling grounded to our surroundings.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  We're kind of floating through.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Well, we have a listener question.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  All right.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  We always try and pay it forward here at IMO. And this question is from Nancy in Salt Lake City.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Hi, Craig. I'm Michelle. This is Nancy. I would love to hear you both talk a little about dealing with the loss of your mom, which I'm sure is going to be a hard question. I recently lost my dad in 2022, my mom in 2023, which obviously still makes me emotional. That was a hard 13 months. And obviously, the time since has been hard, too. As an only child, it really has been very difficult to process because I don't have anybody to process with a lot of the time. I'd love to hear how you guys have processed the grief, helped each other and moved on after losing your dad when you were younger and your mom more recently. Thank you.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  That's one of the few questions that is aimed right square at our forehead. So you want to go first?

• 58:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I think I'm still processing. You know, I don't, I don't think that there's a, you process it and that's that. And I, and I'm learning that there's no need to have processed it. I mean, I don't want to process my parents' lives and feel like I can pack it up. And that's that. Now that, you know, their memory, they are in my head every day. Every, the way I lead my life, how I show up in the world, the words that come out of my mouth, the impact that I'm trying to have. It's all.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  It's all because of that memory and the loss is a part of it. So I don't wanna, I, I, I'm still working that through.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Are the memories tinged with sadness because of the loss? Or is there distance that it, you can look at it without the?

• 59:09Speaker 03

  It, it depends on the time of day, right? I mean, there, we, there are plenty, plenty of times when we sit and laugh. Our family is laughter, you know? That's one, one of the ways we deal with, with grief. We sit and tell stories and we laugh about it. And then there are times, just like Craig, that feeling of just the mention of their name, it can't come out. And it's not sadness, it's just like, it's grief, you know?

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Missing, it's missing more than anything.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  And I, that hasn't gone away. It did, doesn't go away. My, our dad died, um, it's been.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Thirty four years ago.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Thirty four years ago. And look, I'm speaking all the time and I get interviewed all the time. And there's always the, what would your dad think of? You know, um, I don't care how many times I get that question. Just answering it, it chokes me up. Because of joy, but it's also longing of what he missed and didn't get a chance to see. And, you know, that's all, I don't think that's ever gonna go away.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  I, but I don't know that it needs to.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  I, I just think it's a part of me now, like, like life. His life is a part of me, his death is a part of me. Yeah, yeah. I feel them in different ways. I mean, time, what I would say, time matters, right? I mean, in terms of the day to day, pain, loss, grief, that's one of those things where I believe time heals all wounds. It just, you know, after a while, it, the, the, the cut becomes, uh, you know, skin healed and then it's scab and then it's scar. But the scar is always there. And my, my, the loss of my parents are scars on me and they will be there forever.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  But that's a part of life.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  There can be no other way.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  So I think part, you know, hearing you say that you just have to develop a relationship with grief. It's, it, you know, it's, the goal isn't to grieve and have it gone. It's just like, this is now a part of my life. I had the blessing of having these two amazing people whose loss I feel. And I couldn't have that without, you know, the loss is a part of having them. So if I had to do it all again, I'd choose to have them and go through the loss. But do I ever just feel like, phew, that's done? No, no. Some days I do, some days I don't.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  You know, I would say to Nancy and in this discussion, my parents, my, my mom particularly, because my dad died first. She did a really good job of, well, first of all, my parents did a really good job of loving us unconditionally. Right? And letting us know they loved us. There's nothing better than that. Especially when you lose one early. Because my mom did a real, really good job, and you'll remember this, and, and some people have heard me tell this story.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  My mom said to us, or she said to me, I don't know if she said it to us, when we were, we were fighting when my dad passed away, of course.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  We had one fight.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  That was like, our, yes, we had one fight. But it was like the only fight we had in our lives was when my dad died.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  And that was grief.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  And that was grief at the time. But my, you'll love this, my mom said to us, you know, your dad loved you and you knew how, you knew how much he loved you. And he knew how much you loved him.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  So you don't have to be upset about not knowing you guys loved each other. Cause he knew, he told me all the time.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  And that eased my pain. I don't know about you, but it eased my pain. And it made me sadder at the same time.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  And as my mom was getting older, we would talk about that. And that was her way of saying that she loved us.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  And don't worry, when I die, I know you love me.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  That was a, that's a gift that parents can give their kids when they're alive. To help the grieving process. I mean, it was, it, it, and, and when I get choked up, it's only because I miss her. I don't think I missed out on anything and would love to have her back, but.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  To Misha's point, you know, maybe I am, maybe you just grieve until the end of time. I don't know. Because I, I felt like I had got over my father's death. I had gotten over my father's death. Until my mom died. And then I regrieved for him.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  While I was grieving for my mom.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  But even the thought of I got over my father's death. Why? Why, why would that be? Why is that a mission?

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Well, it, it.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  And I'm not.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  It's only semantics.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  It's more a rhetorical question. It's not even a question for you.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  But it's only semantics in, in my case.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I, but I think that that's what people are trying to get to. They're like, when do I get over this? How do I, how do I get over this?

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  And we're learning, we have learned today that maybe you, you, you never get over it. And you, maybe you don't need to get over it. Maybe it's a relationship.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Like you said, it's a relationship now for the rest of your life. Well, I, I think that word process is.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  I'm not big on jargon and I think that word process is very overused because to me, it's like a word everybody uses. I don't really know what it means to process grief, like a cured meat or something. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I mean, I understand the therapeutic nature of it and, you know, feeling things and there are steps and all that. But I think a lot of people I hear from will say, okay, there's, you know, there's steps you go through and you process it and then suddenly you find yourself back at step one because you hear a song and it takes you right back to you're a kid again.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  I ran from this stuff for so long. I know what it is not to process and to try to push it down and it doesn't go away. And I know I feel better. It's harder feeling, but I like feeling and it makes me more able to feel your sadness and to feel your sadness. And I think that's a bond. You know, I've received the benefit of feeling my dad again and that's an incredible thing. I would always hear people talk about, oh, you know, I feel them in my heart or, and to me it always felt like a Hallmark card, but to

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  suddenly like feel my dad inside is beautiful. I don't feel it as much with my brother because I think there's, we both went to our individual corners when my dad died. We never talked about it and I think his death was so violent and sudden and shocking to me that I feel like, I sometimes feel like I don't even know who he was and that's a terrible feeling and I'm hoping that will change. But it's, you know, to feel, yeah, to feel these people alive inside me is incredible and it's such a blessing. And you can only get that if you process or whatever word you want to use.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  I want us all to just kind of. Hold space for it to say, yeah, this, this is going to have an impact on me. Or it has had an impact on me. And maybe by doing that, we can think about when something triggers us, when we're having a bad day, don't brush off, I wonder what's going on, you know? How about immediately going to, what am I grieving? You know, and, and maybe be easier on yourself first about it. Or get, get help or reach out or talk about it.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  So I would say to our, our listener, to Nancy, like, talk, you know? Don't sit alone in it.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Reach out, have conversations, find somebody to unburden yourself with the feelings. And that, you gotta do that. Don't sit alone. If she's thinking about it, then I'd say, don't, don't spend a whole lot of time just thinking about it. Do it, find a place, find a person.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the, the power of, you know, grief support groups. Sometimes it's hard to find communities, but they're, they're, you know, often available. And, and they, that could be an extraordinary thing to be in a place where you don't have to explain yourself to, you know, people who are in that room because they, they just know inherently. I was talking to a woman, Mary, whose, whose son died of glioblastoma. And I, I talked to her every couple of weeks. We just talk on the phone late at night and I never met her. But, um, but that's one of the things she just started going to a, a, a support group. And she says, like, I finally feel I can, I can relax there. I can, cause I don't need to kind of explain, you know, or am I going crazy? I can just be.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  And I would say, Nancy, whatever you're feeling, remember that probably everybody around you that you interact is trying to figure this out.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  That's for sure.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  And maybe it feels less lonely if we all see us as, you know, people in this process together and it all hurts. And whether you had a great relationship with the person or whatever their age or how it happened, it's a thing that happens. And if we could just be more gentle with other people in the way we would want to be gentle to our 10-year-old selves.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  That just that process of offering gentleness is helpful. I mean, I see that in you. The process of taking in other people's, leaving space for other people's empathy, this whole program, this project of yours is healing you.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, without a doubt.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  And you would think, my God, that's a lot. Like, we started out, why did you? Why are you doing this? But we were ending this conversation under like, what a gift you have that you have this healing experience happening, which ends up being you holding space for other people. That's a lesson. That's the power of kindness and empathy. And we need to be thinking about that in these times. And all you can do is, once you leave somebody, is to live a life worthy of theirs. That's how I think about it. My grieving is my life.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  It's like, I'm honoring Marion and Fraser by showing up every day in a way that would honor them. And I think that's, you know, it's better than tearing shit up.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  They would be very proud of you. Thanks, man.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  Anderson, thank you, man.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  This is.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure. It's really lovely.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  Really neat. Really neat.

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