Gary Sinise: ‘The Hole In The Heart Is Always There’

Gary Sinise’s son Mac died in 2024 at 33 after a yearslong battle with a rare cancer called chordoma. He shares with Anderson the music his son created in his final year and how Mac still feels “very present” in his life. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 0:31Anderson 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 award-winning actor and philanthropist Gary Sinise. You likely know him from CSI New York, or Apollo 13, or Forrest Gump. He's also a musician, and in 2011, he established the Gary Sinise Foundation to help support and advocate for veterans. Gary's son, McKenna Anthony Sinise, who was also known as Mac, was an avid drummer and worked with Gary at the foundation. Mac was diagnosed with a rare cancer called cordoma in 2018, the same year that Gary's wife, Moira Harris, was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. After treatment, Moira went into remission and remains cancer-free, but

• 1:13Anderson Cooper?

  Mac's cancer spread. In 2023, he started working on some music he'd written in college but never finished. And over the following months, those efforts became an entire album called Resurrection and Revival, featuring Mac on harmonica with members of Gary's band, the Lieutenant Dan Band. Mac died at the beginning of 2024 on January 5, the same week his album went to press. He was just 33 years old. I spoke with Gary from his foundation headquarters in Nashville in April. Thank you so much for doing this. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  It is my absolute pleasure.

• 1:50Anderson Cooper?

  How has grief been for you?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  It's over two years now since we lost our son. It was a very, very difficult battle where he became more and more disabled. The cancer that he had was called cordoma. It's something that is very, very rare. It's a spine cancer. It will start in the base of the spine or the skull base, right up here at the top of the spine. And it's a tumor that grows there. It's very possible that that tumor was there when he was born, and it grew very, very slowly. He was diagnosed when he was 27, but he was having pain in his tailbone for two or three years before that.

• 2:31Anderson Cooper?

  You were actually with your wife, meeting with doctors, because she had stage 3 breast cancer, and she'd been going through chemo treatments and radiation treatments. And you asked a doctor to take a look at your son because he was having some pain in his tailbone?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  I asked her spine surgeon if he would take a look at Mac. And he put him in the scanner, and he tells me Mac has a tumor.

• 2:56Anderson Cooper?

  Wow.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  And I'm sitting there with my wife talking about her chemo, and now Mac has a tumor.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  And it was very, very difficult. He had the first surgery in September of 2018, and then we were told that the cancer had come back and started to spread. And grief changes as time goes on. I don't think that little phrase, "Time heals all wounds," is really appropriate, because it doesn't really heal the wounds. What happens is you just learn to manage them a little bit better as time goes on. The hole in the heart is always there, right? The missing loved one is forever there. And Mac is, for both my wife and I, he's just with us every minute of the day. Where things were very, very fresh in the beginning,

• 3:48Speaker 02

  and it was just, you know, you couldn't contain your emotions. Now, it's those emotions will kind of jump up and surprise you. I was in church the other day, and all of a sudden, bang. I just was picturing him sitting right next to me, and it just overwhelmed me. And that's the type of thing that happens, isn't it? We just, we carry them with us always, and they jump out and surprise us every once in a while.

• 4:19Anderson Cooper?

  Do you feel Mac?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Very, very present. Because for me, I have continued to press on and do all kinds of things that are related to my son. The music that I'd sent to you, all that music is very present because I continue to work on it. So for me, it's a little bit different, because I'm kind of living with these various projects every day that are related to my son.

• 4:45Anderson Cooper?

  What an incredible blessing, though, to have all the videos that you have, and all the music you have, and have rediscovered. Can you talk a little bit about, you were going through his phone and stumble across a whole trove of recordings, messages to you, videos, I understand, that he actually made for you, talking to the camera late at night in the hospital, that you came across? I mean, that's incredible.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  I had no idea what I was going to discover, but after he died, you know, I just wanted to connect to him so badly that I don't even know what I was looking for necessarily. I just looked through, like, his text messages. And so I found messages from people that had been sending him messages on the day he died. Then I went into his photos, and I found videos. He was very disabled by the cancer. He was confined to a hospital bed at home. And late at night, he just started recording things. And they were messages, or just thoughts that he was having. And you know, Anderson, intellectually, you know

• 6:00Speaker 02

  how serious everything is. And you're watching the cancer destroy his ability to do a lot of things, paralyzed him. And it was getting worse. But for me, I'm the dad who was the fighter next to him, fighting every minute to try to figure out what we could do next, trying my best to find drugs and find doctors who might have another idea, and all these different things. And so I never wanted to have that sort of conversation with him where, well, Mac, if this, if it goes like this, what do you want me to do about that?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  I didn't want to be thinking about the final days with him, because I was always hopeful that we were going to find something. And I thought if I had that conversation with him, it might signal to him that I was, I was, I was, you know, giving up or something. And I never wanted to do that. And I didn't give up until the night before he died. I was still hopeful that we would find something. And so him leaving messages on his phone of things that he had been thinking, that he didn't necessarily have that discuss with me, was, it was profound.

• 7:25Anderson Cooper?

  In those messages, was he talking about his death?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  He did. Not head-on. He was practical and realistic about the fight that he was in. And he started thinking quite a bit about that, especially about 14 months before he died. He went into the hospital, and he had to go into the ICU for 10 days. And so the doctors were talking to him very seriously when he was in the ICU about his body failing. And they had talked to Mac privately. I was not there when they talked to him about this. And I think that got his attention, because I found something that he'd written, and I found a videotape that he made, where he talked about the time in the ICU when he

• 8:15Speaker 02

  thought that was the end. From that moment on, he started writing and making these videotape messages.

• 8:23Anderson Cooper?

  Do you regret not having more conversations with him?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  It's interesting that you ask me that. Some part of me wishes that I had, in those last couple of days, I had had a deeper conversation with him. You know, was he scared? Did he know what was happening? Had he come to terms with everything? And then there's a part of me that is okay with it, because that last night, it got to the point where he, he didn't want to take his medication, he didn't want to eat anything, and he wasn't really able to talk. And he died the next day. And I think about that quite a bit, you know? Gosh. It just, you know, you get emotional about it.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  When I do think about wanting to, to talk to him and just to have a little more time with him to, to see how he was feeling, but I, I know he was accepting. Mac was accepting of where things were and, and the last year of his life was pretty remarkable in so many ways of, of what he accomplished.

• 9:48Anderson Cooper?

  You'd mentioned once that there was a time toward the end when he was in the hospital and he was silent and you asked him what he was thinking about.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it was after his fifth spine surgery that he was laying there in the hospital bed. And I said, what are you thinking about, Mac?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And this was the only time he's, he said anything like this to me. And he said, I'm thinking about death, Dad.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  And that, that sort of knocked me for a loop because I was not gonna go there. I'm in the fight with him and we are gonna beat this. And I could see that after five spine surgeries and radiation and cancer drugs and things, he was starting to feel like he was in a battle that maybe he couldn't win. And he was thinking about that. And I just told him, no more, no more of that kind of thinking. We're gonna, we're gonna get this. We're gonna beat it. And we never talked about that again.

• 11:03Anderson Cooper?

  He died on, on January 5th.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Twenty twenty-four, yeah.

• 11:07Anderson Cooper?

  My dad actually died January 5th, 1978.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 11:11Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah. And that day, um, excuse me.

• 11:22Anderson Cooper?

  I find that day on the calendar has always been very, very difficult. And I'm sorry that that day may be difficult for you now.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  It's, it's a difficult day. It's also my parents anniversary.

• 11:36Anderson Cooper?

  No kidding, really?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's weird anniversaries, isn't it? I remember the, the first anniversary for Mac's death and we were getting a ton of messages from people who were very supportive through everything. And they remembered. It was like, they remembered what we were going through on that day.

• 11:57Anderson Cooper?

  My dad died when I was 10 years old, so it's been decades. And so I'm the only one kind of in my life who remembers that day on the calendar as this significant day. So I no longer get those reach outs of like, hey, thinking about you today, which is totally understandable and I don't expect it. But it's, it's weird to have these day, and I think everybody who's listening to this probably has these days on their calendar, which have huge significance for them. And yet other people in their life have no idea that there's this sort of secret history on this day that, that has any kind of meaning. For me, I work on New Year's Eve because I've always hated New Year's Eve because I

• 12:42Anderson Cooper?

  remember being 10 years old on, on New Year's Eve, right before 1978 began. And I remember watching the ball drop and it being this very kind of ominous feeling of I knew something terrible was gonna happen. My dad was in the hospital. I didn't really understand it. And he died five days later. And so New Year's Eve has always been sort of this strange night of kind of sadness almost for me.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Gosh.

• 13:08Anderson Cooper?

  And I'm, I'm wondering, does New Year's feel different to you in any way? Cause January 5th is looming?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  A bit because I had to call the ambulance on December 30th.

• 13:19Anderson Cooper?

  Oh, wow.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  So I was with him in the hospital on, on New Year's Eve. And when you get to December 30th, I started retracing every single minute of that day, you know, the year prior and what had happened. And my wife had not been feeling well at all. She'd been really struggling with her, her own health. But on that day, December 30th, all of a sudden she woke up and she was feeling really good. And she hadn't been going out, doing anything. And so she said she wanted to go to our daughter's house that day. And once we got home, Mac's nurse said she was concerned.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  And so I didn't hesitate and called 911 right away. And they put him in the ambulance on the 30th and I followed the ambulance. So I was with him, you know, on December 31st, New Year's Eve. It was pretty neat, Anderson, cause that final year of 2023 was in some ways, one of the great years for Mac because in early 2023, he had this idea to go back and finish a piece of music that he'd written years ago in college and wasn't thinking about music at all because he was fighting cancer. And all of a sudden

• 14:40Speaker 02

  he's kind of motivated by trying to put this music together. And Mac, he couldn't play drums anymore. So he taught himself how to play harmonica. And two weeks before he died, that album went to press and he finished it. He said to me, Dad, I, I think I want to make a hundred vinyl records. And so just so I can give them to pals. There, there, there it is right here. So that, that is resurrection and revival. That's a picture of my grandfather and Mac's great, great grandfather, training in Yuma, Arizona to go to World War One. This picture was taken in

• 15:22Anderson Cooper?

  That's incredible.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  1970. And he's, he's about 17 years old there. And he designed that album cover. And it went to press the week that he, he went into the hospital. So he never actually got to hold this, but he got to hear everything and he got to see all the videos. And so it gave him such amazing joy.

• 15:45Anderson Cooper?

  I want to play Amazing Grace because my dad loved Amazing Grace and literally would cry every time Amazing Grace played. We were in a restaurant in Mississippi once. He's from Mississippi. And there was a waitress going through the restaurant singing Amazing Grace. And my dad just started weeping at the table. And I was like eight. I was like, Dad, what is going on? But this is just a little bit of, of Mac on the harmonica.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Beautiful.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  We'll be right back with more from Gary.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  This is Christine Coe from the Edit Your Life Podcast. Decluttering is tricky for a number of reasons. And one of the big ones is the physical act of getting stuff out of your home. And I have a great solution if this is the case for you. 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which helps get unwanted items out of your home or business. The process couldn't be easier. Just pop in your zip code on the website and see what the next availability is. When I did this on a Sunday, there were same day pickup available in very short order. All you need to do after you book your time is point at the stuff you want gone and their friendly team handles everything else, lifting, hauling, and sweeping up when they're done. It's an easy, fast way to reclaim your space without breaking a sweat. This is also a

• 17:29Speaker 04

  genius option if you have older loved ones who are downsizing, but the moving of stuff is a key hindrance to the process. Once your items are loaded into the truck, they recycle the recyclables and donate the donatables. So as much junk as possible is diverted from landfills. Are you ready to check this out? Book your free in-person estimate today. Call 1-800-GOT-JUNK or visit 1-800-GOT-JUNK.com. Again, that's 1-800-GOT-JUNK or visit 1-800-GOT-JUNK.com to book your free in-person estimate today.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life Podcast. I am so delighted to have one of my best friends join us for the podcast. His name is Dr. Julius Fiew. He is a board certified plastic surgeon.

• 18:16Anderson Cooper?

  I mean, unless somebody were in an accident or had some underlying problem, I would not do a facelift on somebody in their mid or early 30s. Somebody in their early 30s, they will scar worse because their immune system is ramped up.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  So the profound wound healing, which can be an asset when you're younger, could be a liability from plastic surgery.

• 18:36Anderson Cooper?

  Big liability.

• 18:37Speaker 03

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

• 19:10Anderson Cooper?

  I love that.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  He's paralyzed from the chest down, kind of here. He could still move his arms. He couldn't move the fingers on his right hand like this.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  After that fifth spine surgery, it did some damage, but he had the fingers. So he could kind of hold, hold the harmonica and he taught himself how to play. And "Amazing Grace" was one of the first pieces.

• 19:37Anderson Cooper?

  As a dad, I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old, and my face lights up every time I think about my kids. Your entire face lights up when you talk about your son and the music and all he has given to you and also to the world through the music. Like, literally, you can see it in your face, your love for your son. It's so nice.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, yeah. I couldn't, couldn't.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Couldn't, couldn't love him more. There were so many amazing blessings in that last year, even though there were a lot of difficult things happening that year. Throughout all of it, he was working on this music and it was lighting him up. There's a video on his YouTube channel where he's actually interviewed during one of the recording sessions.

• 20:31Anderson Cooper?

  Well, I actually want to play, play that. I want people to hear Mac talking. This is Mac.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  There were certain parts of, of this whole journey that I, I didn't think I was going to survive through even, you know, remotely resembling creativity or, or music or anything. Little did I, you know, kind of know that I was, uh, just through pushing through a, a certain stage, I could realize, oh, I actually am capable of music. So it, it just goes to show me that, like, I have to, you know, just, um, keep, um, you know,

• 21:20Speaker 05

  keep moving forward because I never know what I'm capable of doing until I just actually try it.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's.

• 21:42Anderson Cooper?

  You helped make that possible for him.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  That's Mac, yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  That, and that was, like I said, Anderson, that was the whole experience for him that last year. I mean, we didn't know it was going to be his last year, but things were not improving. But the whole experience of working on this music that year was so beautiful in so many ways. It's a sad year because it was his final year, but we were, we were blessed. And he felt like he really did something special, you know? And he did because it led to two more records after the first, first one, because I started finding all this stuff.

• 22:29Anderson Cooper?

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

• 22:33Speaker 02

  The blessings. It's very easy to think about the, the pain and the sadness and the loss, because there's no escape from those memories and, and all of that. But there's always the silver linings and there's always the blessings through the battle. We're all battling every day, something, right? Everybody. If we keep our eye on the silver linings and the blessings that we all have that, that are there, and, and Mac was able to do that, and our family was able to do that, even while watching him get very, very sick. I mean, you, you saw him there. He's got a, that thing on his nose, that's a big tumor. That's a big cordoma on his nose. He had another one here. He

• 23:18Speaker 02

  had another one here. They, I mean, they were popping out everywhere. And we, we, you couldn't avoid that. You couldn't avoid seeing that. And you couldn't avoid the pain of feeling what it must be like for Mac to go through that. Yet, there were a lot of things to be thankful for and to be grateful for. And those blessings, they, they keep you going. You gotta hang on to those and you gotta keep, keep it in perspective. Through this veteran's work that I do at the Gary Sinise Foundation.

• 23:52Anderson Cooper?

  Which is extraordinary, what you've done. I mean, we haven't talked about it, but it's extraordinary.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Thank you. Well, through all that, I have met so many broken families, right? And so many grieving fallen hero families. You're never prepared, you know, because you don't want to, you don't want to accept. But in some ways, I was seasoned, maybe, having watched so many families go through grief and loss and difficulties and trying to help them through and recognize that they are not alone and they're, they're being remembered and not forgotten. And that, I learned quite a bit. And it's, it's helped me quite, quite a lot, having been around so many extraordinary families over the

• 24:41Speaker 02

  years.

• 24:42Anderson Cooper?

  I think that is one of the, the blessings I have learned through grief is that none of us is alone in it. It is this extraordinary bond which all of us share, sadly, either will share or do share. And that helps me to know that I am not alone on this road and nor are you or anybody else.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  I met a lot of fathers over the years who've lost sons and daughters. And, you know, you never think that you would go through that yourself, but it's all possible, you know? Just we're human beings and this is what, what happens.

• 25:20Anderson Cooper?

  It's funny you said that, this is what happens to humans. I, I have said that to myself over and over again the last couple of years, and I find it comforting to know that what is happening to me has happened to every human that has ever lived and will happen to every human as long as humans live and as long as humans die.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  And that pain or that sadness or that loss or that, that longing to see that person again, that never goes away. It just, you do manage it a, a bit better as time goes on. I think I manage it pretty well, but again, like you and I were talking at the beginning of this conversation, they will jump out at you at any moment and you, you won't know it's coming and there it is. And in the beginning, our family was all crying together at the same time, all the time. And then as time went on, each one of us would have our moment. You know, you'd just grab each other and help each other through it. And that's what we gotta do.

• 26:21Anderson Cooper?

  Well, Gary, thank you so much and for talking to us and for sharing Mac with us and sharing his music as well. And on January 5th, from now on, I will think of you and your family and think of Mac and say a prayer.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  And I'll, I'll think of your dad.

• 26:35Anderson Cooper?

  Thank you.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me, Anderson.

• 26:39Anderson Cooper?

  If you have thoughts you'd like to share about my conversation with Gary, you can leave us a comment on our grief community page at CNN.com/AllThereIs. And if there's something you've learned in grief that would be helpful for others, we'd love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. On Thursday, September 24th, I hope you join me at 9:15 PM for my streaming show, All There Is Live. It's on every other Thursday. You can watch new episodes live on CNN.com/AllThereIs. And it's free on our community page there for a week after it airs. Thanks so much for listening.