Cameron Crowe on Grief, Memory and Music

Writer and director of “Almost Famous” among other films, Cameron Crowe, talks about the death of his sister Cathy when he was 10 years old, and how he has come to be "in conversation" with her now, all these decades later. It's a moving conversation about grief, memory, and music. For more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Madeleine Thompson 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. You're not alone. My guest is Cameron Crowe. He wrote and directed amazing movies like Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky. He wrote the screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High and also wrote and directed Almost Famous. He got an Academy Award for the screenplay for that film, which is based on his experiences as the youngest contributor ever for Rolling Stone magazine. It's an amazing story. Cameron graduated high school at 15 and started writing for Rolling Stone, interviewing rock legends like Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, The Who, and a lot of others.

• 1:12Anderson Cooper?

  He's now written a memoir about his childhood called The Uncool. It's a great read, and as soon as I finished it, I knew I wanted to speak with him for this podcast. Cameron experienced loss early on. He was just 10 when one of his two sisters, Kathy, died by suicide. She was 19. That's where we began our conversation. When you were growing up, after your sister Cathy's suicide-

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37Anderson Cooper?

  -in your family, was it talked about?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Anderson, it was aggressively avoided. It was more than not talked about. It was a hairpin turn whenever the subject got close.

• 1:51Anderson Cooper?

  At one point, you did have a conversation with your mom. You tried.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  I tried. I would try often and sometimes I'd get like thirty or forty seconds in before the emergency brake got pulled by her throwing her hands up and saying, "I can't talk about this. I don't want, don't make me talk about, don't make me talk about it." And then you just feel like you're this wicked person for delving deeper. A lot of the stuff that's been talked about in your amazing interviews, it's the things we bury and how they fester and how they never go away. You think they're gone. You think you've outlived them and they're there. When you open yourself up to all the questions, then you've got a

• 2:33Speaker 02

  shot at getting them answered. But what was amazing is that Kathy and even my dad, who died at a pretty young age, sixty-five, there were so many conversations that we had never had. And what I found was, and I don't know if you've found this to be the case, but people leave clues behind, sometimes often on purpose. They leave clues behind, the songs they loved, the books they loved, the photos they loved. Usually it's not a diary, it's the little things. And so I found that I was collecting all these little crumbs that had been left behind by Kathy and my dad. My dad left behind a box of slides and

• 3:17Speaker 02

  he was in the Korean War, but I never talked to him about where he was in the Korean War. And did he ever kill anybody? You know, we never talked about it, but he left these slides behind. And using the internet, I was able to like find out where these pictures of him at war were taken. The front line. He was on the front lines of the Korean War.

• 3:40Anderson Cooper?

  Which were very brutal. I mean, it was a very, very difficult fighting.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Brutal. And I knew him as a real estate man, but I met him as a soldier writing the book, which was amazing.

• 3:51Anderson Cooper?

  And you said that in writing the book, you found yourself in conversation with Kathy?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  I did. I had a really wonderful conversation with Kathy because, again, If you dig, if you look for these crumbs, I found a piece in a small local newspaper from Palm Springs where she had been part of like a weekly book club and she came in with this book. It said, "This is the best book I've ever read" and was effusive about how it spoke to her. So the book was called The Fairy Doll and I couldn't go fast enough to find this book. And I read the book and it was a thinly veiled account of her own feeling like she was not a part of most of, of the lives of the people who judged her

• 4:36Speaker 02

  because she was bipolar and painfully so at a time when people really didn't have room in their hearts or minds for that kind of situation. So she had found a book where the salvation for that feeling of being left out and pushed away from crowds and friendship was music. That was the theme of this book. There was a sound that delivered this young girl who was ridiculed by all the people around her. There was a sound that gave her a transcendent feeling. And I read this, I'm like, "Well, this fits exactly with the way Kathy was with me." Her key to salvation was music.

• 5:17Anderson Cooper?

  You write in the book about Kathy, you said, "There were periods when she was just gone from us, even when she was sitting right there at the table. It was confusing and scary for a kid. The house felt different, like something fragile had cracked and we were all tiptoeing around it. When Kathy was institutionalized, it changed the energy of the house completely. There was a silence that hadn't been there before. My parents were worried in a way that felt permanent. I didn't really understand what was happening. I just knew something was broken and nobody could explain it in a way that made sense to me."

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:46Anderson Cooper?

  What was Kathy like?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Kathy was a deep feeling romantic and so am I. And so much of what I learned about her underlined the things that made me kind of who I am and the choices that I made. And so that was an example of an older sister coming through the mists of time, loss, grief.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Being expelled from huge parts of her life when she walked the earth, coming back to speak so clearly and so eloquently to me about music.

• 6:26Anderson Cooper?

  You write that somewhere around first grade Cathy came home and you said it with the words that changed everything. "The kids are teasing me about not being normal," she said. My parents' lives had become a quest for Cathy's diagnosis. Her emotions could swing wildly from sweetness to sadness. "What's wrong with Cathy?" I asked. My parents, who were probably as confused about her condition as I was, would struggle to explain it to me. They used the phrase emotionally disturbed. It was a kind explanation for where the doctors in Los Angeles had also diagnosed as schizophrenic.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  I remember going through the hallways of these spotless hospitals and doctors' buildings in LA. They were searching for a diagnosis on my sister. And I just remember the drives home, Anderson. Everybody was so distraught. And there was nobody that kind of bent down and said, "Look, I know what you're going through. Let's look to find some kind of comfort for this young girl." I don't think they ever heard a kind voice like that. And a lot of it was the time and place.

• 7:35Anderson Cooper?

  There was a lot of shame involved.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  So much shame. And she left us without getting that kind of a helping hand from a doctor or a program.

• 7:47Anderson Cooper?

  She had attempted suicide once.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  She did, once before. You know, she tried to kill herself.

• 7:53Anderson Cooper?

  You knew she had tried?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yes, there was a conversation around the house that I kind of overheard, which was epic and scary to overhear, for sure. I remember the doctors were like, "Well, it can't be real. It wasn't a serious effort." Even as a kid, I remember thinking, "Not a serious effort."

• 8:15Speaker 02

  That's a serious effort, but I just, I couldn't have imagined how comforting it was to write the book and kind of have a little get together with the people I loved so much and wanted to know better. And they were right there. I mean, even my mom used to say, when I leave this plane of existence, I'll still be here. It's just a thin wall and I'll just be on the other side.

• 8:42Anderson Cooper?

  Do you feel that? Do you feel she is?

• 8:44Speaker 02

  I do. I feel her voice. I definitely feel her many notes, faxes, letters.

• 8:50Anderson Cooper?

  She's still giving you notes?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  They're still arriving. I can, I, I, I open a box and they're just freshly there. There's like an existential or a magical way of thinking about it. And then there's also a practical way. I, I toggle between all of them. The practical way is she really loved me and she wanted to keep timely reminders coming my way about, of lessons she had learned or that the family had learned. So it's both. I, I still feel her, I definitely feel her on, you know, just on the other side, whenever I'm open to it, for sure. Do you feel that?

• 9:29Anderson Cooper?

  I do. I feel that now with my dad and it's an incredible feeling. And I talk to him now. And I feel that with, I had a nanny who was like my mom to me and, and very important in my life. And I feel her, especially when I'm like holding my kids.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 9:44Anderson Cooper?

  I, I don't feel my brother and his death, which was by suicide. It's so, even now, difficult for me to think about without, you know, this weird crack in my voice. And it makes me wonder if I ever really knew who he was. And I asked the question about, did you know about Kathy's attempt? Because I had no idea my brother was struggling in this way. And, and I wonder if he had attempted and survived, how I would have, how any of us would have dealt with that, if we would have been even able to deal with and face that.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Did he confide in anybody?

• 10:21Anderson Cooper?

  He didn't. He didn't.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 10:24Anderson Cooper?

  I think there's more for me to learn there. And I'm just now like literally taking it on as a project. And I think he may have to individual friends. Kind of shown up in their lives in odd times in the final weeks, but nobody put pieces together. We thought he was talking to a therapist and that allowed me certainly to not give it as much attention as I now obviously wish I had.

• 10:49Anderson Cooper?

  But the way Kathy's life ended, does it impact the way you think of her?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Well, it's an amazing question. It does. It does. There's a letter that she wrote not too long before she killed herself that was a very eloquent and helpless cry for help. And she didn't know what she didn't know, except she knew there was something there in a life that wasn't happening for her. And one of those things was empathy from, from the world around her. And it was so heartbreaking to see how helpless that she felt. I do think about her as, as so helpless at the end.

• 11:38Anderson Cooper?

  Was that a letter you found later?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  My sister Cindy shared it with me. It was a letter home. She had tried living in another city and state with other parts of the family. And Anderson had gone really poorly. So she kind of came home with her hopes and dreams tail between her legs and didn't stick around much long after that. So what I think about a lot is that in a time of need, when you look to the world for empathy, how do you handle the fact that nobody's taking time to show you any empathy? And I just wished I was older and

• 12:19Speaker 02

  was able to spot that in Kathy. But I wasn't. And my memory for a long time was that she used to tousle my hair and mess my hair up and that she really got a kick out of me. And I was grateful for that.

• 12:34Anderson Cooper?

  And used to purr like a kitten to you?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, all, all, all true. And I loved her little cats. I

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Glasses and I just thought, oh, she's so pretty, especially when she takes the glasses off. That was a big thing for me. I remembered thinking, when I get a little older, I'm gonna figure out a way to tell her how beautiful she looks without the glasses. That was my dream of where our relationship was gonna go.

• 13:01Anderson Cooper?

  It's interesting you say that. I said this in my brother's eulogy. I imagined he and I would become friends one day as adults and that would kind of meet on the other sides of our childhood, which I think we both felt like we needed to just get through. And I felt like we had a secret pact, like we would be friends as adults. And then I, yeah, I think I imagined that.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Wow. The adult to adult thing is a little bit of a trap because you think down the line, it's all gonna be equal, we're gonna be kicking back, we're gonna talk about all this stuff. And sometimes the time to do all that is right in the moment. This was one of the things that I was thinking about, knowing we were gonna have this conversation, which is so valuable, these conversations you've had with deeply soulful feeling people. What can I bring to the table of grief and feeling these things and being able to talk about it? The one thing I kept coming back to is, don't waste the moments that arrive

• 14:12Speaker 02

  where you have that little voice that says, forget adult to adult, you're here now, talk to them now, tell them you love them now. Because this is the moment where the little voice inside is telling you to do it. And do it now. That really became a thing. Like, I wish every time that little voice inside had said, this could be the last time you ever see this person, tell them you love him. I mostly listened to it, but with my dad, the last time I talked to him, I didn't listen to it. So it was the one time I never told him I loved him in a million conversations. And of course, it was the last time. So say it.

• 14:53Anderson Cooper?

  When you talk about feeling Kathy now, is that, is it a good feeling? It's not tainted?

• 14:59Speaker 02

  It's another great question. It's, it's a beautiful, close feeling. Like I picked up a cue from her and got it just the way she wanted me to get it. It's that sparkle between people when you made a, a great connection. And I felt that before as a, just as a little kid to an older sister. But it's the adult to adult connection that I feel we finally got to make. Through music, through emotion, through being able to write about it, just listening to you read some of the stuff right there, I just, I go right back to the searching. I wanted to meet her, I wanted to know her better.

• 15:38Anderson Cooper?

  And she gave you the gift of music. She introduced you to the, the magic of it.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  She did. She, she said that thing that nobody had said to me before in her own deeply personal way, that when words fail you, ride music. It'll take you a long way and it has. It's taken me everywhere I've been able to go. Making movies is a musical experience most of the time for me. And I can go back to music as a diary and as a souvenir for the way I felt in a certain time. And music was what allowed her to, to introduce herself to me as an adult. And I go back to what you and Patti Smith were talking about. The sacred wounds are not painful necessarily.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  The sacred wounds can be treasures. And these sacred wounds I have for my sister and my dad and my mom and friends beyond my family, it keeps the conversation alive with people that understood you and vice versa. And I think you, you do that in this, in these conversations, Anderson. You keep the lines of communication open without emotional censorship. It's really important.

• 17:01Anderson Cooper?

  We're going to take a quick break, but before we do, I just want to play what Patty Smith said to me about sacred wounds in an earlier podcast that Cameron just spoke about.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  It's not a thing where time heals all wounds. It's just in time you learn to navigate it more because nothing really heals. They're sacred wounds. They're not going to heal.

• 17:20Anderson Cooper?

  They're sacred wounds?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, you just learn to live with them. Don't look to be healed. You have a sacred wound, take care of it. Don't let it get infected.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  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.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  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.

• 18:09Speaker 04

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

• 18:19Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome back to my conversation with Cameron Crowe. Kathy died in your home. You were 10 years old. She was 19. You write, "They had removed her body from the house while I was asleep. It happened on a Wednesday night, less than two weeks after her 19th birthday. My mom found her. We were now living in the house where it happened."

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I couldn't shake that feeling, the house where it happened. I'm always surprised when people stay in a house where there was extreme sadness or even tragedy. A lot of people do. I just feel like the spirits of things that happened in a house or a place or even a city sometimes linger in such a powerful way. And I wouldn't want it any other way. I think it's important that things don't just disappear. Feeling, songs, a legendary event, falling in love, I would go back to places where important things happened. Even the San Diego Sports Arena, that's a scene in Almost Famous. That's my favorite scene in the movie.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Kate Hudson as Penny Lane. This amazing concert is over and she's in the full throes of her love affair with Billy Crudup's character. But the band is gone, everybody's gone, and she's dancing in the trash of the concert hall where this great event has happened. I feel like so much of my life I've done that. I've gone back and danced among the trash of the empty concert hall because it's just, it's a place where deep feeling resides. The people that we love and care so much about, who made such an impression on us, are still there. And if we open up to them, they're so often there to meet us at that crossroads.

• 20:13Anderson Cooper?

  She had taken you to a record store prior to her death?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  We lived in the desert. We lived in India. And India was a windswept town where nothing happened except the date festival once a year.

• 20:30Anderson Cooper?

  Like dates?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Like dates. Like, like-

• 20:33Anderson Cooper?

  Which, as you point out in the book, are the color of cockroaches.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  The color of cockroaches. Anderson, thank you for picking that out. You tend to pick out my favorite lines in this book.

• 20:42Anderson Cooper?

  Yes.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  But yes, they had a festival for dates. And the way you got records was to go to this place called Custom Classics that was both a music store and also records if you ordered them. So she took me to my first record store and showed me that it was a portal to so much and so much feeling.

• 21:03Anderson Cooper?

  She took you because you wanted to impress a girl and she suggested buying some music for this girl and you bought Silence is Golden.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  The Tremolos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Silence is Golden. But when I did give the record, the girl was so impressed, she called over her boyfriend, who would pat me on the head and thank me for being their little mascot and invited me to come along on the date that I'd suggested.

• 21:29Anderson Cooper?

  Wow.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  But I can tell you, this is the power of music. Whenever I hear that Tremolos record, I ache, baby.

• 21:36Anderson Cooper?

  Let's play a little bit of that.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  It's so painful.

• 22:22Anderson Cooper?

  Do you find it painful?

• 22:24Speaker 02

  I find it beautiful and painful. It's happy sad. It's my favorite kind of music. It aches, but the fact that there's somebody that aches like you makes you feel like you're not alone, which makes it joyful. So you get both. It's the happy sad music. She had another favorite song called "Rhythm of the Rain" by The Cascades, and it was similarly achy and beautiful. Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain. And this was Kathy. This was her shining a flashlight towards a place that really resonated with me. And I wonder if she created it or if it was always there? That's a question I don't know the answer to.

• 23:07Anderson Cooper?

  I at times wished my brother had left some sort of a note, and he didn't. And Kathy didn't leave a message for you either, but something happened after she died that you felt was like a message from her?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  The deeply poetic thing was after she died, we still were getting the records that she'd ordered. And they were diaries, really, of her and her personality and her life. They were Beach Boys records. They were beautiful pop that some people might have discarded as fluff, but it wasn't to her, and it isn't to me.

• 23:42Anderson Cooper?

  It was "California Girl" and "Don't Worry Baby." I just want to play "Don't Worry Baby."

• 24:19Anderson Cooper?

  What a message for her to leave you with.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  I know, I know. It'll stay with me always. And I just, listening to that, it never ceases to be powerful and take me to that place where you're just kind of up above, seeing, seeing the beautiful kind of landscape of your life. I go to that place with that record. Forgive me for being a rock journalist here for a second. Brian Wilson was not quote unquote "cool" when he made that record. It was thought to be like disposable pop. And he just religiously stayed with making these records about feeling and ache and

• 25:02Speaker 02

  the quick passing of a joyful moment that we hold on to. A lot of the stuff we've been talking about, he would put it in a two-minute pop song and wasn't cool for many years. And look at what's happened. Pet Sounds is considered to be maybe the greatest record ever made, along with Joni Mitchell Blue. And if you're feeling alone and you're feeling some of that stuff, that music will meet you wherever you choose to meet it. And it found Kathy and Kathy passed it to me and I've passed it to many others and put it in movies too.

• 25:38Anderson Cooper?

  And you write in the book, "I wondered why Kathy hadn't left me a message of some kind, not even a suicide note. And then I remembered the record she'd ordered. My California girl sister was telling me not to worry, baby."

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think that was exactly right. She wanted to continue giving me that message. And it kept coming to me too, again and again and again, that to be a warrior for optimism in your life means that you have to kind of travel through many a buzzsaw. And so many of the lessons from grieving her came in the form of like, go get through it, even though she was unable to. With the pain is joy. And the ache there is that she gave up on the joy for one day.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  And I feel this a lot about people that have committed suicide, that they might have been one day away because moods are so up and down. There's a good chance that terrible day might be followed by a day where you laugh at yourself for how seriously you took it all the day before. And I wish I'd been old enough to have that conversation with Kathy. But time was not Kathy's friend. Had she been born later, there would have been a diagnosis. There would have been a path for her. But if you subscribe to that idea, there's a paper thin wall between you and the person that you lost.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Our relationship has never been better.

• 27:21Anderson Cooper?

  You still have a relationship with her, you feel?

• 27:24Speaker 02

  I really feel it. I really feel it. And I feel like my mom had to exit the stage for it to truly happen. I wish I'd been able to talk to my mom about it, but I don't think that ever was going to happen. That was how much that loss remained unmet with her.

• 27:47Anderson Cooper?

  That idea that you can still have a relationship with someone who's died was revolutionary to me. And I learned it from a documentary filmmaker named Kristen Johnson, who made a film about her dad, who recently died from Alzheimer's. She brought up that idea and I literally did not understand the word she was talking about. That's how like deeply buried I was, but I now understand that. And I have a deeper relationship with my dad now than I did before. And I know him in ways I never did before.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  No doubt. The other thing is when you become the age of the parent who you've lost, like when I became the age of my dad, when he died, oh, did the gates open to some other stuff? Because it's a really basic feeling when you're a kid. It's like you pass into a whole other kingdom where you're anointed as an adult and you lose the feelings that cripple you as a kid. You become, oh, an adult. Then you get to be the age of your parent and you're like, oh, man.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  There's no more answers than there used to be. There's just different questions. This is amazing. My dad was just a guy.

• 28:59Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Trying to make it.

• 29:00Anderson Cooper?

  Struggling along like everybody else.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  And trying to appear like he had more answers than he did to the kid who was me. So then that secret gets passed along, that there's no secret.

• 29:12Anderson Cooper?

  There is no Oz behind the curtain.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  There is no Oz.

• 29:16Anderson Cooper?

  And there's no champagne in the champagne room and no Oz behind the curtain.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  But there is your dad going, "Welcome, brother."

• 29:27Anderson Cooper?

  I love that. That's great. That is great.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  You're no longer the child, you're a brother.

• 29:34Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  It's a little of what happened, but viva all of it, because the happy sad of life, it's riveting.

• 29:42Anderson Cooper?

  I did an interview with Megan Faley, whose spouse Andrea Gibson was a spoken word poet who recently died. And they wrote a poem from the afterlife, and it talks about death is only a portal to here. I'm more present now than I've ever been before, and I'm so close to you. And Megan uses the term allegedly when talking about Andrea's death.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great.

• 30:00Anderson Cooper?

  And Megan's point is, we have no idea what happens when somebody dies. So allegedly, they're dead, but they could be right here. Like, as you said, it could be a veil right here.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Alleged.

• 30:10Anderson Cooper?

  They're all around.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  It's alleged.

• 30:11Anderson Cooper?

  It's alleged.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great. That's just great.

• 30:15Anderson Cooper?

  After Kathy died, you say, "Her turquoise chair, the one where Kathy used to sit, was still in the kitchen table. Her room had been cleaned out, some of her clothes had been given away. Removing that turquoise chair from the kitchen felt like injustice, and so it remained there. The empty chair, nobody wanted to be the one to remove it." How, how long did it stay there?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  It stayed there for about a year, and then it went to the garage. And I used to go sit in it, in the garage. But the empty chair was her.

• 30:44Anderson Cooper?

  So you guys couldn't talk about her, but the chair remained, and nobody talked about the chair?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  That's why there's an empty chair at the table in Almost Famous. It's kind of a, a little message to those of us who were at the table, that somebody can have exited but still be there so clearly and passionately still there in your life. Yeah, the empty chair was her, is her still, but I feel like I filled it. And did the work to find all the clues she left behind. So the chair is not as empty to me now. And it's really the first time I've realized it is just sitting here talking about it right now. That the fact that you and I can even talk about Kathy,

• 31:29Speaker 02

  she is a real person to us both. For for this glorious reason that you read the book, Anderson. She lives and we get to talk about her. And her message resonates through the decades. It's it's amazing. So that chair is no longer empty for me. Thank you.

• 31:48Anderson Cooper?

  One of the other things that you wrote, which really hit me, you're talking about Kathy, you said, lately, I've become obsessed with something that had come to me when I last visited her ashes tucked into the wall of the mausoleum courtyard in Riverside. I realized that I still thought of her from the perspective of a 10 year old. To a 10 year old Kathy was a full grown adult. These days I saw things with more perspective. Kathy was still a teenager when she died. She was she was a kid.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. She was a kid. She was a teenager.

• 32:19Anderson Cooper?

  That realization that your vantage point has been the 10 year old child you were when she died. I have, I mean, God, I resonate so much. I have, it's taken a long time for me to not view everything through the eyes of the 10 year old boy that I was like frozen in time.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Same here. Same here. There's a comfort in that in a way to get out of that frozen moment and try and live in the feeling and

• 32:46Anderson Cooper?

  And to see it through the eyes of an adult, to to hold the grief in the hands of an adult rather than the hands of a 10 year old boy.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  It's powerful and it's necessary. And to take that jump, I think is heroic for both of you. It's listening to them and taking their hand across time. And I mean, that's, that's a gift. And a lot of people don't make it to that stage of having the adult to adult feeling about somebody you've lost and felt so much for.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  But to do it is huge. And they're there waiting for us, I'm sure of it.

• 33:31Anderson Cooper?

  You believe that?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  I, I know it.

• 33:34Anderson Cooper?

  I believe that too. I don't want to give your mom short shrift here because your mom is such a life force that I'm obsessed with.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  And she you, my friend, when I saw you in New York and we were talking about our moms, boy, could I feel her.

• 33:52Anderson Cooper?

  I have started to quote your mom in my own life. Doubt is the devil. This one still blows my mind. Mind is in every cell of the body. What you say will make it so. I mean, that's sort of life changing for me. Opportunity favors the prepared mind.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Anderson, you don't know, hearing these words come out of your mouth, she's gonna appear in about 20 seconds.

• 34:15Anderson Cooper?

  I want her in my life.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  It's too much for her to leave behind. She wa, she is in your life.

• 34:22Anderson Cooper?

  Oh, and you dropped another one in an interview. Wait, I, I wrote it down because I was like, there's another one. It was in a note you found. My notes are so disorganized. Oh, you ne, oh, no, no, no, sorry. You never know, good luck or bad.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  You're, you're amazing. I was just gonna, I was just gonna say that one. You never know, good luck or bad is such a winner.

• 34:44Anderson Cooper?

  And what you think is bad luck now turns out two months from now or 20 years from now to be the best decision you ever made, the best thing that ever happened.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  It's like one door closes, another door opens. I love that you never know, good luck or bad landed in your life. This is, uh, there's celebration up in heaven.

• 35:01Anderson Cooper?

  But given the force that she was and is, she died in 2019. My mom died in 2019 a, as well. How was her death for you?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  I wasn't prepared for it, even though she had left behind files, books, notebooks, thick notebooks, thinner notebooks, notebooks in every city where we were. If I die here, here's what you do. The, the guy that ran the mortuary looked at my mom's materials. He, he said, I've never met anyone or just missed meeting anyone who was this prepared. She was, and still I wasn't prepared for it. But there was a great sense of humor that she leaves behind in all of it because.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  It's just hilarious how detailed she was. I miss her. She knew I was gonna miss her, but as she said, "You're gonna miss me a lot. I wanna make it easier for you. I wanna make you laugh a little." And she did.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  She makes me laugh now, hearing you quote her.

• 35:58Anderson Cooper?

  I could talk to you for hours, but I know you gotta go. I so admire you, and I so love this book. It's The Uncool, a memoir. Obviously, you are like the coolest person on the planet, but the fact that you feel uncool just speaks to your good character. I have a live grief show on Thursday nights, and people leave the names of their loved one for me to say out loud. And I like this idea that everybody listening to the podcast will say the names of these people whose names are now often not spoken. So if you just end by saying your dad's name, and your mom's name, and your sister's name.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  James Albert Crowe, Alice Marie Crowe, Kathleen Janice Crowe.

• 36:37Anderson Cooper?

  Cameron Crowe, thank you so much.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Thank you, Anderson.

• 36:39Anderson Cooper?

  Thank you.

• 36:41Anderson Cooper?

  Cameron Crowe's memoir, The Uncool, is out now. And if you haven't watched Almost Famous, it's worth seeing, as are frankly, all of his films. Thursday, May 7th, I hope you join me at 9:15 PM for my streaming show, All There Is Live. You can watch it on our grief community page, CNN.com/AllThereIs. It streams live there for free. It'll also be free to stream on our community page for a week. All the older episodes of the show are available on demand for CNN subscribers. On the next episode of All There Is, we'll have a conversation with Today Show co-host Chanel Jones, whose husband, Uche, died last May. Here's some of what we talked about.

• 37:18Speaker 06

  I feel like I have been able to get a special key. And the key comes at a cost. And when you have this grief key, it unlocks the door to a club that you're in, and that I'm in, and others are in. And it allows us to be in this special matrix of, I think, understanding and clarity, or at least the recognition that we're in a search for. And it's just really a beautiful way to live life, because it's almost like you have another sense that's built into it.

• 37:51Anderson Cooper?

  That's on the next episode of All There Is. If there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others, leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. Thanks for listening.

• 38:04Speaker 06

  Get ready for election night. CNN is available to stream live now with an All Access subscription. Plus, get exclusive content and interactive Q and As with CNN's journalists. Subscribe now. Visit CNN.com/AllAccess.