Tyler Perry: Letting Go

This week marks 15 years since actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry lost his beloved mother, Willie Maxine Perry, at 64 years old. Tyler shares with Anderson how he’s avoided his grief by pouring himself into work, and how he is now facing the trauma of his past and the pain of his mother’s absence. Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline and watch the video version on YouTube. 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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• 0:32Anderson Cooper?

  I was rereading Joan Didion's book, "The Year of Magical Thinking." In it, she recounts a condolence letter she received from a merry old priest who wrote, "Despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, the death of a parent dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean bed, aware of the depth charges now near and now far buffeting us with recollections." Whether you're in that submarine, sitting silently on the ocean's bed, feeling the

• 1:13Anderson Cooper?

  reverberations of grief's depth charges, or caught in the throes of its swirling riptide, or on a shore examining it from a safe distance, I'm glad you're here. You're not alone. This is all there is. I'm Anderson Cooper.

• 1:41Anderson Cooper?

  I was decorating the Christmas tree with my sons Wyatt and Sebastian this weekend. I'd brought out from the basement boxes of ornaments from when I was a kid. One of them is an ornament my mom must have made. It has a photo of her and my dad and me and my brother in front of a Christmas tree. My brother and I are about the same ages that Wyatt and Sebastian are now. I showed Wyatt the picture, and he asked me who the other little boy in it was. "It's my brother," I told him. "Is he dead?" Wyatt asked. "He is," I said. "Well, how did he die?" he asked. "He got sick," I said, "a long time ago. I miss him a lot." Wyatt moved on to another ornament and we moved on to talking about other things.

• 2:25Anderson Cooper?

  But it got me thinking about what I'll have to tell him one day. I don't know how I'll explain it all to a child. I still don't know how to explain it all to myself. My guest today is Tyler Perry. He's a writer, director, producer, actor, entertainment mogul. His list of accomplishments is long and it's made all the more extraordinary, given the very difficult childhood he had growing up in New Orleans. His mother, Maxine, who he was devoted to, was married to a man who beat Tyler brutally throughout his childhood. I recently watched a documentary about Tyler called Maxine's Baby: The Tyler Perry Story, and I found the arc of his life just incredible. I spoke with him last week.

• 3:11Anderson Cooper?

  A couple of months ago, something popped up on my Instagram feed. It was something you said to a woman in an audience when you were sitting with Oprah.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Diane is here with her sister Liz. Diane, where are you? Diane has a question about letting go.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Thank you. So, my mom recently died and... Sorry.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Grief is a very living thing. It visits at random. You can't schedule it. You can't... I tried to work it away. I tried to drink it away. I tried to... I booked myself like crazy and all it did was wait for me to finish.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  That is good. That is good. That is good.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  So, when it shows up, however it shows up, let it, let it, let it show up.

• 3:58Anderson Cooper?

  We are just a couple of days from the anniversary of your mom's death. How has grief shown up for you? Or how is it showing up right now?

• 4:06Speaker 04

  How is it showing up right now? I usually book out this time of year because she died December 8, 2009. And this time of year is hard for me because she loved Thanksgiving. She loved Christmas. And then her birthday's in February, so it's really a difficult time. I woke up yesterday, early in the morning, just feeling my mother really strong. Sometimes I'll wake up with tears in my ears or just the pillows wet because I was grieving in my sleep and didn't know it. So yesterday was really, really hard, like I'm carrying her and I have this pendant that when... It's a... Shoes, baby shoes, and I bought it for her and put all of our initials on the backs

• 4:48Speaker 04

  of the shoes, my brother's, my sister's, and she had it. So when she passed, I had it separated and gave it to all of the kids so we can all carry this with us. That's on the nightstand. I'm waking up in the grief and I'm thinking, okay, it's okay. And I started going back to 15 years ago. And you think 15 years, come on, man, 15 years, you should be okay, right? I thought it was fine this year. I thought I can get through this. I can push through it. Until I'm at the Paley Center and I'm smiling, taking photos, and I walk up to the press line and the guy's doing an interview and he's asking me questions and I'm present, I'm there. And then he holds up a photo of me at five years old. And I didn't hear anything else. Because the photo he showed me, I

• 5:33Speaker 04

  immediately saw my mother behind the Polaroid, taking it, smiling at me as I was sitting on the blanket in the backyard. That was it. The rest of the night I was gone. I was gone. It was too, it was, it was powerful and her letting me know she was there. But also, it's hard to miss people. It's hard to want a one more hug, one more, you're okay, you know, you're okay. Because she and I were, even my brothers and sisters would tell you that I was their favorite. So she and I were like lockstep. And we went through a lot of traumas together and I would do everything I can to make her laugh

• 6:17Speaker 04

  and happy. So that was challenging. So grief shows up when it wants to. You can't, no matter what you think, no matter how much time has passed, it'll show up.

• 6:27Anderson Cooper?

  You've recently been facing things from your past. How has that been for you? Because I have been doing the same thing and have, it has changed my life dramatically just in the last year. And so much of it is trying to develop a companionship with grief and recognizing the little boy that I was and how much that little boy is still so present and trying to turn to that little boy and Bring him back from the place he was hiding.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Bring him back from the place where he was hiding, but also you get arrested in those moments, especially as a child. You get arrested in that memory and you hold it, even though you think, oh, I'm fine, I'm okay. When it's not processed, when it's not worked through, when nothing's done with it, it is just held. And what happens is it becomes this weight inside of you and you're holding it and holding it and holding it. And then you hit a certain age where everything comes home and it's like, whoa, wait a minute, what is that? And I think that's what happened for me. I was doing really well. People would say, oh, you're so prolific, you're doing so many things. But the truth of the matter is, it wasn't about being prolific as much as it was about not dealing with the abuse, not dealing with the pain.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  And the year my mother died, it was probably the busiest I'd ever been because I booked myself crazy to try to work my way through all of it. And that works for a while. I think that that worked all through in my twenties and thirties and forties, but come 50, there was something inside of me that started to break and it was all of those traumas that were ripping the seams. Because what I found in these intensive therapy sessions that I am, first time in my life ever doing therapy, I went to Arizona in this intensive that you do for seven days and I ended up staying three weeks because it was so powerful for me. But what I found as I'm sitting there, I'm talking to this incredible therapist named Christine and she said, tell me what's going on.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  And I said to her, I said, I just feel like something's breaking and I can't hold it all together anymore. I feel like, and I don't know what it is because everything's okay. And I started describing a lot of what I was dealing with and she said, turn around. I turned around in her office and there is a painting of a child that's in the rain, that's just sobbing. And then there's another painting of a man, holding an umbrella, holding back the rain. And she started explaining to me about the parts of us, how we're born as these beautiful, innocent children. And then this moment comes along where we have traumas and pains in life and we become this sobbing child. And then you grow up into an adult and you become this controlling child.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  That's the guy with the umbrella, you know, he's holding off the rain and he's, he's trying to hold it all together, but then there comes a point where he can't do it anymore. And when I saw the painting, I lost it because I'm like. That's exactly what I'm doing. And she said to me, do you believe that all of this can be healed? And I said, I don't know. And she says it can, I promise you. By the time we got through the first week, I felt like a different person. Yeah, so it was really, really powerful.

• 9:42Anderson Cooper?

  This past year, I felt like the tears are just on the brink and they come at times I cannot control. And it is lovely because I'm feeling for the first time and I'm trying to kind of turn to that little child and say that I see him and I talk to him now. I try to talk to him a little bit every day and I realized this voice I've had in my head, it's been keeping me distant from everybody because I've been telling myself to be wary and to be on guard my entire life. And it's served me well for a long time, but it's not serving me well anymore.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. And what happens with age, what happens with age is that the sobbing child begins to just scream and yell. And then with age, the controlling child, the adult that you are, because that's what we all are, we're all just big children trying to survive. That breaking point is different for many people. Some people can push past it, some people can ignore it. But for me, and it sounds like for you, it had to be addressed. And to hold on to grief and sadness and pain and trauma at this part of my life, for whatever time I have left on this planet, is not something I want to do anymore.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  I want to be pure, free, authentic in all of it. So, so that's what I'm leaning into.

• 11:07Anderson Cooper?

  I don't know how many people know about your childhood. I did not know much about it until I watched this documentary. Your mom was 13, I believe, when her mom died. Gets married at 17 to this man, Emmett is his first name. You are born when she's 24. And this man brutalized you, he tortured you.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:28Anderson Cooper?

  Throughout your childhood.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I didn't understand it, I didn't know why, I didn't, but I, I. Innately felt that this man hated me because I wasn't his kid. I just knew it from a child. I would ask my mother all the time, is this my father? Is this my father? And she, her answer was always the same. I hate to tell you that, but yes, he is your father. And all the way up until the day she died, on her deathbed, I asked her, I said, is this man my father? She said, I hate to tell you this, but yes, he is. Yeah.

• 12:03Anderson Cooper?

  After her death, though, you learned something else.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I did a DNA test and that test came back and he's not my father.

• 12:12Anderson Cooper?

  And you've been public about it. There was sexual abuse by multiple people of you as a child. If I could, I'd like to play something that's in the documentary in which you are talking about a memory you have of being this little boy holding on to a chain link fence. It's originally, I think, from a, you were talking to Oprah.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I remember holding on to a chain link fence and I'm holding so tight, my hands are bloody as he's hitting me and I'm, I'm holding.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Just trying to hold on for my life. I was so enraged about it. In my mind, I see myself running from me.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  And I couldn't get the little boy.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  I couldn't get the little boy to come back to me. That was, if I'm not mistaken, it was 2010. That's after my mother died. And it was the first time I was able to say a lot of the things that I hadn't been able to say before. Because as long as she was alive, the thought of me bringing pain to her or hurting her was, I'd rather not even talk about the things that I endured because she would internalize it as, as what she didn't do. And I couldn't bear that.

• 13:29Anderson Cooper?

  Did that boy ever come back to you? Or was that a moment where that little boy? Died and you became something else?

• 13:38Speaker 04

  I think I have said that in the past, that I feel like that part of me died. But what I found in these sessions was that sobbing child, that's there's this separation of the two. Now I know that in life and going through life and going through grief, going through trauma, you you separate into different individuals. And part of the work that I was doing was fusing that child that never came back to me to the adult that I am. And as you were saying earlier, how you talk to your younger self, you encourage your younger self. That's I often do that now. Talk to him, encourage him, thank him. I'm gonna take you with me. You're safe now. We're safe. We're together. Just reminding myself that I'm a whole person and I don't have to be in these parts.

• 14:23Anderson Cooper?

  It makes a difference. Honestly, when this was proposed to me, it sounded cheesy to me, like talk to this little child. I was like, oh, really? Do I have to?

• 14:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:31Anderson Cooper?

  I gotta say, it is deeply healing and deeply powerful.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  What I found with having my son, it was five years after my mother passed. Because when she died, I felt the most alone in my life, so unloved. I didn't feel like anyone loved me because which is because I knew she was the only person on the planet that really loved me the way that she did. So when she died, I felt like that went with her. And I felt just this incredible isolation until my son was born.

• 15:02Anderson Cooper?

  My mom used to quote a Scottish philosopher named, I think, McLaren, who said, be kind because everybody you meet is fighting a great battle. And my mom actually painted it on a mantelpiece on a fireplace. My mom would paint her fireplaces different, like actually painted herself. She had that saying on a fireplace for a while. And you said something about Emmett, the man who was so terrible to you, that at a certain point in your mid twenties, you learned his story. You learned who he had been as a child and what had happened to him as a child. And that allowed you, if not to forgive, to at least understand some of his story. And that made a difference. And I think that's such an important thing.

• 15:49Anderson Cooper?

  Everybody we pass on the street is great, has grief. Or if they don't, they will. And we don't know the battles that they are facing.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah, I, this is what allowed me to forgive him, which I did. I really did. And it also allowed me to give him grace.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Because we were talking one day and he was in tears. And he said, you don't know what I've been through. I was like, no, I don't. But he couldn't talk. He wasn't the person that couldn't. He had a third grade education, so he couldn't express himself through talking. That's not what he did. He could express himself through building and working and beating and fighting and being angry. But he was, when he was two years old, this is what I've got from other, gotten from other relatives. When he was two years old, he was found in the drainage canal. He and his brother and sister. A white man found them on a horse. He found them there. This is in Brewer, Louisiana. And they brought them to a 14 year old girl named May to raise. And May's father, Papa Rod, was a former slave.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  And he beat his children. And May, the 14 year old that was raising Emmett, would beat him too. Tie him in a potato sack and beat him if he did anything wrong. So there was this cycle of abuse from slavery. So what he knew to do is beat his children. Not hug, not love, but beat them. And understanding that didn't make it right. I don't want people to know that. Doesn't make it right. But for me to get the understanding allowed me the pathway to be able to forgive him and give him grace.

• 17:34Anderson Cooper?

  More of my conversation with Tyler Perry in a moment.

• 17:40Anderson Cooper?

  We're back with Tyler Perry. What have you learned in your grief that would be helpful to somebody listening to this?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Oh gosh, that's really good. What I've learned is that it is what it is. I would try and suppress it or not cry when it came or just push it to the side. You have to let it visit at will. You have to let it be what it's gonna be so that you can move through it. And I really do feel like it's a living thing. Like it is a visitor that will knock at the strangest moment, at the worst time. And I'm like, what is this moving through me? And I would just tell anybody, what I've learned about it is you can't fight it. Let it be. Because in order for it to to get better eventually, it's gotta move through you. I have this friend, her name is Cassie, my mother died.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Her father had died and she she really struggled big time with with it. And he had died many years before. And I was having a moment one year around this time. And I'm talking to her on the phone, trying to, you know, find comfort in anything. And she says, you're gonna be okay, you're gonna be okay. I'm like, when, when? She says, in about nine years. And I thought, that's not comforting. Why would you tell me that nine years? But she was right. It took her about nine years to just be okay when the day happened. And for me, it was about nine years that I was beginning to turn the corner. And it wouldn't show up in a way that it would take my breath away.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  Because when my mother first passed, it would literally take my breath away. I'd find myself gasping for air when I would think about her. Or I'd fall asleep and she'd be in my dreams and I I would feel myself waking up and I'm fighting to stay asleep so I can just talk to her one more time. Yeah.

• 19:28Anderson Cooper?

  You've said that after your mom died, you weren't sure you would survive. I mean, that you were drinking. You'd said at one point that if you hadn't had so many work commitments, you might not have stuck around.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  No, no, that wasn't that wasn't. What was the point? What was the point? What was the reason? Again, feeling that level of love leave me.

• 19:50Anderson Cooper?

  But also because all of the, so much of the drive that you had and have, but had was about her, was about providing for her and making sure that she had everything she could ever possibly imagine that she wanted.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was the goal and the purpose. And then when she was gone, so was that desire and that drive to keep pushing and working it hard. You know, the strangest thing was, because there was so much trauma, because there was so much poverty, I never thought I had enough for her. I always thought this is not going to be enough to make sure she's okay. And she never asked me for a thing. But yeah, losing her was losing the love that I felt, but also losing the purpose to keep working and grinding that hard.

• 20:35Anderson Cooper?

  Your mom got to see everything. There's a moment in the documentary where you've opened up your studio and your mom is there with amazing stars. And you look at her and you say, you see what your baby boy did. She saw it. She got to see it all.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a, that was a good moment that night. She, she was having, the irony in that is she was having trouble seeing because the diabetes and the things she was dealing with, she was having a lot of trouble being able to see. So she was,

• 21:14Speaker 04

  she was holding my hand and we were out, out going through the stages and she, she said, everything is so beautiful. And I said, how do you know? Can you see it? She said, I can feel it, you know. So she was wonderful, man. She was wonderful. Anderson, I'm angry, man. I'm so angry. I'm so angry. That's a part of the grief too. I'm angry. That's, that's another part that, that you have to be careful with when you're grieving. And this is why around this time of year I go away because I don't know how it'll show up. But the anger is, is, oh God, I remember the first Mother's Day when people are saying, Happy Mother's Day. And I'm like, I don't even want to hear it, you know. And then

• 21:56Speaker 04

  to see friends who won't even call their mother, talk to their mother, they get the business from me. I'm just like, what is wrong with you? And I would get angry because I wish I had her. So I'm just, I, working my way through the stages of grief was hard. I think the anger was the hardest one.

• 22:14Anderson Cooper?

  I have felt this rage, the, it's the hard-hearted rage of a child. And I remember feeling it as a little kid, just terrified when my dad died and stunned, but just filled with rage that has continued throughout my entire life. And I think there's, it's been fuel in so many things I've done, but it's, uh, yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  I wasn't, yeah, I wasn't allowed the rage. I wasn't allowed to, to have that because culturally.

• 22:47Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Just being six foot six and black.

• 22:51Anderson Cooper?

  Right.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  There was this, from the time I was in school, it was like, you're big, get to the back of the line, you're, you're, you're too big. So I, I wasn't allowed to have that kind of freedom to just be enraged about something. So anger, my anger was quiet and slow, slow to, to build. But I felt it more with her than anything. I remember being in some of these sessions and, and I, I felt this anger coming up out of me and I just, and, and the therapist is, she's a little white woman, she's saying, let it go, let it go. And all I could think of and hear was this, you're going to destroy this room, don't, you can't do that, you're too big.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  And by the end of the sessions, we were getting to a point, one, one therapist said to me, because you see multiple therapists, but one said to me, you deserve to take up as much space on this planet as anyone else because you're here. You don't have to be smaller, you don't have to make yourself smaller. And I was able to just let it all go.

• 23:55Anderson Cooper?

  Do you, do you cry? I mean, I've never been really a crier. I have been this last year and I don't know. Yeah, I feel awkward about it and weird about it and but it bubbles up a lot for me now.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Since since I started this program, it I have wrung myself dry. I just I constantly go to water thinking about my mother, my life, my son, how hard I've worked to be here, the cost, the price to be here, all of those things. So but it feels good to be able to cleanse. And of course, growing up, boys don't cry, you're a man, you're taught to push down every feeling, not really be able to express it. So to have a 10 year old who is clear in his expressions of what he feels, when he feels joy, when he's upset, we've given him this great brain room to be able to come to us in any of those states.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  So and and when I'm looking at him or hugging him or saying I love you to him or giving him that space or having a conversation with him where he gets to state an opinion or or he gets to have some sort of say in what's going on. All of those moments are helping the little boy that I was heal.

• 25:12Anderson Cooper?

  I don't know that I would have been as whatever success I've had, however you define that. I don't know that I would have had the career that I've had if I had been healed earlier on. I don't know if I was not filled with rage and driven by pain. I don't know that I would have worked the level that I've worked at constantly.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Or the courage to do it, yeah. And the same for me, the same for me. So I understand that fully. Oprah and I talk about this all the time. She said to me one day, God, I don't know who we would be had we grown up in a house full of love. Because when I got into this trauma session, the first thing she said to me is, and this I'll never forget, she said, your success is equal to your trauma. And I thought. I've had some enormous successes in my life. And I thought, yeah, the traumas are pretty, pretty bad, too.

• 26:02Anderson Cooper?

  You also connect the trauma and your ability as a child to go into kind of other rooms in your head during it with your ability to dream up comedies and dramas and write scripts and work at the level that you have. Things you developed in your mind as a child to cope have served you in your career.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, when I, when I started these sessions, when we talked about my childhood, she was clear about what happened to you is you had to be hypervigilant. You had to look at 10 things at once to survive. You had to walk in a room and calculate every moment in the room in order to know that you were safe. And that ability is in you as a man. It's still as strong as it was then. And also my ability to disassociate. It was during those horrible moments that I could leave, like, not literally, but in my mind, be somewhere else. And then when the moment was over, I would come back to myself. But as I'm coming back to myself, I had no memory of what had happened. Like, there'd be a hole in the moments of the memory.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  So as I got older, it wasn't just happening for bad things, it was happening for good things, too. Anything that was heightened in me, I would leave, wouldn't be there, wouldn't remember the moment. So when I write a script, a story, or a movie, I get quiet and I can be in that world for hours and see everything that's happening. And I can use that disassociation as, now use it as a gift.

• 27:30Anderson Cooper?

  So for you, right now, just circling back to really how we began, for you, right now, grief is what? What does grief look like?

• 27:38Speaker 04

  For me, right now, grief is a wave. It's a wave. And my prayer for anyone who's going through grief is that it comes in waves. And how do you stand on that wave? Do you let it drown you? Or do you have a surfboard where you can try and get on it? Sometimes there are gentle ones where it's just like, wow, that is a wonderful memory. Gosh, that's a wonderful memory. Then it's like, whoa, last night, I was in a tsunami. It was a tsunami.

• 28:03Anderson Cooper?

  Do you feel your mom, for the first time since I was a little kid, I now feel...

• 28:21Anderson Cooper?

  I can feel my dad, I can feel my brother inside me in a way

• 28:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:29Anderson Cooper?

  that I've never experienced before.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And I dare I say that's because you made room for it. Because maybe when it was when it was blocked before and you were putting everything away, there was no room for it. But now that you've made room for the grief, you can feel them getting closer. I understand that so well. I've been cradled by my mother since she's gone cradled. And it just felt like, what is this feeling? When she first passed, I could I could smell her. I could she was, you know, my senses were actually with that close to me. And I'll never forget, because she died at sixty four, December eighth, right around Christmas. And I had a dream about, I got she'd given me a gift, this red air red bi wing airplane that she'd given me.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  And I was like, well, I was so happy that she'd given it to me. I woke up, of course, sad, go downstairs to the Christmas tree. My sister gives me a gift. She said, I bought this for you. I opened it up and it is the exact airplane that was in my dream. And and I hadn't told anybody, but my aunt, my aunt and I look at each other, I had to leave the room. They're like, what happened? What is my sister's like, what happened? What I do wrong? I just, you didn't do anything. I just dreamed about this plane. So I do believe that they are with us. I do believe that they're close. I really, really do believe that.

• 29:42Anderson Cooper?

  And you feel that?

• 29:44Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I feel it. I feel it. I know it. There's a knowing in it for me.

• 29:47Anderson Cooper?

  It's to me, the irony is I pushed all this stuff down so that I wouldn't feel sadness. And it left me feeling alone and disconnected from my dad and my brother.

• 30:00Anderson Cooper?

  But now at fifty seven, I allow myself to feel sadness and that pain, which I've been running from, and yet it actually makes me feel better. It doesn't make sense on paper, but it's absolutely the case.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  But also, I think at the time of life where you are, you know, with a father and children and older, I think I think you were ready for it now. Because there are many times when people aren't ready to face it. Or what would you have been now had you been able to get in touch with it earlier?

• 30:29Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:30Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah. To somebody who's grieving out there, is there anything else you would say?

• 30:34Speaker 04

  It's gonna be about nine years.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  So again, my hope, my hope is, we're talking about this. My mother was only 64 when she, when she died. And the, the last seven years of her life were really difficult through illness. But also, her whole life was just hard. And I don't want to reduce her life, and I would say this to anyone who's going through grief, don't reduce the person's life to the moment or how they died. Lean into the good in it, because the grief is gonna be hard. Lean to the good times and the good moments and the smiles and the laughs. And that's when, when grief really overwhelms me, that's what I try to do. That's what I was doing all day today. All day today, I didn't leave the room after last night. I stayed in the bed. I've got photos of her.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  And I was just trying to think myself happy inside of the grief. And I was just thinking about the good times we had and me and my mother at church. Oh gosh, we loved to go to church together. And I loved to see her singing in, in the choir. And, and she could not sing. She could not carry it, no, in a bucket. But she would just try singing her heart out. After all the hell she just went through at the house, she would just be happy and smiling. This is when I really, really started to lean into God and faith and Jesus is when it's like, God, I, I need to know there's God that makes her feel like that. So I'm trying to surf it so that I can allow myself to be in the pain of it and the heartbreak of it, but also remember some of the good times and the good moments.

• 32:00Anderson Cooper?

  Tyler Perry, thank you so much.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  Anderson, thank you, brother. I appreciate it very much.

• 32:08Anderson Cooper?

  The day after we recorded this interview, a colleague of Tyler's, Steve Mensch, who ran his movie studio, died in a plane crash. Tyler wrote a tribute to him on his Instagram page, saying in part, "Life is but a moment. We are like vapors. Hold strong to the people you love and tell them."

• 32:29Anderson Cooper?

  You can watch the video version of this podcast on CNN's YouTube channel or at our online grief community, CNN.com/AllThereIsOnline. You can also listen there to voicemails from podcast listeners about their own experiences with loss and grief, and you can leave comments of your own and hear all three seasons of our podcast. Next week, two very special guests, writer David Sedaris and his sister, actress and writer Amy Sedaris.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  I cannot believe I lived through my mother's death. I can't believe it.

• 33:01Anderson Cooper?

  In what way?

• 33:02Speaker 06

  Because I just thought I wouldn't be able to live without her.

• 33:05Speaker 07

  Or just without her love.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Without her love, yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 07

  I just adored her, just adored her. And when my mother died, I was like...

• 33:14Speaker 06

  He was mama's boy.

• 33:15Speaker 07

  I'm alone. I don't have anybody in my corner that way. And it happened really fast. She called and said she had cancer, and then three months later, she was dead. And I remember there was her chemo medication and stuff, and we were so mad at it, do you know what I mean? And just throwing it into a trash can, and my father's pulling it out because he wants to get a refund. He wants to take it to the drugstore and get a refund on it.

• 33:40Anderson Cooper?

  Wow.

• 33:41Speaker 06

  Now, wait a minute.

• 33:47Speaker 07

  I remember the priest came to the house, and my mother had a jigsaw table on them. And so we were just throwing, "Oh, I see. You're finishing that in honor of your mother." And it's like, get out of here. Who let him in here? It was just so dumb, like, why do you have to even ruin it by saying crap? Like, then we're going to frame it, and then we're going to... We laughed so hard, like...

• 34:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 07

  We just laughed so hard.

• 34:12Speaker 06

  Because that's how we dealt with it.

• 34:14Anderson Cooper?

  That's next week on All There Is. All There Is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan DeZula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is our executive producer. Support from Nick Gottzel, Ben Evans, Chuck Hadad, Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Kerry Pritchard, Shimmeri Chitrit, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Deonora, Laney Steinhardt, Jameis Andrest, Nicole Peseru, and Lisa Namro. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.