Amanda Peet: ‘There’s No Algorithm For Grief’

Both of actress Amanda Peet’s parents were in hospice care when she learned she had breast cancer. Her father died the same weekend she was diagnosed, and her mother died some four months later. Now cancer free, she talks with Anderson Cooper about facing her own health battle while grieving her parents and feeling “untethered” in their absence. For more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Emily Williams and Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is Amanda Peet. She's an actress, a producer, and a writer. She's been in films like The Whole Nine Yards and Something's Gotta Give. She's currently starring in Your Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV+. Amanda grew up here in New York City with her sister Alyssa, who's a doctor, her mom Penny, who's a psychotherapist, social worker, and her dad Charles, who is a lawyer. Amanda has three kids now with her husband David Benioff, who's probably best known for co-creating the TV series Game of Thrones. In late August of 2025, Amanda was diagnosed with breast cancer. The following day, her father died, and her mom died some four months later.

• 0:45Anderson Cooper?

  I read a moving essay that Amanda wrote in The New Yorker about what happened called "My Season of Ativan." We reached out to her, and she kindly agreed to talk with me about it. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:00Anderson Cooper?

  Can you talk a little bit about the diagnosis that you got?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  I was just blindsided. I mean, it was just one of those things. It was the Friday of Labor Day weekend, and I guess they were watching the spot. I didn't really realize that somehow. And I said, "If you were a betting woman, what would you, what do you think?" And she said, "I think you have cancer." My doctor was able to call on the Saturday morning to say that indeed, the quick biopsy had come back and that I had breast cancer, and it was lobular breast cancer. And then that evening, my sister called to tell me that our stepmother had said that my dad was failing. And so I got on the plane, and it was too late. The next morning, he passed away at 6:00 in the morning.

• 1:45Anderson Cooper?

  How long had your dad been sick for?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  He had a hard time in the last, like, two years, but he didn't get really sick until he had a fall about six months before this. And then it was pretty quick. The end was really awful. He was very agitated and stuff, but I saw him two weeks before he died, and he was able to talk to me. We went to a restaurant. He was in a wheelchair, but he was able to talk a little bit and eat a little bit.

• 2:13Anderson Cooper?

  By the time you got to your dad's place, he had died?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And she was very emotional.

• 2:21Anderson Cooper?

  Your sister was, who's a doctor?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then, once we left the apartment, she was more able to be like, his body is just his body. And I was much more like panicked about where his body was going and how it was so impersonal. This was just so impersonal, how you're just taking his body. It's so weird.

• 2:44Anderson Cooper?

  These people showed up.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yes, it's so insane.

• 2:47Anderson Cooper?

  You're describing this as like the Blues Brothers, dressed in dark suits and with a body bag.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was something just so rushed about it and so impersonal about it that really was torturous for me, even though I knew he was dead and it was just his body. It was, I think, much easier for my sister to be more clinical about it once his body left the building. And I felt this weird sense of like wanting to go save him. Like, who are these people? Like, it was a weird sense of being possessive of him.

• 3:19Anderson Cooper?

  Had you felt that before?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  No, and definitely not about him. I was much, much closer with my mom. In fact, I feel like now, looking back, now that it's been a few months, like, I feel like my dad definitely got the short end of the stick in terms of my attentiveness. He was less sensitive and he was more unfazed. So if I couldn't make it to something, I always thought he was kind of like, yeah, whatever. Whereas my mom was more like, well, that'll hurt my feelings if you don't come to that.

• 3:49Anderson Cooper?

  I want to ask you about a couple of specific things you wrote about. You talked about your sister weeping, seeing your father's body, and you didn't. You said, "I just stood there in a state of morbid fascination. I had never seen a dead body up close before, let alone someone so familiar to me. I felt guilty for not crying, but at least I got a reprieve from guessing how much longer I had to live."

• 4:09Speaker 01

  I was really at a remove, like, I was watching it from some kind of altitude.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Maybe for both things, like the cancer and my dad's death. And also felt like a weird sense of like I'm stealing bases. Like I had one foot on the cancer and I was trying to like, connect with the fact that my dad was dying and honor him by thinking about him, by being present. And then I was thinking a lot about Tim O'Brien, the writer, The Things They Carried.

• 4:40Anderson Cooper?

  What about that book?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  It had a huge impact on me, weirdly. Tim O'Brien had a little girlfriend when he was in like fifth grade and she gets cancer and she dies and his dad takes him to see the body, which is crazy. And he then starts having these daydreams that he makes up purposely so he can be with her more. And at one point he says to her, what's it like to be dead? And she's like, it's not so bad. It's kind of like being a book on a shelf that nobody's reading. And that has stuck with me for years. And that's what I couldn't stop thinking about when I saw the hearse and we kept walking.

• 5:23Anderson Cooper?

  Do you think that's what it's like?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  No, because I think it's even worse because it's not even consciousness. This is when I feel really dark about death. It's that it's in perpetuity, lack of consciousness. I would rather be a book on a shelf that's like, hey, hey. You know?

• 5:44Anderson Cooper?

  It's just nothingness.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  It's nothingness. That's what I can't. And for infinity. Somebody recently said, well, why aren't you upset that you weren't alive before? You never cared. And I was, and I'm like, that doesn't help me.

• 5:59Anderson Cooper?

  We're going to take a quick break. Coming up, I talk with Amanda about the panic she felt as a mom facing her cancer diagnosis.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:26Anderson Cooper?

  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.

• 6:47Speaker 02

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

• 6:55Speaker 01

  By the time I was back in L.A., I was back to panicking about the cancer. And that took over everything until I knew that I wasn't, that I wasn't like in trouble, which took a little while.

• 7:09Anderson Cooper?

  Was the panic, the idea of leaving your children?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yes. The biggest thing was like, I will not do this to my children. I couldn't tolerate that feeling of like that I was going to be a source of grief like that when they were so young. And I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear it.

• 7:31Anderson Cooper?

  I was never afraid of dying and put myself in situations where there was a very real possibility of it and perhaps intentionally flirting with that line. But now, the idea of, I was 10 when my dad died, the idea of dying around with my kids being that age is, it's unthinkable to me.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:51Anderson Cooper?

  It's interesting because I now, it's one of the ways I understand my dad more because now I know what he felt when he knew he was dying. I understand how horrible he must have felt about that.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  One thing I thought about was this woman, when we lived in London, we did a carpool with these two daughters and the mother had cancer. And I remember my mom made us go to their birthday party. It's one of the sisters, it was her birthday. And I was eight, maybe, my sister was probably 10. And they were kind of nerdy and weird. And, and we were really mad at my mom that she was making us go. And she said, well, the mom is sick, which we didn't know. And at the birthday party, there were all these balloons in the front room. And the mom was just lying on the couch, like somewhat corpse-like, with stockings that were like way too big. And she was not the right color and had the wig was like slightly askew.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  And I remember being so disturbed by it. But when I thought about it, when I had cancer and was thinking about my children, I was like, how beautiful, how beautiful that the family had the strength to include her and come what may and not treat her and the pain and the grief as something to be sectioned off, like a cordoned off thing that's like not to be seen, not to be talked about. I thought it was so beautiful, even though as a child I felt almost repelled by it.

• 9:20Anderson Cooper?

  It sounds like you had, growing up, this incredible level of communication with your mom.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  My whole life, she taught me how to talk about my feelings.

• 9:32Anderson Cooper?

  I guess as a teenager, you were in psychoanalysis at the same time as she was in psychoanalysis training.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yes, we were insufferable.

• 9:42Anderson Cooper?

  So there was a lot of, a lot of talk about feelings, which is very much different than the way I grew up.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yes, I know, I know, it's different from the way you grew up, yeah. And different from the way she grew up. Whereas I have always found it to be extremely comforting to be able to talk to someone who has been through the same thing or talk to someone who isn't going to judge me. I can't keep it inside. As long as I could tell her something, I felt like... The world sort of righted itself. So at first, it was a very childlike sense that a lot of us have when we just hold on to our mom's sleeve when we feel unease. But later, when we were both adults, it became our ability to really talk deeply about very uncomfortable things. My sister wasn't like this at all.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  It was kind of like my sister and my dad had a certain style of dealing with uncomfortable feelings, and then my mom and I had a certain style. And it's taken me a long time to realize there is beauty in both ways of handling things. She was diagnosed Parkinson's like right as my sister and I were having our own families and our careers were like in full swing. And she was in her late 50s. She told my sister and me that she was having trouble getting out of a car. There was something weird about the way she was making these certain transitions, I think, from sitting to standing. And so we went up to Columbia, and within 30 seconds, the doctor was like, yo, she has Parkinson's.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  And in the back of my mind, I knew once she had Parkinson's, like I was like, I want to get pregnant right away. I want my children to know her. But she was extremely lucky. She had a very slow progression in the beginning. We still got her for a long time before she started to lose it. But there were still just so many times where I was so busy.

• 11:32Anderson Cooper?

  Well, your mom was in hospice for a long time.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:34Anderson Cooper?

  She was in a cottage right outside your house.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I didn't realize that there was a difference between acute hospice and just hospice. So my mom's geriatrician said, I think she should start hospice. But he sort of meant more like, she's going to be taking 30 pills a day. And I guess I thought it was going to be a precipitous thing, but it wasn't.

• 11:55Anderson Cooper?

  What was that like for you?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  It was so many things. It was torture and to see her that way. And it was also really beautiful and filled me with many regrets. I wished I had been a better caregiver before she was so sick. The worst day, when she was really dying, like she, the hospice person told me, she's transitioning. And I just couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop crying. And I was like panicking about whether I'd sucked the marrow out of life with her, like if I had done everything right, whether I had seized the day enough with her, included her enough.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Talked to her enough, gone to enough movies. I got really scared. It was like a fever dream. It was a very strange and haunting feeling of like wanting to go back in time, like a child and spend time with her and talk to her. I have a wonderful therapist who told me like, you don't have to rush over there and try to connect with her now. Like, you don't have to do that. Like, it's the sum total. She was trying to tell me that the bucket is full from many, many, many, many years of what transpired between us.

• 13:13Anderson Cooper?

  I think that's very true.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:15Anderson Cooper?

  I understand that feeling of regret, did I spend the time with her? I should. Now that I have little kids, like, and how much I love to be with them, the idea of me being old and them being in their twenties and me only seeing them occasionally is just terrifying to me.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I couldn't get over this one incident. We came home from my daughter's bat mitzvah and she was already with Jerome, my, our caregiver, and she couldn't walk or anything like that and wore diapers, but she had an accident in my new car. And I was such a bitch and was so shaming. And I couldn't believe how I had been. And Jerome was like, you should tell her. So I told her. She was really blank, but I just said, I'm really sorry. I was. But I rejected her so much when she was sick because I was so busy with my kids.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  It was like a terrible, in my mind, there was a very unfortunate kind of timing with everything.

• 14:22Anderson Cooper?

  Talking about your mom, you said, I was always waiting for glimpses of who she was in the past, whereas he, talking about Jerome, embraced the person she had become. Sometimes I caught sight of the old her. She would raise one eyebrow a skosh when I asked her if she wanted a glass of wine. The idea that she was still in there but couldn't communicate gnawed at me. You also said that you never told her she was in hospice and that you never asked if she knew that she was dying or if she was scared. And you write, I was like Iliad's wife. Tolstoy's Ivan Iliad. I was like Iliad's wife chirping about bullshit while he lay terror stricken. I would drop by her cottage and try to perk her up with some dessert or a few sips of wine, but my visits were never more than flybys.

• 15:07Anderson Cooper?

  You sound very hard on yourself.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Well, I wasn't able to really

• 15:18Speaker 01

  completely be there for her. So that's a fact. And I think that if she had been compos mentis, she would have been like, go take care of your kids. Are you kidding me? Please don't worry. But I don't know exactly where she was mentally. And sometimes I felt guilty that I was presuming that she wasn't with it, especially if she like gave a suggestion of something like humor or something like that. I'd be like, oh, my God, she's totally with it. What, what am I doing? She's been alone for three days straight. I haven't gone over there.

• 15:54Anderson Cooper?

  She wasn't alone. I mean, she.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  She was with Romeo, but.

• 15:59Anderson Cooper?

  In a cottage right by your house. It's not like you.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 16:02Anderson Cooper?

  Left her on an ice floe somewhere.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  I went back and forth between thinking that it had all been good enough and beautiful enough and thinking that I had missed the boat somehow and wasted time

• 16:22Speaker 01

  not being over there.

• 16:23Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, you said, it occurs to me, looking back, that I abandoned her because of the narcissism of small differences. Friends always said that we were uncannily similar in looks and temperament. I couldn't bear to see her until I knew that I wasn't going to die right along with her.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Well, when I had the cancer diagnosis, I felt a conscious feeling of anger towards her. I can't do you.

• 16:48Anderson Cooper?

  Like I'm going through this.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I have to do my kids. I can't do you like a Sophie's Choice thing. I can't give one ounce of my mental strength to thinking about you because I have to think about my kids. And I have to think about if they tell me this on Monday, I'm going to tell them this. And if they tell me this on Wednesday, we're going to tell Frankie and Molly. But then Molly has the soccer tournament, so we'll do it after. It was very strict in my head that I wanted to push her away. And then the more information I got that I wasn't going to die, I was able to go visit her again and stop doing that.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  I was able to hold the whole, all of us. It was very painful not to be able to tell her. Or if you're gonna take off, you wanna be able to say like, hey, listen, I need space right now. I, I'm gonna come back, but I need to go do this thing. And that wasn't possible. I remember when I told Jerome though, he was just very sweet and loving and forgiving. Very extraordinary relationship with that man.

• 17:57Anderson Cooper?

  Your therapist said that, that you didn't have to appear strong or unfazed to your kids or have definitive answers. How did you handle telling them about your diagnosis?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  We waited to tell them until we were really fairly certain that it was a small-ish tumor and that it was hormone receptor positive, HER2 negative, which is like the best kind of cancer, breast cancer. And so I was much more confident about talking to them when I knew those things. And so we waited a long time. And by the time we told Henry, it was probably almost confusing for him because I was like, hey, you know, I had cancer. It's almost being, it was kind of being like, I, I almost got hit by a car, but I didn't. What's he supposed to do with that? I don't know how I would have been if I had to really devise a much more difficult plan.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I went to Miami to do this little film festival and it was right before she was about to really start to take a nosedive. And Jerome called me and said, I think you should come back. I made him, please, promise, promise me you'll tell me like, because I do wanna be there when she dies. And he called and said that she was having trouble breathing. In the middle of the night, he had said, Penn, do you wanna die? And that she went, no.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  She was really very full of life, very connected person. So it's so weird that that, it's just so weird.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  That she doesn't exist anymore. It's just, I know that sounds so childish, but it's just.

• 19:40Anderson Cooper?

  Oh, it doesn't.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  The finality of it is still just insane. She's gone. It's so insane.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  And how much she would, she would hate it.

• 19:54Anderson Cooper?

  Hate being gone?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Or even when I got the thing with the ashes and they deliver it. Your loved one is getting texts, like your loved one is being cremated today. Your loved one is on the way.

• 20:09Anderson Cooper?

  You're getting texts about that, really?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yes, texts. We have a group chat about it because it's so funny and not funny, but it's. I don't need the play by play, guys, first of all. And yet I do, I'd feel weird if they didn't tell me.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  It's just really mind blowing. It's all weird.

• 20:29Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  We also just had a lot of fun.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  You know, that was also part of it, is just being very connected to someone in terms of humor. She used to, like, when I thought she was a pain in the ass, which was a lot of the time, she would shuffle in her Parkinson's shuffle across the kitchen, like dropping crumbs from the cake she had stolen. And then like fart in front of everybody, in front of my kids and stuff. And I just feel like, and she'd just go, another county heard from.

• 21:05Anderson Cooper?

  Another county?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Another county heard from. It's like an old voting thing.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  That's like.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Oh, you know what it means. Okay.

• 21:19Anderson Cooper?

  That's what she would have heard, a fart would be like another county has been heard from. Like on John King at the Magic Wall.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  It's a line in Clifford Odette's in Awaken Sing. There's a lot of humor, actually.

• 21:36Anderson Cooper?

  In what way?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Like, my sister is really funny and David's really funny. And I think that having a sense of humor, it can be really a saving grace. We watched my mom die. It was like four hours of stopping breathing and then starting again and then stopping, which was also kind of funny. We were like...

• 22:03Speaker 01

  I mean, it was really, really scary, too. I mean, it was everything. It was everything. It was like we ran the gamut, I feel like.

• 22:09Anderson Cooper?

  I just want to read this. You're talking about your mom. "She wouldn't stop moaning, and we tried to give her liquid morphine, but she kept biting down on the syringe. So I finally pulled her lip down and inserted the dropper through a gap where she was missing a tooth. Even though Jerome promised me that the biting was just reflex, it seemed like her last line of defense and made me think she didn't want to go. This idea was unbearable, but watching her gasp for air was worse. The morphine was taking forever to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision. We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes. I thought of my teen improv class, which she had found for me when we moved back to New York from London.

• 22:53Anderson Cooper?

  In improv, even if the given circumstances defy logic, you and your scene partner have to stick to them. I wasn't sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me or whether I was just a constellation of interesting disembodied shapes. I said, 'Howdy, doodle.' That's how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and besides, I had already told her everything." That's beautiful.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 23:23Anderson Cooper?

  Howdy doodle.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Always. Yeah.

• 23:30Anderson Cooper?

  I was with my mom when she died and I found it incredible. I mean, I've seen a lot of bodies in a lot of different ways. I've been in hospital wards where like children die in front of me and stuff. But I was holding my mom's hand and it was just, I don't know, I just found it to be this incredible thing. And I'm so glad I was there.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  I think the fact that we weren't religious and my parents weren't religious was really difficult in some ways. And I understand why the rituals exist. We do Shabbat and I didn't have any of that growing up. But the idea that you're saying words and doing a ritual that your forefathers did and their forefathers and so on and so on is like, it gives me chills. It's a way to maybe feel comforted that there's something bigger than you.

• 24:20Anderson Cooper?

  I think it's so true what you say about the rituals, though. And I do think there's something incredibly valuable about some sort of faith tradition and the ritual of it. I've started to collect stuff from my mom's family that comes up in weird estate sales and frame a lot of photographs of my dad's ancestors and tell my kids the stories of them because I want my kids to feel like they're not just floating in space, that they are grounded in a family and a tradition and a history. And I feel that in grief, we're living through these cycles which generations of people in our families have lived through before. I'm working out stuff that my mom was trying to work out as well.

• 25:04Anderson Cooper?

  And I'm now reading all my dad's old letters. I'm now reading all the things that were, he was worrying about and concerned about. And, you know, it's.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  You're getting to know him.

• 25:13Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I'm getting to know him in a whole new way.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  I have had some similar things happen. I think one of the most extraordinary things that happened was that when the essay got published, people reached out to me. In particular, there was a woman who worked at my dad's law firm and talked about the kind of bro culture and how oppressive that was and how my dad would talk to her about Shakespeare and theater and that he was.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  What she would call a true mensch. And that was extraordinary to me. That there was something he had done that was so moving to someone that I didn't know about. It's such a beautiful and strange revelation. And even with my mom, I just got a letter from her freshman roommate, who told me that my mom was such a keen field hockey player. She would do her practice with her stick on the floor, pass lights out. And that just tickled me so deeply to know that. And she sort of implied that my mom was like a little bit naughty and got in trouble sometimes,

• 26:26Speaker 01

  but that she was fun in a really endearing way. And so it was just wild. It was wild to hear a story about her as a teen. My mom was so sick for so long and all her friends are all over the world. So we didn't have a memorial or a celebration of life for either of them. But it's been trickling in as such.

• 26:47Anderson Cooper?

  I did not have one memorial or a celebration of life for my mom either. I mean, I did what I normally do, which is like I just threw myself back into work. And it wasn't until I started going through her things two years later, once I was finally ready to like go through her apartment and stuff, that it really started to hit me. I had this whole idea for a memorial service for her because I wanted it to be really like at the Cafe Carlyle, where we used to go and listen to Bobby Short sing. And I imagined it opening up with like somebody dressed in one of her Fortuni gowns, dancing under a spotlight with either another woman in a Fortuni gown,

• 27:27Anderson Cooper?

  looked like her as well, or like some, you know, guy who's like masked or something. I just wanted to be this really kind of unusual, interesting, beautiful, strange thing, which is what she was to me. Yeah, I worried like I could never produce this thing in a way that would really do justice to her. And the task of it just started to feel overwhelming. And then I just never got around to it.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  The beautiful things that happened with my mom's death is that. I have a very old friend who I've known since I was six. We had a big fight and we broke up for nine years and then we got back together. And her mom was very sick at the exact same time that my mom was very sick. Both of our moms were single and broke. We were just in such a bizarrely similar situation. And one of the things we talked a lot about is that there's no algorithm for grief, that there's no right way to do it or wrong way to do it. And it's such a beautiful daydream for you to have this curated idea of a memorial for her and to say it in this podcast. And there's value in that.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  And maybe it doesn't actually have to be done. There's something even in just you just saying that.

• 28:47Anderson Cooper?

  Is grief different than you thought it would be?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I don't know yet. It's so new, I don't know yet. I have a friend who is like, if you see a butterfly, like it could be her. And she's very spiritual and she believes in reincarnation and the afterlife. And she thinks my mom is looking down on me and all this stuff. And I wish I could believe that, but I don't really. So if I see a butterfly, I just say, hi, Pen. It's a way of stopping for a minute. It's a way of being with her, even though I don't really believe it, which I think is what the writing was too. It was my way of being with her and harnessing her and my dad.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  You were saying that you feel like you are closer to your dad now, or you feel him? I don't know if I feel that exactly. It's weird sometimes coming to New York because they were both here for so long, even though I was living in LA. And when I come in and I see the skyline, there's a funny kind of emptiness and weirdness that neither of them are here. And a childlike feeling of like, being untethered, like an orphan, like.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Where's the person who would walk through fire for me?

• 30:10Anderson Cooper?

  I think untethered is a really interesting word and I use the word unmoored a lot. Like, I used to feel unmoored.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:17Anderson Cooper?

  Living in the city that I grew up in. I find it very hard to be like the last from my little family. Because it all felt so real and I don't know, all that stuff happened. But I'm the only one who remembers it.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. Once a day, I am shocked that she's not here. That's all. I just can't get my brain around it. She was so present when she was present and so alive. And it's so crazy and bizarre. I don't know, I don't even know.

• 30:49Anderson Cooper?

  Is there something you've learned in grief that you think would be helpful for others?

• 30:54Speaker 01

  There's no right way to do it. There's no algorithm, there's no timetable.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  And I think that was really helpful for me. To not be like, I should be doing it this way. I should be feeling this, I should be. That was really huge for me. And also, I feel like my mom is talking through me, but talking about it. I think talking about it helps. And so, giving people sometimes the benefit of the doubt, they do care that they get it. It was so funny when Amy Sedaris was like, "Your parents are still alive? Get out of here, you don't understand anything."

• 31:34Speaker 01

  I had a little bit of that where I was like, even towards my husband. I was like, "Don't talk to me. Your parents are still alive and they're still together and they're still healthy." Like, out of my face. I don't even want to see you or talk to you.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And humor. Lifesaver.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Another county you heard from?

• 31:53Anderson Cooper?

  Another county. By the way, you looked up when you were talking to your mom.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yes, I know, I know, I know. It's, it's, I don't know what that is. I don't know. She's in a cardboard thinger dinger in my closet.

• 32:09Anderson Cooper?

  Is she?

• 32:11Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's like, almost like a weird sense of not wanting to be toxically positive

• 32:21Speaker 01

  with myself or something. I don't know why. But I do look up. I do.

• 32:27Anderson Cooper?

  There's nothing wrong with that.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And when I look at the sky.

• 32:31Anderson Cooper?

  Nothing wrong with a little positivity.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Just a little bit.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:36Anderson Cooper?

  Doesn't have to be toxic.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also have a little like thing with flowers with pictures of my parents.

• 32:43Anderson Cooper?

  Like a little altar?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  A little altar.

• 32:45Anderson Cooper?

  I like that idea.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Which is so not me. It was really weird. It was like, I was like, I am doing this. Who am I? Like, it was so weird. And I go and refresh the flowers. I mean, my kids just like walk by the altar and they don't, you know, they're busy. They're teenagers.

• 33:01Anderson Cooper?

  The fact that you have that, they will come to at some point.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if not, I still feel like my relationship with her is something they witnessed.

• 33:12Anderson Cooper?

  It was lovely to talk to you. Thank you.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 33:15Anderson Cooper?

  You can read Amanda Peet's essay, "My Season of Ativan in The New Yorker." She's starring in the second season of Your Friends and Neighbors, streaming now on Apple TV+. If you have thoughts you want to share with us about the conversation with Amanda or your own experiences with grief, we'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment on our grief community page at cnn.com/allthereis or leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. On Thursday, June 18th, I hope you join me at 9:15 PM for my streaming show, All There Is Live. You can watch it on cnn.com/allthereis. It streams live there for free. It'll also be free to stream on our community page for a week. Also, next Thursday, June 18th, just before Father's Day, which is a day I've long avoided acknowledging,

• 34:00Anderson Cooper?

  there'll be a new podcast episode, a conversation with Michaela Schifrin. She's a three-time Olympic gold medalist and an eight-time world champion alpine skier. In February of this year, Michaela won her first Olympic gold medal in eight years. It was also her first win in the Olympics since her father, Jeff,'s sudden death in 2020.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  I just felt like it was hard to feel the will to live. Not that I didn't want to be alive, but just that I really was searching for a reason to get out of bed and didn't really have that. I didn't feel like ski racing was nearly a good enough reason to want to exist. And I didn't feel like wanting to win ski races had any place in my life anymore. So it was more like maybe this guilt that you have things that inspire you, the things that drive you in life that feel very meaningless when something like this happens.

• 35:00Anderson Cooper?

  That conversation comes out June 18. Thanks so much for listening.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  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.