Pod Insights All There Is with Anderson Cooper Nick Cave: Grief’s Jagged Edges About this episode Musician Nick Cave has experienced the death of two of his sons. He tells Anderson how, over time, these losses have changed his relationship with the world; expanding his heart and widening his “capacity for love.”
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Host: Anderson Cooper
Showrunner: Haley Thomas
Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams
Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring
Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski
Technical Director: Dan Dzula
Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher
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Transcript 5,993 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Anderson Cooper? I've been thinking a lot about being with my mom at the end of her life. Maybe it's because Tig Notaro was on the last podcast talking about seeing her friend, poet Andrea Gibson, die. My mom died in June 2019. She hadn't been feeling well, and I took her to the hospital. That's when she was told she had cancer and didn't have much time. She was silent for a while and then said, "Well, it's like that old song. Show me the way to get out of this world because that's where everything is." Which I thought was a pretty cool response, being told you're about to die.
0:36 Anderson Cooper? Later, she made a joke, and we both started giggling. I happened to record it, and it was only when I watched this later that I realized we both had the exact same giggle.
0:51 Speaker 01 Is that all there is?
0:54 Anderson Cooper? I'd always wondered where my giggle came from. Now I know it was hers all along. I took my mom home, and we spent a lot of time together in her final days. We held hands a lot. Any of the old disappointments or resentments were gone. I knew her, and she knew me. Are you scared?
1:14 Speaker 01 No.
1:17 Anderson Cooper? I'm not either.
1:19 Speaker 01 Oh, God, man.
1:21 Anderson Cooper? Her voice was becoming just a whisper.
1:24 Speaker 01 It's the greatest gift.
1:28 Anderson Cooper? I'm getting to spend time with you has been the greatest gift.
1:31 Speaker 01 Yeah. The kind of time that we have now is...
1:35 Anderson Cooper? It's really special.
1:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39 Anderson Cooper? We're a good team.
1:41 Speaker 01 That's for sure.
1:45 Anderson Cooper? I love you.
1:46 Speaker 01 I love you, sweetheart. You know that.
1:49 Anderson Cooper? I do.
1:51 Speaker 01 Always and forever.
1:55 Anderson Cooper? I say that to my kids now. I love you always and forever. I spoke to Andrea Gibson's wife, Megan Fawley, on All There Is Live recently. One of the things she said really stayed with me, and I want to show you part of that conversation. I saw something you wrote where you say you started to use the word allegedly when you talk about Andrea's death, which I kind of love.
2:17 Speaker 02 It felt so weird to talk with such certainty and to say Andrea died, as if any of us even know what that means. We actually don't know what it means.
2:32 Anderson Cooper? It's true.
2:33 Speaker 02 I don't think.
2:34 Anderson Cooper? No, I mean, it's true.
2:36 Speaker 02 I had felt so many sort of signs and communications that it felt, it just didn't feel right, and it still doesn't, to say Andrea died. So I love saying that Andrea allegedly died. To my limited understanding of a body and a spirit, language is very important to me. So if I feel like something is not quite getting it right, I'm going to make whatever adjustments I need.
3:09 Anderson Cooper? I think that idea-
3:11 Speaker 02 I invite you to try it, Andrew.
3:12 Anderson Cooper? Well, no, I mean, I'm crying because what you said is so unique and, I think, true. And, yeah, we have no idea what this means. I don't know if I'll start using the term allegedly, but I love suddenly hearing something that makes me look at loss and think about it in a new light. We'll be right back with my conversation with singer, songwriter, and author Nick Cave.
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4:15 Anderson Cooper? Welcome back. Nick Cave is a legendary Australian singer, songwriter and author. His 15-year-old son, Arthur, died 10 years ago in a fall off a cliff in Brighton, England. Nick and his wife Susie have one other son, Arthur's twin, Earl. Nick's first child, Jethro, died in 2022 at the age of 31. At the request of Jethro's mom, Nick doesn't talk in detail about Jethro. Nick has authored a number of books. His latest is Faith, Hope and Carnage: A Conversational Memoir, written with Sean O'Hagan.
4:49 Speaker 04 I feel I was an incomplete or unformed human being before my son died. Something happened that completely shattered myself and broke apart my relationship with the world. So that, putting the pieces back together again, I found that I became an entirely different person with a different relationship with the world.
5:17 Anderson Cooper? More fully human, which is something Stephen Colbert has talked about.
5:20 Speaker 04 I would say more fully human. You know, it's a condition of being for me, grief. What I came to understand was...
5:27 Anderson Cooper? A condition of being.
5:28 Speaker 04 Well, what I came to understand is that we are all creatures of loss. We are all suffering in our own ways. You don't need to have, you know, someone close to you die to be suffering from this thing too. I think the world is suffering in a collective way. I mean, you must know that too, just by visiting war zones and this sort of thing. But the world is suffering from loss. It is the thing that holds us together.
5:57 Anderson Cooper? There is an ocean of grief out there.
5:59 Speaker 04 Yeah. Grief has a sort of specific feel about it. But loss, to me, is something... A little gentler and wider, and I think that that's the sort of connective tissue that holds us all together. I can look at you, you can look at me, and we understand that within our lives, whatever they may be, there is this sort of thread of of loss that runs through. It's, as I said before, a condition, a condition of being to be. And that's not a bad thing. I don't find grief to be a bad thing. My heart expanded hugely to be able to encompass all manner of things in the world that I
6:43 Speaker 04 didn't even recognize before. One of those things is the capacity for joy. Joy for me is a different, it's a different thing than happiness. I think joy springs, it's an emotion that sort of springs out of suffering.
6:58 Anderson Cooper? Joy does.
7:00 Speaker 04 Yeah. Joy is this feeling that you get where there is an understanding of suffering, and it's a sort of leaping forth from that. There's an intensity to that word that has something to do with the awe of things and connectedness.
7:16 Anderson Cooper? So joy only exists because of sorrow?
7:19 Speaker 04 I would say that joy comes out of the blues, to put it in musical terms, whereas happiness is more of a kind of day-to-day feeling, if you're lucky.
7:32 Anderson Cooper? For a lot of people who are listening to this, who are in the midst of grief, the idea that you could feel joy again might seem incomprehensible.
7:42 Speaker 04 Well, not only that, it could feel like blasphemous or an absolute insult to their to their own feelings, and I understand that. But I've found that there are two ways you can go. You can internalize what's happened and wrap yourself around the the absence of something. Or you can open up and take in the world and understand that your suffering is not unique and that the world is also suffering and that you are part of a greater thing.
8:19 Anderson Cooper? Did you feel that right away? Or did it take time before you got to that place?
8:24 Speaker 04 No, no, no, oh my God, no. When Arthur died, I think there was a year at least of
8:32 Speaker 04 Absolute devastating, incapacitating sorrow. Terrible feelings of self-blame and guilt, complete emotional chaos. And these feelings of like cosmic betrayal. And I remember sitting in the kitchen and I could see my wife. This was some weeks after walking up the stairs and only being able to get halfway up and then just kind of collapsing down on the stairs. And I remember sitting in the kitchen and unable to go through the door to get to the stairs, to be of any assistance.
9:17 Speaker 04 Just this incapacity to move beyond our own internal horror. And I remember thinking, I'm not only lost my son, I'm losing my wife. And my wife spent a long time just in her room, you know, in the dark, entombed in her room. And at some point, some months later, I think we both made the decision that we cannot continue in this way. And we were able somehow to do that. But these did ultimately transform into something else.
9:57 Anderson Cooper? You'd said, since Arthur died, I've been able to step beyond the full force of the grief and experience a kind of joy that is entirely new to me. This is Arthur's gift to me, one of many.
10:06 Speaker 04 Yeah. I think we need to establish something here is that if I could have it back the other way, if I could have Arthur back and Jethro back, of course, you know, so I say these things with a thousand caveats, that this thing happens and there's no escaping that. But what springs from it too is something of extraordinary beauty. For the first time, I became a part of something, which is the world.
10:41 Anderson Cooper? You felt more connected to other people.
10:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely.
10:45 Anderson Cooper? And everything around you than you had before.
10:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. I felt that I was part of, I became part of the world in a way that I didn't. Even realized that I wasn't. And my own situation was was unique to me, but also ordinary. And that the world itself and everyone in it were living sort of perilous lives, that everything seemed close to catastrophe in the world. And that's true. And this gave me a feeling of a kind of preciousness around humans, that they are things of intense value and extremely precious.
11:30 Speaker 04 And that idea I didn't have a clue about before Arthur died.
11:35 Anderson Cooper? I've had the same feeling in the last year or two. I've started to view everyone as somebody who has suffered. And it's sort of levels of suffering. It's an interesting way to look at people as all sort of children of suffering.
11:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, that becomes a philosophy of being in a way, to be able to see the world in that way. We're asked really to to to divide the world up into the the good ones and the bad ones. But it's way more complex than that.
12:03 Anderson Cooper? One of the things that has helped me is the realization that I am just one of of hundreds of millions of people throughout time who has walked this road and who has, there has been a me before many times over, who did all the things that I did wrong and about grief. And and that this is what happens to humans. This is the human experience.
12:28 Speaker 04 That's beautifully put. And this is what happens to humans. And this feeling towards the world was new to me. When I see a human being walking down the street, this person has all this stuff going on, all this sorrow and happiness going on inside them. And we are all like that.
12:50 Anderson Cooper? We'll have more with Nick Cave in a moment. But if you want to listen or watch past episodes of the podcast, you can do that wherever you get your podcasts or at our community page at CNN.com/AllThereIs. You can also watch our new weekly companion show there, All There Is Live. That's Thursday nights at 9:15 PM Eastern. We'll be right back with more from Nick Cave.
13:15 Anderson Cooper? Welcome back. Here's more of my conversation with Nick Cave.
13:20 Anderson Cooper? In this remarkable book that you did, "In Conversation with Sean O'Hagan", you said something that really just stopped me. You said, "Perhaps God is the trauma itself. Perhaps grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state, where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence of things." You went on to say, "To me, it feels like grief and God are somehow intertwined. It feels that in grief, you draw closer to the veil that separates this world from the next." You see God in grief.
13:50 Speaker 04 Well, for what it's worth, I see God in everything, and in the good and the bad. That it is an animating force within all things. You could say, within that trauma, that the face of God was revealed to me, and that I understood that this world was good. It's good. It's not indifferent. We, as human beings, tilt towards what is good. Even though a lot of the time, there is no evidence of that, I just feel that on a fundamental level. That there is an essence within us that is good, that we stack on top of it all sorts of agendas, and needs, and desires,
14:35 Speaker 04 that get in the way of that essential essence. And I think grief breaks that open, and allows us to connect on some fundamental level, some sort of heart level with the goodness of things. And that's what changed for me about the way I saw the world. Rather than before, I think, Arthur died, where I was just kind of consumed with my own
15:05 Speaker 04 world, and my career, and all these sorts of things.
15:11 Anderson Cooper? There's a lot of people listening who are in the midst of, or in the very early moments of their loss and grief. And I know you get this question a lot. Does it get better? And if so, how does it get better? For you, how did it get better?
15:27 Speaker 04 It becomes different. It's different. Yes, it is better than it was, as I was describing it before.
15:38 Speaker 04 Suzy and I, we lead, I would say, it's difficult to say this stuff because I don't want people to get the wrong idea, but we lead more meaningful lives.
15:48 Anderson Cooper? Because you and Suzy are open in a way you were not before.
15:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, we just, to each other, we love each other in a different way, we're sort of bound together by, by a deep feeling for each other, but also for a catastrophe that happened in our lives. This is a, it's a mutual language that we have that's new and beautiful, actually.
16:09 Anderson Cooper? And, and, and real.
16:11 Speaker 04 And real, it's real. We have a, it's, it's real, exactly, that's right. And the world is real.
16:20 Anderson Cooper? In a way that it wasn't before.
16:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think, I think completely different.
16:25 Anderson Cooper? So many couples do not survive the loss of a child, the death of their child.
16:28 Speaker 04 The, the statistics are terrible, you know.
16:32 Anderson Cooper? But you were able to.
16:33 Speaker 04 We, we were able to. Some months after it happened, we just started to come together with things. We, there was no blame that often, I think often happens. Suzy didn't blame me, I didn't blame her. There was, it was, it was for us just this terrible accident that happened. We just came together around the loss of our son. We had, Arthur had a twin brother. We focused on him too. And we all, all of us have a very strong relationship.
17:12 Speaker 04 And I think it, it is in some way cemented or, or bound together by catastrophe. And that's part of the sort of beauty of our relationship, the, the depth of our family.
17:24 Anderson Cooper? You were able to ultimately talk to each other about this, which is what drives, I think, so many couples apart. I mean, to-
17:31 Speaker 04 We, we talk about it all the time.
17:33 Anderson Cooper? Even now?
17:33 Speaker 04 Yeah. You know, and I I don't dream much. Suzy dreams all the time and Arthur is always entering her dreams.
17:42 Anderson Cooper? That must be so nice.
17:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, I I mean, absolutely. I'm I'm hugely jealous. Envious of that. And these dreams are not complicated. You know, she just sits with Arthur and and um the last one, she woke up and said, I had a I had a dream about Arthur last night. I was just putting his toys away. And then she said, it was kind of sad. They are very simple. She's tying his shoelaces up or she's making something for him or these extremely beautiful, simple, little metaphors of of love for her for her son. And it's it's a great gift.
18:24 Anderson Cooper? I think I worry that if I move beyond the grief or or past the the sense of loss, that I will lose touch with the people that I've lost, that I that they are there in the grief.
18:36 Speaker 04 You know, I mean, the the idea of letting go, as you know, is it's it's it's we don't do that anyway. No one lets go of this sort of thing. I mean, how do you let it go anyway? It it simply becomes a part of you. We can have a tendency to sort of deify the the the one that is that is no longer with us, that that the that absent person becomes everything. It becomes everything. And
19:10 Speaker 04 and I'm not so sure that that's a very good idea.
19:16 Speaker 04 It's there's there's a sort of comfort in despair. This is for I can only talk about myself.
19:26 Speaker 04 I I didn't do what you did. You you you my my wife did, but but she she has she sort of surrounds herself, I think, with kind of sacred objects. You know, photographs and she's kept every little thing of of Arthur's and and and so so these things have have huge importance to her.
19:46 Anderson Cooper? Because you're feeling the other person in it.
19:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, you're you're connected. Yeah, you're connected to the person that you that you that is no longer with us. And and I I for me personally, I needed to become part of the world.
20:03 Speaker 04 For me personally, I've developed a relationship with my sons, both of them actually, and I think about them every day. I mean, I don't just think about them idly. I close my eyes and you could say I pray to them, but essentially I think about them and I talk to them and. Do you feel them? Sometimes, you know, sometimes they're of huge, it's of huge benefit. They're actually like, like patron saints, you could say. I mean, I have a whole, I'm old and I have a whole collection of these people, right? My mother, my father, and in a way, they all represent something to me.
20:49 Speaker 04 Arthur, for example, represents kind of joy. Jethro represents like chaos and sometimes you need some chaos. Sometimes my life becomes really stuck and ritualistic. And I think of Jethro and I call to him to sort of, to sort of disrupt things a little bit. Or with Arthur, when I'm about to go on stage, for example. And in fact, before I did this, I'm worried about what I'm going to say and whether I'm going to be able to be articulate because it's serious what we're talking about. And I don't want to not be articulate about things. I worry about that all the time.
21:31 Speaker 04 But I think of Arthur and I also think, well, so what? The worst has kind of happened.
21:41 Speaker 04 It really puts things in perspective. Just go and see what happens. And Arthur is that sort of freeing spirit that I have. So these people live on in a different way within me. This collection of people that I have inside me. And so I don't feel that I've. Let them go. I know the feeling that you're talking about. But I feel the conversation is still continuing with these people. And maybe it's all a kind of madness and maybe I'm sitting there talking to myself. I don't know.
22:23 Speaker 04 But it feels like they are having, within their passing, massive influence over my life.
22:33 Anderson Cooper? You said that you've talked to Arthur before going on stage. What do you talk about?
22:39 Speaker 04 I just say, look, I'm tired. I'm not sure quite how I'm going to do this concert. Or, and I talk about things that are immediately, immediate problems with me. I need your help. And sometimes I get these sort of weird, sort of humorous, I would say, affirmations that come from Arthur. Which he always did in real life, in a way. Arthur could never be really particularly serious about anything. He was just a crazy little fifteen-year-old guy. And funny. And so there's a sort of joyful humor in these sort of, let's say,
23:21 Speaker 04 responses that I get, or we could say imagined responses I get. His voice comes through and it's like, hey, you know, you're awesome. Go and do your job or whatever, you know, it's playful. It's playful.
23:36 Anderson Cooper? You talked about with the album Ghostin, that Arthur is kind of roaming around in the songs.
23:44 Speaker 04 I would say that's definitely the case. You know, I think that there was something going on with the making of Ghostin. That I felt his presence very closely. The songs were fashioned by him in some way and that I was finding a way to articulate my need for him. I think one of the things we all want to say to the people who've passed is that we're sorry.
24:12 Speaker 04 That we're sorry that they're they're gone. And did we pay them enough attention when they were with us? But I I felt when I was making Ghosted in this opportunity
24:25 Speaker 04 through these songs to articulate the way I felt about my son and to talk to him and to say that I loved him and that and that I'm sorry. I'm sorry that he's gone, sorry for whatever failings I may have had as a father. And that I love him.
24:45 Anderson Cooper? We had Andrew Garfield, the actor on on the podcast as well, whose whose mom died of cancer. I just want to play something that Andrew said about about Ghosted in.
24:55 Speaker 04 Okay.
24:56 Speaker 06 Nick Cave.
24:58 Anderson Cooper? Nick Cave.
24:59 Speaker 06 Nick Cave writing Ghosted in the album Ghosted in, I don't know if you've.
25:02 Anderson Cooper? Yeah, yeah.
25:03 Speaker 06 I would walk around with that album. I would walk around London with that album. I would get lost in London. And Ghosted in is this beautiful hymn psalm. It was a friend. Nick Cave's work became a mentor and a friend that kept me company, kept its hand on my shoulder, kept me from falling into too deeply into the abyss. Or at least I could meet him down in my own abyss while he was in his.
25:32 Anderson Cooper? I love him calling it a psalm.
25:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, I like that too. I like that because Ghosted in is is sort of religious in nature, in my my view. There's a there's a lovely thing that happened with the central section of that song where it says, and I love you.
25:46 Anderson Cooper? Well, let me let me play this part of the spinning song with the where you say I love you.
26:08 Speaker 07 And I love you.
26:13 Speaker 07 And I love you.
26:18 Speaker 07 And I love you.
26:22 Speaker 07 And I love you.
26:29 Speaker 07 And I love you.
26:34 Speaker 07 And I love you.
26:39 Speaker 07 And I love you.
26:46 Speaker 07 Peace will come and peace will come and peace will come in time.
27:03 Speaker 04 I'm not gonna cry at my own songs.
27:05 Anderson Cooper? That's right. That repetition of "I love you" beyond, you think it's over and it should be over and yet you continue going and it's extraordinary to me.
27:15 Speaker 04 Yes. A particular record has throughout it, so things that feel that they've come from some other place. I don't remember, I don't remember doing this stuff. And it feels like there's someone else, to me personally, speaking through that song.
27:32 Anderson Cooper? The line, "You sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the radio," that's the memory you have of your wife before you got the phone call.
27:41 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so she's listening to a particular song. But that's, that's the sort of, I think, the final, or the last, hmm, complete image of my wife before everything, before we got a phone, before we got this phone call. You know, before everything shattered.
28:09 Anderson Cooper? I want to play one more part from Ghosting, "Bright Horses."
28:52 Speaker 07 Well, this world is plain to see. It don't mean we can't believe in something in any way. My baby's coming back now on the next train. I can hear the whistle blowing. I can hear the mighty roar. I can hear the horses prancing in the postures of the Lord. Oh, the train is coming. And I'm standing here to see.
29:34 Speaker 07 And it's bringing my baby right back to me. Well, there is something. It's hard to explain. But my baby's coming home now on the 5:30 train.
30:09 Speaker 04 It's beautiful. Hmm, thank you.
30:12 Anderson Cooper? We'll have more with Nick Cave in a moment. But if you want to listen or watch past episodes of the podcast, you can do that wherever you get your podcasts or at our community page at CNN.com/AllThereIs. You can also watch our new weekly companion show there, All There Is Live. That's Thursday nights at 9:15 PM Eastern. We'll be right back with more from Nick Cave.
30:36 Speaker 08 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. BJ Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician.
30:54 Speaker 09 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.
31:15 Speaker 08 Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.
31:23 Anderson Cooper? Welcome back to my conversation with Nick Cave. One of the things that I've had a hard time with my brother's death, who killed himself in front of my mom, is very much getting stuck on how his life ended. My brother leapt off the balcony of our apartment building, and I cannot go to that part of New York City where that building is. If I drive down the FDR Drive, the building, the balcony is very prominently seen, and I literally try to avoid that. And I read you had to, for a long time, drive by the cliff.
32:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:03 Anderson Cooper? Where Arthur fell.
32:04 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:05 Anderson Cooper? And you don't, if that's too personal?
32:07 Speaker 04 No. I mean, you probably get it the same way, but, you know, the idea of a cliff in itself as a thing is, seems, it's hard to say this, but look.
32:26 Speaker 04 You know, we'll never get over that and and in the end, we found it too difficult to live in the place that we lived in and we shifted and we we went elsewhere in Brighton, even though Brighton is full of memories in that way. The cliffs are too, it's too brutal, the whole thing. Um, little Earl, his brother, had to travel, had to go to school and had to get the school bus past that place and back again every day, you know, and how he dealt with that is, to me, um, you know, I'm just awed by that child,
33:06 Speaker 04 uh, how he's dealt with with the whole thing and continues to deal with that. Um, but those, uh, the sharp edges of grief, the the practical horrible realities of it, uh, I I I think never go away. You you may know it with balconies.
33:29 Anderson Cooper? Yeah.
33:30 Speaker 04 I sit down and watch a movie with Susie. It starts off with a a scene of of some cliffs.
33:36 Anderson Cooper? Yeah.
33:36 Speaker 04 It's happens all the time. It's it's crazy.
33:38 Anderson Cooper? The amount of people who jump off buildings in movies is extraordinary. Once you, once that's something that that you notice, uh, it's, and it happens out of the blue in movies all the time.
33:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, the the these are the kind of, these are the things.
33:55 Anderson Cooper? Yeah.
33:55 Speaker 04 You don't.
33:56 Anderson Cooper? The jagged edges.
33:57 Speaker 04 The jag, the jagged edges, I I would say. It's funny, though, when we are watching TV together and something like that happens, as Susie reaches across and holds my hand or whatever, and jagged edges are also the sort of glue that holds the relationship together in some way. We we, uh, kind of wedded together with a certain pain, um, that is very, very strong and very deep and and full of meaning. It means something. And even those terrible things are are a part of the.
34:34 Speaker 04 Sort of beauty of things too.
34:38 Anderson Cooper? Is there something you've learned in your grief that would that would be helpful to to others? One thing I I heard you say, which I found interesting and helpful. You said essentially, I think grief needs to be measured by action. You have to construct a series of actions around your day in order to survive. You exercise, you go down to the sea for a swim, you meditate, you make breakfast for your kid. You do all the small things that maintain order.
35:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's, I would say that's good advice. You know, the the very early days, none of what we're talking about is of any help at all. You know, you're just in this thing. It's so cataclysmic, the whole thing, so physical. It's so physical, I could feel this sort of roaring feeling running through my bodies, the body. And and this feeling like bursting out the ends of my fingers. You know, it's not something where I can sit and listen to a podcast and and get some help. And Suzy too.
35:38 Speaker 04 And but I I remember the small acts that that um started to sort of penetrate this feeling. I meditated for quite a while before this happened with with Arthur. And and the thought of meditating was impossible. How can you meditate with this feeling that's going on in your body? But I did do it and for for a for a small second, there was this moment that was just like a like a tiny light going on that that felt suddenly something had sort of drifted away a little bit. This second or two where I felt things were OK.
36:20 Speaker 04 And and I've I've told this story, but I I tell it because I think it's people often want to know, how do you respond to a grieving person? What what do I do my, you know, how should I be? And the first time I went out in Brighton, you know, I'm well known in Brighton. I went to this vegetarian restaurant to get some takeaway food and bring it back home. And there was a girl that served the food there and I stood in a queue. And I could feel people's sense of me being in the queue and all of that. And, and I finally got to her and she just said, what do you, what do you want? And I know her and she didn't say anything to me and, and I ordered the food and, and I was,
37:05 Speaker 04 I was thinking in my mind, doesn't she know, you know? And when she, I gave her the money, when she handed back the change, she squeezed my hand like that and, and let it go. And to me, this response was so deeply articulate and so meaningful to me. Did she look you in the eye when she did that? Yeah, she just, she just, yeah, yeah. She just did, she just gave my hand a squeeze. I understand. It's beautiful. It, it was more articulate than any, anything that I've read and I've read all the books. It was just one human being, feeling empathy towards, or compassion towards another human being.
37:48 Speaker 04 Deeply sort of spiritual thing to do that told me that people were good. It was not something that I ever even thought about before, but there was a moral dimension to what we can be as human beings and that this person was good. And that on some level, it changed the way I started to see people. And, and I still, you know, it's weird. I still get that in. You still feel that squeeze? Yeah, in, in, in sort of stressful times, I still feel a kind of, and that sounds crazy, but. It's quite a squeeze. It was quite a squeeze.
38:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, quite a squeeze.
38:29 Anderson Cooper? So in answer to the question, is there something you've learned that would help others? What do you say?
38:34 Speaker 04 After a while, I think you can make certain decisions about things, about how you're going to be in the world. And I think at the end of it, it was to be defiant. That's how I think me and Susie felt after a while, to be defiant about what we saw at that time. And I don't see it this way now. At that time was a was a an indifferent world. We were not going to allow that world to to um to break us. You know, there was that feeling. Neither of us feel that way anymore. We're much, we've softened to the world, but at
39:15 Speaker 04 the time, we weren't going to allow the world to have its way. We started to see that hope was a was a defiant act. I think we made some conscious decision to, I suppose, to be happy. You can do that. It's possible to do. The thing is, I think everyone does this in their own ways. And back in the day, I used to go to Narcotics Anonymous and stuff. And I used to sit there two days clean, absolutely destroyed. And there would be some guy there who was 20 years sober going on about what a wonderful life he has and
39:56 Speaker 04 all that sort of stuff. And I used to sit there and go, for God's sake, you know, and I'm afraid of doing that, too, you know. If anyone had have said those sort of things in the first few months after Arthur died, I would have just, you know, I would have not been impressed by that at all.
40:15 Anderson Cooper? Early on, that kind of a message that
40:18 Speaker 04 Don't worry, it gets better.
40:19 Anderson Cooper? You'll view it as a gift ultimately.
40:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, as a gift.
40:22 Anderson Cooper? That's like, yeah.
40:23 Speaker 04 Well, exactly.
40:23 Anderson Cooper? Yeah.
40:25 Speaker 04 Deeply so. Yeah, the word gift just has a sort of new age feel about it or something like that. But
40:35 Speaker 04 You know, I'm just a completely different person than I was before Arthur died. And that's allowed me to feel things that I don't think I really felt in the same way before. My capacity for love is just widened hugely. And I want to stress that way of thinking is something that comes through time. It's not some sort of failure if you're not feeling that way.
41:01 Anderson Cooper? It's taken a long time.
41:02 Speaker 04 It takes a long time. It takes a long time, but beautiful things often do, you could say.
41:11 Anderson Cooper? Yeah. On the cave, thank you so much.
41:14 Speaker 04 Okay, thank you.
41:17 Anderson Cooper? Next week on All There Is, I talk to actor, comedian, director Ben Stiller about the loss of his parents and the process of going through all the things they left behind. That's next Tuesday. This Thursday, join me at 9:15 PM for the new episode of my weekly companion show called All There Is Live. It'll be livestreamed on our grief community page at cnn.com/allthereis. That's every Thursday night at 9:15 PM. Wherever you are in your grief, I'm glad we're together.
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