Ken Burns' History With Grief

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has been called “America’s biographer,” but in this moving conversation, he reveals how his own history has been shaped by early loss - the death of his mother Lyla when Ken was eleven years old. Join the community to share your story and watch Anderson's weekly streaming show All There Is Live at cnn.com/allthereis Host: Anderson Cooper, Showrunner: Haley Thomas, Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski, Technical Director: Dan Dzula. Booker: Kerry Rubin. 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.

• 0:02Anderson Cooper?

  The last couple of days, I've been sifting through old photographs of my dad. He worked as an actor and screenwriter in Los Angeles in the 1950s, long before he met my mom. It's a bit like looking at a stranger. There's so much about him I still don't know, and so much I've forgotten over time. I've never had any videos of my dad as he was when I was a kid, and I've struggled to remember how he moved, the look in his eyes when he talked. Still photos don't give you that. A few weeks ago, I got an email. An archivist found a TV interview my dad gave on Mississippi Public Television, and she sent me the link to watch. I waited a few minutes. I was nervous. And then, I clicked on the link.

• 0:46Anderson Cooper?

  And suddenly, there he was, alive. And I want to show it to you. I want you to meet my dad, Wyatt Cooper.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I'm at home, anywhere I am. I really am, because whether I'm in a big city or in the country, I am the same person. And in New York City, for instance, my kids and I go into the park. And Central Park in New York is a marvelous place. We have a spring that belongs to us. It belongs to us because only we know about it. We go there, and we clean leaves out of the mouth of the spring. And when the water gurgles gratefully out and goes down the thing, we have affected this. So we have had something to do with the soil and with growing things. And that exists in the city as it does in the country.

• 1:35Anderson Cooper?

  I watched him, how he moved his hands, the way he listened and connected with the person he was speaking to. And I remembered the feel of those hands, and the way he connected to me when we spoke. I remember those eyes looking into mine, not just the brightness of the blue, but the delight and wonder and love I saw in them. That spring he was talking about in Central Park, I'd forgotten we used to go there.

• 2:05Anderson Cooper?

  But about six months ago, I found a spring in the forest near my house. And every weekend, my kids and I had been going there to clear out leaves. And I now delight in seeing my Wyatt and Sebastian help the water gurgle gratefully out, as my dad once did with me and my brother. I see my kids with the same eyes he once saw me. One more thing. Several months ago, I started occasionally calling my son Wyatt Buddy. Now, I don't really know why. It's not a name I've ever used for anyone ever. But a few days ago, I found a bunch of letters my dad's mom and his sister sent him over the years. Each began the same way.

• 2:50Anderson Cooper?

  Dear Buddy. I'd forgotten that was the nickname he was called in the small town of Quitton, Mississippi, where he grew up. The cycles of history in the world and in families play out across generations in patterns we only sometimes see. My guest on the podcast today has made history come alive for millions of Americans. Ken Burns is the most well-known documentary filmmaker of our time. You've probably seen some of his award-winning series on public television, baseball, jazz, the Civil War. What you don't know about Ken, what I didn't know, is how early loss and grief has shaped his entire life.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  We forget that these losses are often the most important and animating aspects of who we are, that we are not just defined by it, but sometimes our accomplishments are issuing out of that.

• 3:46Anderson Cooper?

  We'll have more with Ken Burns in a moment.

• 3:49Speaker 03

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• 4:21Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome back. I've started a weekly companion show to this podcast. It's called All There Is Live. It's livestreamed on our Grief Community page at CNN.com/AllThereIs every Thursday night at 9:15 PM. If you can't catch it live, it'll still be available there to watch for days after. The first episode was last week, and I spoke to a podcast listener who's become a friend. Her name is Mary Lahikinen. Her son Ian died of glioblastoma.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Something that morning, the last morning of hospice, I needed to hold him, and I got in behind him and had him against my chest. And I told him, I said, "It's okay, Ian. I've got you. I love you." I could feel his heart beating, and then it stopped. And just to have been able to hold him at that moment, how lucky am I to have been holding Ian? How lucky am I?

• 5:22Anderson Cooper?

  And to have had him.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  What a gift.

• 5:28Anderson Cooper?

  That's All There Is Live, Thursday nights, 9:15 PM. My guest is Ken Burns, one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time. His new series, The Revolutionary War, will be seen on public television starting November 16th. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 5:45Anderson Cooper?

  I found in my dad's things, two self-published books from two people in the 1800s about the children they lost. These are grief books that these families put out. The losses that previous generations had before penicillin, before other antibiotics, it's stunning. And it's haunting to me, but history has given me solace. To know that grief is a landscape generations of people have found themselves in and found a way to walk through.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  From the beginning of time. And we spend a good deal of our time, particularly in a modern age, trying to avoid it, trying to design the most sort of perfect circumstances, the equivalent of a gated community in every aspect of one's life.

• 6:33Anderson Cooper?

  Emotionally as well.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Emotionally, most definitely. Certainly in my experience, too, watching myself and trying to come out of that or break out of those gates. But what we do is we...

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Forget that these losses are often the most important and animating aspects of who we are, that we are not just defined by it, but sometimes our accomplishments are issuing out of that. I don't think I'd be sitting here talking to you, Anderson, if my mother hadn't developed cancer when I was a little boy and died when I was 11 years old, a few months short of my 12th birthday.

• 7:13Anderson Cooper?

  You don't think you would have had the career, the life path that you've had?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Definitely not. There was never a moment, Anderson, when I wasn't aware that there was a sort of Damocles hanging over our family, our life. There was something wrong with my mother. She would go away for a long time. She'd be in the hospital. She would come back. She had a radical mastectomy. There was all of the disfiguration of that.

• 7:35Anderson Cooper?

  From the time you were, your earliest memories-

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Just conscious, my earliest memories.

• 7:39Anderson Cooper?

  She was ill.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  They told us when I was seven years old that she was going to die within six months.

• 7:43Anderson Cooper?

  Wait, somebody told you when you were seven years old?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  My parents set us down, and it was, in retrospect, not a good thing to do. We knew she was sick, but they basically said that this had metastasized and that it was terminal, and they thought it would be six months. And my mom is so heroic and so strong, she just came and said, "I will see you to junior high," she said. And that meant seventh grade. That was like, I was in second grade. That was like, so far away. I kind of almost go, phew, you know, I've got some time. And she missed it by a few months. But she would just face all this stuff. We brought a hospital bed into the living room. She'd want to be in her bedroom. She would hold court there. I can remember her climbing up a set of stairs, you know the way you know your mother, the pleats of her skirts, and you're following

• 8:29Speaker 02

  her up. And she would take this flask out to get a shot of brandy to give her more oxygen for her lungs, because she'd lost one lung and was now basically on a half.

• 8:40Anderson Cooper?

  And how old was she when she died?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Forty-two. She died on April 28, 1965. In the days after, I was immensely sort of relaxed. I was aware that she was gone. I would dream that she was not gone. I would blow the candles out at my birthday, wishing she'd come back. So that was the secret I held with the universe. In fact, many years, April 28, the date would be up ahead, and then all of a sudden it would be receding. I would never present from 1965 on.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  It just didn't happen. And it was part of the keeping her alive, of not, not dealing with the fact that she was gone. And after she passed away, and I would say passed away, I would say deceased in these awkward anachronistic phrases, never say die, you know.

• 9:28Anderson Cooper?

  I try not to use pass away, because

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:31Anderson Cooper?

  I mean, I try to, if somebody, I try to use the verbish somebody uses, but, but in my own life, I, I, I say somebody died.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  I had to learn how to do that. We're now sixty and a half years since she's been gone, which is way too long to be without a mother, and I feel it every day. Her name was Lila, by the way, L Y L A, Lila Smith Tupper Burns.

• 9:55Anderson Cooper?

  And you feel it every day, the loss?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I love baseball, for example, and people say, yeah, I loved it when my dad and I could get together, or my mom, and I, I did baseball as this thing because nobody ever came to my games. It was this stuff I did alone, and, and a good deal of my life right now is like that too, kind of isolated. I'm in touch with people all the time, but also completely, you know, alone.

• 10:20Anderson Cooper?

  I'm exactly the same way.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  And, and so you, you've got the social aspects of whatever the professional life is, but there's also, you know, you got, you come in and you take off your coat and you're just, you just want to talk to your dog and, and, and that's it.

• 10:35Anderson Cooper?

  Does that, I mean.

• 10:40Anderson Cooper?

  Sorry.

• 10:44Anderson Cooper?

  I was hoping that would go away.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  So the half-life of grief is endless, and that's okay, because it is an engine of accomplishment and of, I mean, it took me, so I'm almost twelve, eleven years old. By the time I'm thirty-nine, forty, I'm in the middle of a, a real-life crisis. Anxiety came in, and there was doubt and worry and all of these crushing things. And I remember speaking to a therapist about the divorce I was going through, and she looked at me and said, you really think she's coming back? And I knew she didn't mean my wife.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. It was that conversation that led me to my father-in-law, a fairly eminent psychologist. And I told him, just off the top of my head, I said, I seem to be keeping my mother alive. And he looked at me as if he knew all of this all along. And he says, I bet you you blew out your candles on your birthday cake, growing up, wishing she'd come back. And I go, yeah, how did you know? And then he listed two or three other intimate things that only I knew that I was doing. Superstitious things, stuff that was avoiding dealing with it. And then he said to me, but look what you do for a living. I said, what? He said, you wake the dead.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And then from that moment on, I realized that I needed to go back and repossess the loss and reclaim what actually happened, no matter how painful, to figure out how to heal myself. My mother died, my father had mental illness. And so we had a funeral, but nobody ever picked up the ashes. And here I am now, almost 40 years old, and there's no there there. There's not a grave, there's not anything. And I went, this is not repressed memory. This is just set aside. I mean, how could I have gone that long and not known where she was? Or whatever was left of her?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  And then me and my younger brother, Rick, who's also a documentary filmmaker, we endeavored to go back and try to find. The funeral home had grown out of business. We tracked the widow down to Florida, who said that when we had unclaimed...

• 13:11Anderson Cooper?

  The widow of the owner of the funeral home?

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that when we had unclaimed ashes, that we sent them to this cemetery way outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we had lived and where she had died. And... We went out there and the guy with the little filing cabinet goes, yes, she's with 28 other cremains, the euphemism for this.

• 13:34Anderson Cooper?

  Cremated remains.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Uh huh. And could we pull them out? He goes, no, they've all dissolved. Well, could we put a plaque? And so we go out there and find the place and we're able to put, it's not one of these things with above ground markers, but you can put something that lies flat. And then brought my dad out, who had been the sort of agent of the forgetting because he had not dealt with it and just had not bothered to do it. We went to the minister at her church, the man she knew had died and now this was the replacement. And sobbed to him. And then I've never lost April 28th. In fact, I probably once a day see it on a clock or on a sports countdown thing.

• 14:17Anderson Cooper?

  You see for like the numbers for 4/28?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  And my young, I've got four daughters and I would take them, the older daughters, to Ann Arbor every April 28th and we would have an elaborate feast. And then afterward, I said, I don't have to go there every year, but the date is never lost and it's, it's okay. I don't always feel the immense pain of the loss, but it, I'm sorry, is not going to go away.

• 14:41Anderson Cooper?

  But what I was asking, well, it's twofold. I was hoping it would go away, the pain of it, although I'm really just allowing myself to feel the pain of it for the first time in my life after my dad died when I was 10 years old and my brother 10 years later. But I think the loneliness and that, that sense of isolation, I mean, it's an effort to engage with people. I can do it for work, but I've been in my head this entire time and I was hoping by feeling the losses finally in my life. All that would dissipate and I would somehow be engaged more with other

• 15:25Anderson Cooper?

  human beings and that hasn't happened with you, you say?

• 15:28Speaker 02

  It's happened a little bit. There is, the work that we've done, the work that you're doing is all good and it all is connecting, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to be some ideal of happiness that doesn't really exist for anybody, gregarious and whatever. Sometimes you'll find the people that are the life of the party are themselves beset. This is where they lose themselves and that we lose ourselves in other ways and in the interior dialogue that no one could possibly understand. And just sitting here talking to you, I mean, it's clear we've had very similar circumstances

• 16:08Speaker 02

  and very similar, completely understandable reactions to those circumstances and the way you button them down and then the way you try to bring air into this miasma and just let it breathe a little bit, it's not going to change overnight. And then maybe the work we do is the compensation for, I mean, if I wake the dead, if my job is to make Abraham Lincoln come alive or now George Washington with this or some ordinary foot soldier from the revolution come alive, maybe that's the compensation. The question is, and I have a really close friend and my co-director in this, Sarah Botstein, and she always will

• 16:49Speaker 02

  say to me all the time, "Take it in. There'll be something really great that happens, a great award, a great wonderful thing."

• 16:56Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I can't do that.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  And I can't do that. And she says, "Take it in." And every once in a while, you get a glimpse. It's almost in a way, and I don't know if this is your experience, and I'm not sure it's actually accurately a mental thought process that does this, but you're disrespecting if you let go of there, of the whatever internal sadness you're supposed to have or just the sense of loss or whatever it is. But I know I have at times glimpsed and gone, "Wow, this is great," you know? And most of the time it's...

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Okay, what's the next thing?

• 17:31Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, I started working to earn money when I was like 12 because I was very concerned about, I mean, it may sound weird to some people, given my mom's last name, but financial stability and safety and I wanted, I knew I was on a financially shaky ship because my mom was amazing, but not a business person. And I needed, I knew I would end up supporting her one day and supporting everybody one day. And that was very much in my mind when I was 12. And I used to say a prayer every night, which was, God, please keep me healthy so I can continue to work and earn enough money to take care of mommy, me, and nanny who I loved, and Carter, my brother.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  I also started working and I've never stopped working. It's almost like the red shoes. I mean, like I put on the red shoes and it's, you can't take them off because there are too many people that need that support.

• 18:26Anderson Cooper?

  I don't feel like I can stop. Like, everything will fall apart. And I believe everything will be taken away. And so I need to build up as big a cushion as possible.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and nothing is big enough, by the way.

• 18:40Anderson Cooper?

  Right. It will never be, it will never, it makes no, and I'm actually doing damage. I mean, I'm taking time away from my kids because I have, I'm on this treadmill that I cannot allow myself to go.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  It's very interesting. I have been a single dad twice in my life now. And it's been one of the saving graces. Not that I would ever recommend divorce or the pain of that, but it has necessitated that at least half the time I am there and cannot have that excuse to go off someplace, you know. But I, I, I do think this idea of working and just having to keep doing, I've watched, I'm now at an age where I have friends who are retired or are contemplating or making plans for retirement. And what about you? And you kind of look at them like, retire? What do you mean? I've got a thousand more stories to tell.

• 19:30Anderson Cooper?

  Also, people work their whole lives to get mastery. And you know how to do what you do better than anybody. And you create things which are magical and important. God knows, we need to understand our history and we need to understand and look at ourselves. And you, you help us do that. You're so good at what you do. There is a satisfaction in that, even if you don't take it in.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 19:56Anderson Cooper?

  Just knowing.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:57Anderson Cooper?

  Oh, you know what? I know how to do this.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Grief, actually, as painful as it is, as isolating as it can be for some people in the manifestations that it seems that both you and I have, is also a gift that can't be squandered either. We can't not try to transform it, at least, into something that, if it doesn't ultimately help us, or we don't think it helps us, that could help other people.

• 20:20Anderson Cooper?

  I keep saying to myself, like, my dad, my nanny, who I was very close to, who really raised me after my dad died, they would not want me to be unhappy. They would not want me to feel disconnected. And yet, I do think there is that element of like, if I let go of this.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Right. Then you're betraying them in some way.

• 20:41Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, they disappear altogether.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't think that happens. I think there must be a right way to put it, but I haven't found it. I just think that there's a kind of, you know, it's almost like this samurai ethic. You keep this kind of ascetic.

• 20:57Anderson Cooper?

  Right. And like, you do something and it receives awards, or it gets recognized, I immediately discount it and think, okay, it would be weakness if I.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:08Anderson Cooper?

  Allow this in, I need to just be on the next thing, like a shark who needs to keep moving.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  And it's not imposter syndrome either. You know you're where you're supposed to be, and you're doing the work, and you know it's good work. And I feel the same thing about my thing. I feel so lucky. I knew a couple months after I turned 12, my dad would let me stay up late on a school night and watch movies, and I watched him cry. He never cried when my mom was sick. He never cried when she died. And I wondered why, and he never cried at this impossibly sad funeral, and then, of course, never picked up the stuff. But here was this old movie called Odd Man Out with James Mason about the Irish troubles, and he's crying. And I said, I'm gonna be a filmmaker. So I'm just.

• 21:48Anderson Cooper?

  That was the moment you decided to be.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  That was it. Because I understood that it had provided him, in all the complexity of his own life and mental illness, probably bipolar, don't know. A safe haven, and it was the movies. And we love that. So by the time I'm 12, I know what I'm gonna do. By 18, I'm a documentary filmmaker. And by 22, I also know it's going to be in American history. I'm so lucky to know what I'm supposed to do. And yet I sit there also absent from the real experience of what I think I see other people having.

• 22:24Anderson Cooper?

  God, I feel that so much, absent from the experience other people are having. But do you feel the 12-year-old boy that you were still?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  I was talking to my-

• 22:33Anderson Cooper?

  Because I just woke up to feeling that little kid. And it's been incredibly important.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  It's really important. And you have to love him in a way for all the grief and the pain and all the confusion. I have an experience where I'm 72 years old and I take the subway all the time. And I bound up the stairs. And I realized that I- there was a kid who was eight or nine or 10 years old, pre-death kid. Still worried about it, knew something was bad, was gonna happen. But I could feel that. And I still feel that same person.

• 23:07Anderson Cooper?

  But the thing of, well, I'm not gonna take this in. I gotta keep moving forward. To me, that is the mental trick I developed when I was nine, 10, 11 years old, which was, don't feel any of this stuff. Just keep moving forward. If you feel it, it's gonna drag you down, it's gonna suck you down. And so don't celebrate your birthday and have never celebrated my birthday since. Don't take the good in because it's going to, it's gonna weaken you.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 23:36Anderson Cooper?

  It's gonna drag you down.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have so many of that things. I can remember being the back of a station wagon of a new friend. And the mother very innocently says, hi, what's your dad do? My dad's an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. And what does your mom- Do. And I would say, she's deceased. Like, I was some accountant, forty-five years old, with an actuarial table.

• 24:03Anderson Cooper?

  You would say that when you were-

• 24:04Speaker 02

  I would say deceased when I was twelve, thirteen years old. And then, the outer life was pretty calm. I mean, if you said, what was the greatest grade you were in? I'd say, eighth grade, which was a couple of years later. And I, and everything was good, I was popular, whatever. But, inside, inside was just roiling sense of loss. And I think that, as you said at the very beginning of this conversation, this is the inevitability of all human beings. None of us are getting out of here alive, none of us. We are more defined by, by these losses than we are by the Nobel Prize,

• 24:46Speaker 02

  or the Oscar nomination, or the Emmy, or whatever the thing is that our group tells us is the most important thing. None of those things matter. And in fact, you know, how you free yourself of this needless suffering without losing the connection to these spirits of these people who are central to who we are. Fathers, and brothers, and mothers, and-

• 25:16Anderson Cooper?

  It's not just history that makes me realize how much suffering others have had. Early on, I started going to Somalia and the famine, and Bosnia, and all over, and touching other people's pain. The incomprehensible suffering that exists in the world. And, in, in comparison, my little suffering seems minimal compared to a, a mother who's lost eight of twelve children, because they don't have a twenty-five cent antibiotic.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  My second daughter, Lily, she was, as a baby, just terrified of the vacuum cleaner. And her mom would have to make sure she was asleep, or, or, outside, or at a neighbor's, to vacuum. And one day, and this is really important, I think, to you and me. One day, Amy, my first wife, said, she just appeared at the doorway, while she was vacuuming, and walked over and sat on the vacuum cleaner. Sat on this monster, just sat on it. So in our family, we say-

• 26:23Speaker 02

  To sit on the vacuum cleaner is to face your fears. And we do this all the time. And you try to remind yourself that that's what you need to do to move into this. So I took Siddhartha Mukherjee's book, The Emperor of All Maladies, about cancer, this thing that had taken my mom. And I had a hard time even saying the word cancer, let alone death. And then spent many years working with colleagues to make a film, a series about cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, which was a way of sort of sitting on the vacuum cleaner, which you're going into Somalia, or Rwanda, or all of these places is about. It's confronting the human experience, and the human experience is loss.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  But I can't say, Anderson, that even sitting on that particular vacuum cleaner changed my relationship to that loss. And I think, as I get older, that maybe it's not supposed to. I just have to have some new understanding, to make room for it, and to tolerate that 11-year-old, or maybe it's the three-year-old that knew, or maybe it's the five-year-old that knew it was coming, or maybe it's the 12-year-old who'd had to absorb it, to just make room for that boy.

• 27:41Anderson Cooper?

  It has been a revelation for me that it is only once you turn to the grief, the pain, which I ran from always, that you actually get the reward, which is feeling again, or feeling your loved one again.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:03Anderson Cooper?

  I couldn't feel my dad because I couldn't allow myself to feel the pain of his loss.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  I cannot describe to you how extraordinary, after years of anxiety, which is the avoidance of pain, I mean, anxiety's a kind of friend, right? It's keeping you from the thing that really hurts, to pierce through it and to be able to sob in a therapist's office, or to be able to sit in this Episcopal church in Ann Arbor, Michigan with a man I'd never met before. With my brother and just sob and read a letter we'd written to our mother that was filled with all of the pain of loss and anger at leaving and all of the mess that we inherited and finding notes that she would leave to her mother-in-law, my father's mother, who was a wonderful woman, saying, "I'm dying. Bobby can't take care of them.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Who will take care of my little boys?" And understanding how fragile Rick and I were in the world and we made it, you know, we kind of muddled through, but she was amazing. I think she willed herself to stay alive for Rick and me.

• 29:07Anderson Cooper?

  I found letters of my dad recently, and he's writing the same thing, which is, "I've got to stay alive for these boys."

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is it. And this is, how different is that from your prayer? You know, "Let me stay healthy so that I can support this person and this person and my nanny and this person and all the people I love." My dad died way too young, too, of mental illness and other things in his all-too-short life. My dad was not great, but not bad either, and the ability to have these cathartic things. But I'll tell you, Anderson, I lost one of my best friends two days ago. And I mean, why is that not on the tip of my tongue right now? Why has it taken it this long to tell you? Ron Sullivan was his name, from Sunapee, New Hampshire, and I've known him for 30

• 29:59Speaker 02

  years. And he left me an anguish call from the hospital that he had maybe a year to live. And I called him right back when I got the message and left him all the, not the bromides, but all of the compassion that I could summon. I love this man. He's a big bear of a lovely human being and had been through a lot of health stuff and misdiagnosis and finally this, and then this happened, and then this new thing. And his wife had called back and said, "We're going home to hospice." And he got home barely a day or so and left. And my youngest daughters think of Ron as their godfather, and he remembered every birthday, and when we saw him, he would give them way too much money for ice cream

• 30:44Speaker 02

  and stuff like that. And I have spent the better part of the last 48, however long it's been. Doing what I have always done, you know, which is trying to figure out not to react to the loss of Ron, you know, and my 20 year old who's taking a junior semester abroad calls in the middle of the night sobbing that she misses him and my youngest away at school calls and every day says, and I really miss Ron and can you send me a picture? Right? So there are people around me that seem to know how to process.

• 31:23Anderson Cooper?

  When you hear them say those things.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  I just see daylight and I just want to run towards it and I go, oh God bless them that they're not, they don't have this.

• 31:32Anderson Cooper?

  But does it make you, I think it would make me realize, ah, here's that wall again. Like, why am I not saying this?

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Here's that wall again. It's better than the way the wall was for so many years unaware. The wall's there? Yeah. That's what I guess human beings do. It's certainly what this human being does. And I've now met another human being that does the same thing. So I guess that this is something that we do. But yeah, the wall's still there.

• 32:01Anderson Cooper?

  I see your films and they're drenched in grief and they're drenched in connection and emotion and it's not dry history. You're an emotional archaeologist. And I get that. And a lot of the stuff that I think I do best is going someplace and being able to touch people in the middle of the worst thing that's ever happened to them. And you help other people feel things.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:30Anderson Cooper?

  And yet we don't allow ourselves to feel.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Or we don't permit the full expression of it or the unconscious expression of it. Like, I'll be working on a film and Abraham Lincoln dies, or Jackie Robinson dies, or Louis Armstrong dies, and I cry. I'm watching the film and I cry and I'm grateful for that, that release, just like my dad. Maybe that's why I'm making movies, to have a death scene where James Mason essentially commits suicide by cop at the end of this Odd Man Out by Sir Carol Reed, a really great, great film that he cried at. And that's, that's the thing we're also doing that is.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Okay, there's, there's some, there's pathologies and some toxicities to the way we behave. We both know something's wrong with the way we've conducted our lives. And at the same time, these spirits are still there.

• 33:24Anderson Cooper?

  We'll have more of my conversation with Ken Burns in just a moment. But first, if you want to listen or watch past episodes of the podcast, you can do that at our community page at CNN.com/AllThereIs. It's where you can also watch our new weekly companion show, All There Is Live, Thursday nights at 9:15 PM Eastern, and catch past episodes of it as well. We'll be right back with more from Ken Burns.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. We're going to talk about rethinking how we die. How we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live. Our guest is Dr. BJ Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician.

• 34:07Speaker 05

  We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group. It's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interests, services, and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject and makes us cling to life.

• 34:28Speaker 02

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

• 34:36Anderson Cooper?

  My five-year-old, Wyatt, whose name is after my dad, asks me lately about death all the time. I've talked to him about it, like, did my grandmother die before I was born? And I've said, I believe they are watching over us. And I believe my mom would be so happy to see you. And then my dad is smiling. And I would have never said those things before because I don't think I believed them before. But I actually do believe.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  I think I do. It's, you know, that's, I'm walking in Memphis, are you a Christian? Ma'am, I am tonight. You know, there's a kind of, there's something really powerful about what it releases and what it, I mean, we know the pain that it's caused, but there's a great thing. I mean, I've got one of the happiest endings of all, which is my oldest daughter, Sarah, who never met her grandmother. Of course, none of my four daughters have met their grandmother.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  The name Lila was never said, but the name was itself draped in black crepe because

• 35:40Anderson Cooper?

  Your mom's name.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  My mom's name. We said mommy and still do. But in January of 2011, my oldest daughter had my first grandchild, a daughter, whom she named Lila. And so, all of a sudden, the black crepe has disappeared. We say the word Lila all the time with excitement and glee. She's old enough, the same age as my youngest, so they're best friends, not aunt and niece. And she gave me the greatest gift, which was taking the "Paul" off the name at least.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  And we say Lila all the time, and the name doesn't have the associations it did. It's just a wonderful, wonderful gift. I can't begin, I mean, this gal has given me many, many gifts. She recited one Christmas morning, The Gettysburg Address as her present to me, flawlessly standing in her nightgown at 12 years.

• 36:42Anderson Cooper?

  She knows her audience.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  She knows her audience, and there was an awkwardness.

• 36:45Anderson Cooper?

  No fool Lila.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  I was a single dad, and I thought, oh, I'd forgotten something. And Lily was looking up, my second daughter's, and I went, oh, did I forget something? And she said, no, Dad, Sarah has one more gift. And she stood in the early Christmas morning light and recited flawlessly, I mean, not a single, you know, thing, and no emphasis on the prepositions. It's people, not of, by, and for. It's people, people, people. Got it all perfectly. And I'm sitting here, just drowning it in, and, you know, so...

• 37:16Anderson Cooper?

  I just wrote my son this name Wyatt, after my dad, and I started calling him Buddy for some reason, not something I have ever called anybody in my life. I'm not like, hey Buddy. And then I've been going through all of these boxes of my dad's things, which have never been gone through. And I'm reading all these letters to him from his mom in a small town in Mississippi, and they're all addressed to Buddy. And I did not remember or realize that was my dad's nickname, Buddy. And everybody called him Buddy Cooper. So these, these cycles that repeat... In families is fascinating to me.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  And they ought to be telling us something and we keep forgetting, you know, that maybe we're practicing here, right? And maybe the next time we do it differently or better, or I don't know.

• 38:10Anderson Cooper?

  We've set up a voicemail for people to call in if there's something they've learned in their grief that would be helpful for others. And we've received about 7,000

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 38:18Anderson Cooper?

  Messages, and it is the most incredible repository

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:22Anderson Cooper?

  of human emotion. And just the ocean of loss and feeling and love out there is extraordinary.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  I live in New Hampshire and we're a political state. And I have one political sign up that isn't political. It just says, "Love multiplies." And I think it's the only equation in the universe that I know to be absolutely thing. And that, I think, in the work that we do and the way that this thing for you works so well with the response is this manifestation of that. We just, we need each other, you know? I make films about the US, but I also make films about us. And the intimacy of that is where all of the stuff happens. Certainly, there's the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the US.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  But all of the intimacy of us and we and our and the need to replicate that, where we, no matter how many people around us are part of that us, we, the singularity, the aloneness, the solitude of grief is so, at times, oppressive, but also it's sometimes those connections that make me feel so alive, even in the suffering, that there's something. That is very much alive about having to keep front and center these things.

• 39:53Anderson Cooper?

  You talked about the pursuit of happiness. I'm very interested in the history of grief in America and the privatization of it. Loss and grief was part of everybody's daily life.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Everybody's life.

• 40:02Anderson Cooper?

  And that-

• 40:03Speaker 02

  And the widow wore black for a year.

• 40:05Anderson Cooper?

  And black bunting was hung, people's bodies were displayed. That became privatized in America as people stopped dying at home and started dying in hospitals. Do you know much about why that privatization took place?

• 40:19Speaker 02

  No, it did. And I think it has to do with consumerism, which means you focus on what's happening now, what I'm doing.

• 40:26Anderson Cooper?

  Well, I wonder how much the idea of the pursuit of happiness, how to reach happiness, grief doesn't really fit into that equation. If everybody's pursuing happiness in what they think it means, grief is not welcome in that conversation.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  I agree. So I think we have to go back and rearrange the molecules of what we assumed the pursuit of happiness. I mean, you could have followed John Locke, Jefferson, and said life, liberty, and property, because that's really what it was about. Remember, it was only going to be an aristocracy of landed property men who were going to run the thing. But in order to win the war, you had to let teenagers and ne'er-do-wells and recent immigrants who had nothing to fight this war for you, you're going to have to give them something. So democracy is not the object of the American Revolution. It's a consequence. And pursuit of happiness is the inscrutable phrase at the heart. It's even not just happiness. You can define it as material stuff and miss the point. It's about the responsibilities of citizenship and lifelong learning. But the key word is pursuit. It's process.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  You're just going to have to work with this and work through the grief and work through the stuff and all the walls that we've created for ourselves. I think there have been so many things that we've done that have separated us from this. We've separated ourselves and we don't want to know about it. And when I said consumerism, I meant the focus on youth and everything is pretending that there's going to be an exception made in your case and you're going to live forever. And it just isn't going to happen. Everybody within the sound of my voice. We're not getting out of here alive. That is the true fact of everything. And somebody asked Plato, what was his philosophy of life? And he said, preparing for death.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  So I think we've done ourselves an extraordinary disservice at a, at a social, political level, but at an intimate level. If we can't let loss and grief be part of our common language, then the stuff that we did as little boys to ourselves, happens.

• 42:25Anderson Cooper?

  You had a saying of three things.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:29Anderson Cooper?

  That were very important to you. What were the three things?

• 42:31Speaker 02

  This will pass, get help from others, and the hardest, be kind to yourself. And there's a yes, but for every problem that every person has, and there are no real yes, buts to that. It will change. Maybe it'll get worse, but more than likely, it'll get a little bit better.

• 42:48Anderson Cooper?

  This won't last, get help from others, be kind to yourself. Those are all things in grief as well that are important to remember. They apply to grief.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  My acquiring of those three things, and one of my daughters calls them the truths, and I said, let's just call them things. They are a product of trying to work through and negotiate this complicated dynamic between my mother's death and me. And let's just say, Lila Smith, Tupperburns.

• 43:16Anderson Cooper?

  Ken Burns, thank you so much.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 43:21Anderson Cooper?

  Next week on All There Is, comedian and cancer survivor Tig Notaro. It's a funny and moving conversation about loss. Tig's close friend, poet Andrea Gibson, recently died, and Tig was at Andrea's bedside.

• 43:34Speaker 06

  I have to say, it's really the first time I've experienced a death in the way that I have, where I really feel Andrea. And I don't know what that is, but the grief leading up, and the grief I feel, you know how tricky it is. You go about your day, and you're doing all right, and then all of a sudden, a truck parks itself on your chest, and you can't do anything, because it's like...

• 44:06Speaker 06

  It's so confusing that Andrea's gone.

• 44:09Anderson Cooper?

  Join me on Thursdays at 9:15 PM for my new weekly companion show called All There Is Live. It'll be livestreamed on our grief community page at CNN.com/AllThereIs every Thursday night at 9:15 PM. We can come together there, talk grief, and not be alone. You can also follow us on our new Instagram account, AllThereIs, and the number again for our new voicemail box, 404-827-1805. Wherever you are in your grief, thanks for listening.

• 44:39Speaker 07

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