Hold Space for Grief with Anderson Cooper

Broadcast journalist and podcast host Anderson Cooper joins Michelle and Craig to share what he’s learned from hosting his grief-focused podcast “All There Is.” The three talk about how they managed (or avoided) the grieving process and how their moms prepared their kids to live without them. Plus Anderson shares his thoughts on the Vanderbilts inspiring an episode of “The Gilded Age.” Have a question you want answered? Write to us at imopod.com http://imopod.com. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The only connection to the Vanderbilts I had as a kid, my dad once took me to Grand Central Station, which was founded by Commodore Carmelius Vanderbilt, who was not a nice guy. And there's a statue of him outside Grand Central Station, which by the way, he paid for and had made and set up there. And it wasn't like his workers loved him and he did it. It was his. And he made photographs. He had paintings painted of himself and gave them out to all his children. Not that they wanted them either. But I remember my dad taking me to see this statue when I was like six. And the only thing I took away from it was that grandparents turned into statues when they die, which is very relatable. I know, everybody feels this.

• 0:42Michelle Obama?

  This episode is brought to you by Rivian.

• 0:48Craig Robinson?

  Nish.

• 0:49Michelle Obama?

  Hi Craig Robinson.

• 0:50Craig Robinson?

  How are you?

• 0:51Michelle Obama?

  I'm good. I'm good. How are you?

• 0:53Craig Robinson?

  I'm fine. I'm having such a good time out here in LA.

• 0:57Michelle Obama?

  Yeah. So you've got some company with you this trip?

• 1:01Craig Robinson?

  So this trip, Erin, our youngest, our fourth is here. And Kelly Robinson.

• 1:09Michelle Obama?

  Kelly!

• 1:10Craig Robinson?

  Made it.

• 1:12Craig Robinson?

  Yes, yes. Go ahead, give it up for her. She made an appearance.

• 1:16Michelle Obama?

  Kelly left Milwaukee to be here. Kelly in the house.

• 1:20Craig Robinson?

  Kelly's known to the whole staff only by her emails.

• 1:26Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, Kelly's emails are infamous. Kelly will, I can count, this is what I love about my sister-in-law. Details, you know? There is no detail, which is why I don't communicate with you. You have no information. You give nothing. If I want to know what's going on, I'm like, excuse me Kelly, tell me what's happening in your life and I will get the rundown, right?

• 1:49Craig Robinson?

  You will. You will.

• 1:50Michelle Obama?

  Your wife is like, I tell her, she's, you know, I'd hire her in a minute as a chief of staff to run anything, any office, any project. She, yeah.

• 2:01Craig Robinson?

  Well, you'll love this because you know, we, Erin and I have been staying in our Airbnb, which has been terrific.

• 2:08Michelle Obama?

  Have a normal life while you're away for a week?

• 2:12Craig Robinson?

  We cooked breakfast this morning.

• 2:13Michelle Obama?

  What'd you make?

• 2:13Craig Robinson?

  So.

• 2:14Michelle Obama?

  We as in?

• 2:15Craig Robinson?

  Aaron and I.

• 2:16Michelle Obama?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:17Craig Robinson?

  Aaron and I, so we boiled eggs last night so we could have our.

• 2:21Michelle Obama?

  You know, it's all, he says he cooking breakfast, like, everybody here knows.

• 2:26Craig Robinson?

  I haven't got.

• 2:27Michelle Obama?

  I cooked breakfast and he boiled some eggs.

• 2:29Craig Robinson?

  I haven't gotten to the.

• 2:30Michelle Obama?

  Okay, alright.

• 2:31Craig Robinson?

  We had to fix some other things to go with the eggs.

• 2:35Michelle Obama?

  And don't say toast.

• 2:39Michelle Obama?

  Don't say toast and fruit.

• 2:41Craig Robinson?

  And toast and fruit, and Aaron made himself waffles.

• 2:44Michelle Obama?

  Oh, now that's.

• 2:45Craig Robinson?

  Frozen.

• 2:46Michelle Obama?

  Oh, well.

• 2:47Craig Robinson?

  In the toaster.

• 2:48Michelle Obama?

  Okay, alright, well.

• 2:49Craig Robinson?

  You know, we're two bachelors. We're two bachelors.

• 2:53Michelle Obama?

  Two bachelors living life in your Airbnb.

• 2:55Craig Robinson?

  We're living life and so.

• 2:58Michelle Obama?

  Did you have to rent a car this time?

• 2:59Craig Robinson?

  No, no, we haven't, but Kelly, of course, rented a car because she figured out that that was cheaper than taking Ubers, so.

• 3:06Michelle Obama?

  And that's the other thing about Kelly, not a penny wasted, not a penny. It's like, yeah, she knows the cost of Uber, she's probably.

• 3:17Craig Robinson?

  She's calculated.

• 3:18Michelle Obama?

  Traced out all the Uber trips that are gonna be taken in this trip and decided, we're renting.

• 3:23Craig Robinson?

  Yes.

• 3:23Michelle Obama?

  We're renting a car.

• 3:24Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 3:24Michelle Obama?

  It's better.

• 3:25Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, but if we could rent a car that we wanted, I would have rented a Rivian.

• 3:30Michelle Obama?

  You know, they're sleek and clean, and Kelly's just now starting to drive the Rivian, are you now? Is she, Kelly's getting in on the Rivian action?

• 3:40Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, our listeners, as they know, Rivian gifted both of us cars this past year, and we've had fun driving them.

• 3:50Michelle Obama?

  Well, we've got a.

• 3:51Craig Robinson?

  Woo!

• 3:52Michelle Obama?

  Great, great show, great guest.

• 3:55Craig Robinson?

  Yes.

• 3:55Michelle Obama?

  Someone who so many of us know, he's been in our living rooms for good or bad.

• 4:02Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 4:03Michelle Obama?

  For most of our lives, doing the hard work of telling us what's going on in the world. Anderson Cooper is with us today.

• 4:14Craig Robinson?

  Yes, yes, Anderson Cooper, who is the anchor of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, host of The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper, and the popular grief-focused podcast, All There Is with Anderson Cooper, and I'm really interested to talk to him about that. He is also a regular correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes, which is on in the Robinson household every Sunday, right before we watch the evening football game. And he's a New York Times bestseller. So without further ado, Anderson, come on out.

• 4:46Michelle Obama?

  Anderson Cooper. How are you, sir? Welcome to IMO. Thank you for being here.

• 4:53Craig Robinson?

  Welcome to IMO very much. Great to see you.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Thank you. We're kind of dressed the same colors.

• 4:58Michelle Obama?

  I know.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Says about me, given your fashion sense, but I. It's a little alarming.

• 5:05Michelle Obama?

  That's good. You guys look cute.

• 5:08Craig Robinson?

  This is very close.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:10Craig Robinson?

  Yes. But I like your style.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Nobody has ever said that to me.

• 5:15Michelle Obama?

  No one has said, no one ever. Well, it's great to have you. I was just saying, you've spent some time with my husband.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  A little bit, yeah. I actually saw you, I did an interview with your husband in Ghana. And you were there, I think with your kids, at the last door.

• 5:32Michelle Obama?

  Yes.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  That enslaved people would go to before.

• 5:35Michelle Obama?

  That was first term.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:36Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  It was incredible. It was an incredible experience.

• 5:38Michelle Obama?

  Powerful experience.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's nice to be here.

• 5:41Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, it's good to have you here.

• 5:43Michelle Obama?

  You've been busy in the meantime.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, you know, it's been, it's been, it's been a little busy.

• 5:48Craig Robinson?

  Well, let's get right down to it. Why would you do a grief podcast?

• 5:53Speaker 00

  You know, it started, I, my mom died in 2019. She was 95. And I, she was the last person left from my family. My brother had died by suicide when I was 21. He killed himself in front of my mom. And my dad had died when I was 10 of a heart attack. And so grief had, I mean, I'd kind of known loss early on. But so my mom was the last and, and I was kind of, you know, I was prepared for it. She lived an extraordinary life and we were very close. But I suddenly found myself going through all the things that she had left behind, which is a process all of us will go through at some time in our life, unfortunately. And it turned out to be also all my dad's things and all my brother's things, which my mom could never go through.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  She can never bring herself. So I found it to be such a lonely and overwhelming experience of, I don't know. I mean, I hadn't heard people talk about it. I obviously knew it as an intellectual concept. This is something that, that happens. But my mom saved everything and. And I just, the way I deal with things is I tend to kind of narrate them from a distance in my head. And I just started recording stuff on my phone. And then I thought it's weird that there's not more stuff out there about this process that is so universal. And I, I'd never actually, I mean, I'd only listened to one podcast. I wasn't a big podcast listener. I didn't really know what I was doing. But I just started talking to people

• 7:21Speaker 00

  because I needed help in figuring out, how do you, how do you do this? And it's been an extraordinary evolution since then. I, yeah, it's been amazing.

• 7:31Craig Robinson?

  Wow. Wow.

• 7:33Michelle Obama?

  Well, you've had a pretty interesting childhood. I just recently watched a documentary about your family, mother's history.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did a documentary for HBO about my mom.

• 7:47Michelle Obama?

  I mean, that was, she was an amazing.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  She was cool. She was cool. Yeah, my mom was Gloria Vanderbilt. And she was kind of, in some ways, larger than life. And, but she lived this extraordinary life of very early loss and this kind of crazy childhood she had and never really feeling, she felt like a changeling most of her life. And we, yeah, so I was very glad that I was able to put together this documentary for HBO called Nothing Left Unsaid. And for me, it was really important that I felt like with my brother and my dad, there was so much left unsaid because I was so young when they died. And when my mom, actually, when my mom reached the age of 91, she wrote me this really funny text about being 91 and yet feeling like

• 8:32Speaker 00

  17. And I, it just kind of clicked in my head of like, you know, I want to engage with her in a real conversation for the next year of her life. And, you know, because I think so often, we, we know our parents as our parent, we don't naturally know them as a human being. And it's only afterward, we kind of realize, wow, there's all this stuff we don't know about them. So I asked my mom if she would like have this intentional conversation with me for a year, which she was thrilled about because it meant I would be talking to her a lot. And we did it over email and phone. And we ended up making into a book called Nothing, The Rainbow Comes and Goes. And then we made this documentary called

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Nothing Left Unsaid. And it was really important to me that when she died, she knew me and I knew her. And there was nothing left unsaid between us. There was no. You know, there were no secrets, there were no

• 9:25Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Things, I wish I had said that. It, we had said it all and it was really, it was extraordinary.

• 9:30Michelle Obama?

  And

• 9:31Craig Robinson?

  Wait, what was the, the thing that you found out about your mom? As a human being that surprised you the most?

• 9:40Speaker 00

  I mean, I had known, I mean, as a kid, I was very concerned about, um, stability and my mom, my mom was an amazing person, but she was not very parental and my dad had died and I very much wanted to know what was happening and, um, I used to read my mom's journal. I used to monitor her phone calls when I was a kid. Like, I wanted to know what was coming down the pike.

• 10:05Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  And I started working when I was 12 to earn money because I was very concerned about, like, my mom's on shaky financial footing and even though the world probably thought she was super rich, but

• 10:18Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  She, you know, spent a lot of money and had no sense of money and I knew this from a little kid. And I remember I was actually walking up the stairs one day and my mom was on the phone and she said, she's talking to somebody on the phone. She said, "Well, I'll always be able to make money." And I stopped and I was like, "This ship is going down." Like, if she thinks she's always gonna be able to do this, like.

• 10:37Michelle Obama?

  And how old were you when you heard that?

• 10:39Speaker 00

  I was like 12.

• 10:40Michelle Obama?

  So you knew.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I knew. I knew early on.

• 10:43Michelle Obama?

  Were you the oldest?

• 10:44Speaker 00

  No, I was the, I was the youngest. My brother was two years older and, but he wasn't as like, focused on this as much as I was. I was really determined and yeah, I started, I mean, it was ridiculous. I started working as a child model at 12 to like

• 10:57Craig Robinson?

  To help, help the family.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, not that they, you know, I wasn't, I was saving the money because I was like, "I'm gonna need to, I'm gonna, I'm building a life raft here."

• 11:05Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  But, but she was remarkable and, and, you know, I was always very sympathetic to my mom because she really didn't have parents of her own. She was kind of Her dad died when she was an infant. She was raised in hotels in Europe by her mom, who just wanted to party. She was the subject of a vicious custody battle when she was 10 years old. It was called the trial of the century in the depression. And, you know, I kind of saw sadness behind my mom's eyes her whole life. And I didn't understand what the sadness was from, but I was sympathetic to her. And so even if she wasn't the most kind of mom mom, she was, I viewed her as a, I mean, from the time I was little, I viewed her as like a space alien whose rocket ship had like, you know, failed and landed here

• 11:50Speaker 00

  on earth by accident. And it was my job to like, help her like rent an apartment and learn how to breathe oxygen.

• 11:59Craig Robinson?

  That's, that's a level of worry that most young people.

• 12:03Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, but look who's talking.

• 12:07Michelle Obama?

  I listened to you and I think about him. And he's the oldest. I think you called it catastrophic.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was a catastrophist.

• 12:17Michelle Obama?

  He was a catastrophist at that age in the same way that you were, you know, really thinking, okay, all the worst possible scenarios. And I think he felt like the one that had to know it all. He was gonna be you. Like if things fell apart, if our dad ever could never function, then Craig was the one who was gonna make sure.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  It's interesting, because the title of this book my mom and I wrote together, which ended up being basically our correspondence over the course of the year, was The Rainbow Comes and Goes, which is from a Wordsworth poem. And it was a poem my mom liked. And for her, it meant, well, the rainbow comes and goes. It's always gonna come back. And so like, bright days are just ahead. They're just around the corner. The phone can ring and your whole life can change. And for me, the title was like, yeah, the rainbow comes and it goes. And yeah, the phone can ring and your whole friggin life can change. Like, I saw it from a negative lens. And she saw it. She like could not, it was such an interesting kind of, different way of saying stuff.

• 13:15Craig Robinson?

  You're just trying to be realistic. Just cover all the bases in case something happens.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  It's a fine line between realistic and pessimistic, I think.

• 13:21Michelle Obama?

  That's right. I think you two fell on the pessimist. I stick side.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Somewhere in the I stick family, but.

• 13:26Michelle Obama?

  Do you think that your mom, did she know that you were kind of the, the backup child?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  She did. Yeah, she did. She knew, you know, I didn't really know my mom so well. My dad was such a present dad. And, uh, and, and she didn't really know how to be a parent. She, you know, and she loved watching him. You know, being a father and she'd never had a father. Um, and so when my dad died, it was something like, who is this person I'm with? Like, I gotta get to know her. And I had a nanny who was, was my mom and my mom hated her and, uh, because of that. And, um, but, you know, my mom, my mom knew she could feel how attentive and, I mean, I, I, I was there. I was always the one she would sort of call and, and, uh, it's funny. She would, uh, she would call and I would have to steal.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  I would steal myself like, okay, who is she killed now and whose body do I gotta bury? And I would like, she'd be like, I'd really like you to come over. And finally I'd go over and one time, uh, more, more. Nine out of 10 times it was because she had redecorated something and, uh, and, and wanted to show me. Um, one time she, uh, uh, I, I had started going out to the guy who's now the, the co-parent of my child. And, uh, we'd moved into a place together and she'd seen the place and then she called me. She was like, honey, there's something I'd like you to talk about. And she's like, uh, dropped this a couple of days in a row. I finally went over. I was like, okay, what is it? And she's like, you know, when you love something, somebody, you sometimes do things you wouldn't ordinarily do. I was like, what are you talking about, mom?

• 15:00Michelle Obama?

  He's dead in the basement.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  No, and she was like, I'm talking about the taxidermy. And there was a taxidermy, like this guy had some taxidermy. And she was like, you know, it's just too much. The taxidermy. I was like, this is what I've been worrying all week. About what you've dragged me here to come from me about.

• 15:17Michelle Obama?

  Taxidermy.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  I made sure it wasn't wrong, but.

• 15:19Michelle Obama?

  Well, with your father being, you know, the way you describe your father, I mean, he sounded like a wonderful man. He was your stability.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was.

• 15:29Michelle Obama?

  He was your truth. He was your, you know, he made everything seem right for a child. And this is what we also don't realize. I mean, that's all children want is stability. They don't need money.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:41Michelle Obama?

  They need certainty, you know? It's like, I got a schedule. I know when I'm gonna eat. I know when my dad leaves and comes back, that he, you know, he does what he says. I need to go to sleep on time. I need, all those things make for security. And your dad provided that to you for 10 years. And then he was gone relatively suddenly.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, very quick. I mean, yeah, very quick. And it's interesting, because I used to think, growing up, like, I had 10 years. I mean, I was so young. And but what I came to, one of the things I came to realize among many things is just, you know what, 10 years was enough. I mean, I wanted more. I wish I'd had more. But in 10 years, he was able to do, to give me that sense of this is what security feels like, and this is what love feels like. And that's, you know, again, I wish I had more, but it's been extraordinary. To suddenly realize, oh, you know what? Like, it was enough.

• 16:39Michelle Obama?

  Well, that's if it's done right.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:42Michelle Obama?

  Right? Because there are a lot of kids who have 10 years of parenting from somebody, and it's not enough.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:48Michelle Obama?

  Right? And it's funny that you mention that because one of the, one of the reasons why I think I talk about death and mortality probably more with my kids. And our mom always said this. I mean, it was funny, as we were talking about, you know, briefing and prepping for you coming on, we realized we had different memories of how our parents talked about death. And I was like, Mom talked about it all the time. And you felt like she didn't talk about it at all.

• 17:22Craig Robinson?

  She didn't talk about it in the way that she's talking about it. She would always prepare us for her death. Like, she's been dropping dead for 20 years, right? Like, well, when I drop dead, you're gonna have to do this, this, and this. And I think she, she looked at the two of us and tried to give each of us what we needed.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  At the time, because she did not talk to me about death.

• 17:47Michelle Obama?

  But I.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  A lot, but she apparently talked to me a lot about it.

• 17:50Michelle Obama?

  Maybe me as a daughter, as a, as a mother.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  As a mother.

• 17:55Michelle Obama?

  I think she wanted me to know throughout my life, she wanted to hand us our lives early.

• 18:03Michelle Obama?

  Like, you're responsible, you did this for yourself. My mom would always say, and she would say this publicly, I didn't have anything to do with raising Michelle and Craig. They, you know, they always knew this. But I think she told herself that because there's some security in knowing that when you are gone as a parent, that your children are gonna be okay. And I didn't understand that until I had kids. And I realized that's the scariest thing, is not just losing them or something happening, happening to them. It was some, it's something happening to me. And I, and my kids are gonna go through life not feeling like they have what they need to get through. And I think my mom was constantly telling me, you're fine.

• 18:47Michelle Obama?

  You have common sense, you're already making decisions as a child. I think she was trying to tell me what you came to realize. That if you know your parents' values and their core, you've seen them, you've experienced them. If there's a loss, you're gonna be okay.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. My, my dad wrote a book about two years before he died called Families. And it was a memoir about, he grew up, he grew up kind of poor in Mississippi on a farm during the depression. And it was about the, the life of families then, and the family that he was born into, and the family that he created with my mom and, and my brother and me. And it's really a letter to my brother and me that he wrote, knowing there was a good chance that he would die. His dad had died at 50, his dad before that had died at 50.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  I've gone through my whole life thinking I would die at 50. I'm 58 now. And like, I realized I had this just, this crazy idea, which a lot of people have if you lose a parent early on, that you're gonna die at the age their parent died. Thankfully, there's advances in medicine. But, but it's really, it's such a blessing to have this book because it's, it's, it's the family history. And it's all these names of people and stories that never get told in history books of people who were, you know.

• 20:01Craig Robinson?

  Poor farmers who gathered for family reunions and their stories don't get written up in the history books very often, but you know, I know about my great uncle Raspberry, who you know, cried so much that people thought his bladder was just located too close to his eyeballs. And all these kind of obscure, you know, characters that made up, it might be like the opera of my dad's childhood on this farm.

• 20:32Craig Robinson?

  In this next segment, I want to share some of our favorite family trips, the kinds that stick with you, shape you, and remind you what really matters. Brought to you by our friends at Rivian, built for the journeys that bring us closer together. So we went on a very limited amount of road trips when we were little. What is the one that you remember the most?

• 20:57Michelle Obama?

  Well, it was one that we, we took a road trip every summer. It was just the same road trip.

• 21:04Craig Robinson?

  Right.

• 21:04Michelle Obama?

  We went to Duke's Happy Holidays Resort in White Cloud, Michigan.

• 21:10Craig Robinson?

  Yes, we did.

• 21:11Michelle Obama?

  And I don't know how long it was. It felt like we were driving to California. But when you're young, being in a car for longer than 15 minutes, I think I just lost track of time.

• 21:22Craig Robinson?

  I think it was, it was just under two hours.

• 21:25Michelle Obama?

  Right, right.

• 21:25Craig Robinson?

  But it felt like it was all day.

• 21:26Michelle Obama?

  It wasn't long. And we sort of planned for it, like we were going cross-country.

• 21:31Craig Robinson?

  Right.

• 21:31Michelle Obama?

  You know, there were lunches packed, fried chicken sandwiches, and we all, we went with our cousins.

• 21:38Craig Robinson?

  Yes.

• 21:38Michelle Obama?

  So we were packed in that car, probably in very unsafe ways. No seat belts, adults in the front, kids in the back, three adults in the front, four kids in the back.

• 21:50Craig Robinson?

  It's crazy.

• 21:51Michelle Obama?

  In a, in a Buick Deuce and a Quarter.

• 21:54Craig Robinson?

  And groceries in the trunk, because we went shabbish.

• 21:56Michelle Obama?

  And luggage. I mean, we had to have luggage. I don't even know how we all fit in it. We'd like, we didn't have, there weren't SUVs and we didn't have a station wagon.

• 22:04Craig Robinson?

  No.

• 22:05Michelle Obama?

  It was a two-door Buick Electra 225. Now, these were huge cars, huge sedans. The backseat literally could sit for kids, but it probably wasn't the safest way.

• 22:21Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, that was, that was one of the lessons we learned that.

• 22:23Michelle Obama?

  But that was, that's how it happened back in the day. People didn't use seat belts.

• 22:26Craig Robinson?

  No.

• 22:27Michelle Obama?

  They, you know, there wasn't, there weren't car seats there, you know. Are all the adults smoked?

• 22:35Craig Robinson?

  They did.

• 22:35Michelle Obama?

  And they had smoked the entire car ride?

• 22:37Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Michelle Obama?

  And we just sat in the back and endured.

• 22:40Craig Robinson?

  Well, you know, you know, the trip that I'm reminded of, and I think you may have forgotten. Well, you're gonna remember when I remind you, remind you was when you and I drove to South Carolina.

• 22:52Michelle Obama?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:53Craig Robinson?

  When we were in college.

• 22:54Michelle Obama?

  We were in college. We did do a brother sister road trip.

• 22:58Craig Robinson?

  Brother sister road trip.

• 22:59Michelle Obama?

  To visit our grandparents in Georgetown, South Carolina.

• 23:02Craig Robinson?

  And we rented a car.

• 23:03Michelle Obama?

  Was this spring break or was it just a short break?

• 23:06Craig Robinson?

  It was, it was spring break because that would have been the only time I could go.

• 23:09Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, because you had basketball last season.

• 23:11Craig Robinson?

  Yes, and I, when we said, all right, let's go visit the grandparents. They'll be really surprised. We were gonna surprise them. And it was a seven-ish hour drive. And although you had had your license for quite some time, I would not let you drive.

• 23:27Michelle Obama?

  And I was and am an excellent driver.

• 23:30Craig Robinson?

  You are a very good driver.

• 23:32Michelle Obama?

  But you were being very big brothers. Like, I got this. I got this. And I was like, you sure? I can drive, you know? So I was the navigator, which it wasn't a huge navigational task.

• 23:41Craig Robinson?

  No, it was straight down 95.

• 23:43Michelle Obama?

  Straight down 95. So I would always, I would ask throughout the trip.

• 23:47Craig Robinson?

  She would ask and.

• 23:48Michelle Obama?

  You need a break?

• 23:49Craig Robinson?

  And I would say, no, I'm good. And then about four and a half hours in, I was so tired.

• 23:56Michelle Obama?

  You were loopy, you know?

• 23:58Craig Robinson?

  And I got to the point where I finally said, okay, you can drive.

• 24:02Michelle Obama?

  It's like, yeah.

• 24:03Craig Robinson?

  And then.

• 24:03Michelle Obama?

  Thank goodness.

• 24:04Craig Robinson?

  I let you drive and I think you were comforted because you were driving and I was sleepy.

• 24:09Michelle Obama?

  And I wasn't falling asleep because I was watching you. I was like, he needs a break.

• 24:14Craig Robinson?

  Yes.

• 24:15Michelle Obama?

  So you went to sleep and I wound up driving the rest of the way there.

• 24:18Craig Robinson?

  But every 20, 20 to 30 minutes, I would come up and be like, you okay?

• 24:23Michelle Obama?

  Is everything okay?

• 24:24Craig Robinson?

  And then I would go back to sleep.

• 24:26Michelle Obama?

  And I'm just like, my God, this dude.

• 24:29Craig Robinson?

  It was great.

• 24:29Michelle Obama?

  You were trying to be the big brother. But yeah, that was a fun trip and we surprised our grandparents, which was, which was fun. We felt like real adults.

• 24:37Craig Robinson?

  We felt like adults.

• 24:38Michelle Obama?

  We planned the trip. We got the car. We made. Did happen?

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know, spending time with with family is incredibly valuable. Making memories to last a lifetime. And Rivian is here to inspire families to adventure forever together. And if you've been listening to our show, you know, we have partnered with Rivian. Thanks a lot, folks, for providing us with your R1S. It's been such a treat having an all electric seven seat SUV that fits the whole family.

• 25:11Michelle Obama?

  We could have used that on our road trips.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Oh, man, could we? Could we? Let me tell you, and the the thing we would have used the most would be that would have been that large screen and navigation system. Because we were using a TripTic at the time and had to use maps back in the day.

• 25:29Michelle Obama?

  Mm hmm, yeah. We could have just used the space.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Thanks again to our friends at Rivian. Learn more at rivian.com.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  It's amazing to hear his voice. And actually, I just about maybe two months ago, got an email from somebody from Mississippi Public TV. And I've had no, I got a radio interview my dad did about 10 years ago. That was the first time I heard his voice. Because I have no recordings of him or anything. I had no moving images of him. And a lady from Mississippi Public Radio, an archivist, found an old TV interview my dad gave promoting this book. And she sent it to me. And I, for 20 minutes, I watched my dad sit there talking and moving. It was the first time I'd seen him moving. It was just incredible.

• 26:23Michelle Obama?

  What did that feel like?

• 26:23Speaker 00

  It was interesting. I mean, it was, it brought back, it's so interesting to me, the cycles of history, the repeated families that we don't even know about. So like, my son is named Wyatt because my dad was named Wyatt. But I recently just randomly started calling my son Buddy, which I've never called anybody Buddy in my whole life. I'm not like, hey Buddy, thanks very much. No, I'm not really. And I've been going through these things still. And I found all these letters that my dad's brothers and sisters sent to him. They're all addressed to Buddy. And it turns out that was his name, that's how he was known back then. I mean, he wasn't Wyatt Cooper, he was Buddy Cooper.

• 27:00Craig Robinson?

  And you had never heard anyone call him Buddy?

• 27:02Speaker 00

  I hadn't ever heard anybody call him Buddy. And I mean, maybe somebody as a kid said this to me, but I had no memory of it.

• 27:08Craig Robinson?

  Right.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  And then watching this TV thing. My dad, like, literally, I had just been, I've got a place in the, in the country, and there's a little stream on it, and I've been really liking, my son and I like to clear all the leaves from the stream and, and like, get the, the stream moving.

• 27:25Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, that's a unique, uh, thing.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes, I mean, you know, and, uh, you know, it's, it's very satisfying, you're out in nature and it's fun and there's snakes jump out and stuff.

• 27:35Michelle Obama?

  Oh, yeah, that sounds like a blast.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  But my dad is on this TV show talking, and he suddenly says that, he's like, well, I go with my sons into Central Park and only we know about this little stream and we spend a lot of time clearing the leaves from the stream.

• 27:50Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  And I, I was just like, oh, and then the memory came back to me of like, oh my God, I remember doing this with my dad. Um, and the fact that I am doing these things with my son without even realizing it, I just find kind of extraordinary.

• 28:02Craig Robinson?

  So, do you have any, any recollections of when your dad was alive?

• 28:08Speaker 00

  I do, yeah, but they're, they're not, you know, they're more like, the memory of the softness of his stomach when we, I would lie on, on the floor with him watching television and my head was on his stomach, or, he, he was a writer, so I remember the sound of typewriter keys, you know, late at night, uh, things like that, um, I, but there's a lot, they're, they're very fragmentary, there's not, it's not, and, and it's been so hard for me to, it's only now that I've sort of started to remember more, like, I ran from, you know, at 10 years old, I, I was so terrified by his death and just shocked and angry and filled with rage and I just buried it, I just stuffed it all down.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  And when my brother died 10 years later, I stuffed that down too, and I propelled me into the world and, and in some ways, it was a very effective strategy for a kid to... You know, to have rocket fuel of rage and anger and heartbreak. But what I've learned in doing this grief podcast and in actually going through the things is I realized, I came to the realization about two years ago that, or about a year ago, that I'd never grieved. And I had this realization when I had stopped doing the podcast. I was like, this is too overwhelming. I can't do this. I listened to a lot of these voicemails.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  And finally, one day I was like, oh, I'll start, you know, maybe I'll just go back down the basement and start again. After a couple of months, I opened up a box and hadn't, I just randomly selected this box and there were like a hundred of them in the basement. And it turned out to be a box of my dad's papers and a bunch of files, Muldy and Mildew. And I opened the first one up and there was an essay inside he'd written. I looked at it, put my glass on it, looked at the title and it was called, "The Importance of Grieving." And in it, he wrote about, and he quoted some psychologists, child psychologists, about what happens to kids who don't grieve and how they go through their life, or can go through their life with sort of this melancholy they can never quite put their finger on. And I realized like, oh my God, that's me. That is what I've done my entire life.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  And that was for me, the beginning of, okay, how do I, you know, turn to that little child that is still buried deep inside me and who is the framework through which I see everything? And how do I, you know, start to grieve? And so that's, that's, yeah, that's why I keep doing this podcast.

• 30:33Craig Robinson?

  Well, that's the answer to the very first question.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, it's a long answer, but.

• 30:38Michelle Obama?

  No, but I mean, I'm just, I'm just picturing 10-year-old you.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:43Michelle Obama?

  I mean, my, my heart breaks.

• 30:45Craig Robinson?

  So after having done this for a while and then turning it off and back on again, have you learned a strategy that is helpful for people to grieve? Or is it individualized? Because I gotta tell you, I felt like we grieve, when our dad died,

• 31:09Craig Robinson?

  my mom was the type where, okay, like, like Mish was saying.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Get up, keep going.

• 31:15Craig Robinson?

  Feel sorry today, maybe tomorrow, maybe a third day, but then after that, just get on up. Whether you're finished grieving or not. Get up, go to work, go do your thing. Is there a right, wrong? Is there a way to grieve?

• 31:31Speaker 00

  I certainly, you know, in the world, I certainly am no expert and, you know, I ran from it. I buried it, but it doesn't go away. And it is, it has stopped me from being able to, you know, I am wary all the time, which helps in my job at times, especially going to war zones and stuff, which is how I started my career. But it makes me, it keeps me distant from people. It keeps me, everything is a threat. Everything is seen through the lens of this 10-year-old boy who's still there.

• 32:05Michelle Obama?

  And why would you want to get close to somebody who could leave you?

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, exactly. For me, the voice in my head is this voice that I developed to protect that little kid long ago. And it is telling, all the signals that sends me are, hey, don't trust this person. You gotta be wary about this. I'm not sure about this. I read rooms like nobody's business. Any room I walk to, I clock everybody, even if I'm not looking at them, even if it seems like I'm unaware. And it's exhausting and it's not healthy. And so I've been trying to figure out as an adult is how do you start to?

• 32:39Michelle Obama?

  Let go.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and also give room or space for grief. And like you can hold it softly. And I wanna, I don't want there to be a sadness behind my eyes like my mom had and that I saw. And, um, and so it's, I'm highly motivated and it's, it's, it's an incredible thing that there is, you know, it will still be painful, but that, that the wound is the root to the gift. It's only by allowing yourself to feel the sadness that you actually feel the joy and you feel them again. That my dad is alive inside me, that, you know, I can feel even the little boy I was, you know? And I talk to them.

• 33:13Michelle Obama?

  And our current culture is not helpful.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  I think it's strange that, that society has set up that we no longer talk about grief. I mean, it wasn't always this way when my dad. Dad grew up in this, you know, small town in Mississippi. Everybody went to funerals every weekend, like grief was a much more, it was something spoken about. People wore black. You, even if you didn't know the person, you went to the funeral. You brought, you know, food and my grandmother played piano at funerals. And my dad would go and his job was like to hold babies at funerals. And there was a, you know, a, there, there were, there was more of a commons of the soul. There was more of a, a community aspect to grief that, that has been shunted aside as taboos change.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  You know, it used to be you couldn't talk about sex, but death and grief you talked about. Now you can talk about sex, but you can't talk about grief. It's a weird shift.

• 34:07Michelle Obama?

  And, you know, and grief is a ritual.

• 34:11Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, we're losing a lot of ritual.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And rituals are so important, which I had never really thought about Francis Wellers, who this writer I mentioned. He's a, he does grief rituals and he did a, a small ritual of, for it was about 200 people in this room. And there were bowls in each corner with stones in it. And you could take a stone and basically whisper the name of, of a loved one. And then you would put it in this bowl with water with all the other people's stones. And at the end, all the stones were collected. And I kind of was like, mm, I don't know about this. It seems kind of, kind of cheesy to me. And in five minutes, I was like weeping over my stone. I mean, it was incredible. And I don't like, I'm trying not to be a person who displays emotion in public.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  But like they're all, I mean, it was, it was a beautiful, like, everybody was into this. And so I was like, all right, I'll go pick up a stone. And, and suddenly I'm like, oh my God, I need another stone. And like, finally they were like, Anderson, enough of the stones. Like you gotta give, move it along, kid. But, um, it was incredible. It was really incredible. And, uh, and I think there's tremendous power in, in that ritual and communal aspect of it.

• 35:18Michelle Obama?

  And, and respecting aging.

• 35:22Michelle Obama?

  We don't do it well. We, we don't, we don't celebrate the moving on into that, that stage, which should be beautiful of wisdom and knowledge.

• 35:33Michelle Obama?

  You know, where retirement is honored. You know, we didn't have nursing homes and senior centers because families reincorporated. You didn't lose the elderly. They stayed with you. They became a part of the fixture. They were, you know, they played a critical role in not only the family unit, but the community unit. I think of just a crazy example. When I was a young attorney and I was a first year and I worked for a big law firm. They had like 30 floors in a building downtown. One day I got an assignment from a partner to take a memo over to one of the retired

• 36:18Michelle Obama?

  partners who still had an office. And I didn't even know this part of the firm existed. It was almost like this, you know, this shadow system of firms. And they had everything that the regular office had, but it was older. It wasn't remodeled. There were older, there was an older receptionist. It was a quiet floor. And the offices were still set up. You know, there were corner offices and I went and I found the person. I gave the thing, but I left there feeling really creepy because I thought, okay, yeah, this is where, this is the floor where old partners come to die.

• 36:59Michelle Obama?

  It made me think about how, and I continue to think about how we treat people and why people don't want to move on. And I think my husband said this recently. I mean, one of the problems with society today is that nobody wants to move on from leadership. People hang on too long and they hang on beyond their usefulness or even their practicality. I mean, as we get older, we think a different way. You know, leaders are supposed to move on to make room for the next generation that has new ideas, new energy. But because there's no place for our, our senior leaders to go with honor and dignity, I think people.

• 37:43Michelle Obama?

  People hold on too long. And I, I, I think we suffer as a society, as a, as a nation, as a world, because we haven't figured out how to honor our elders, to give them a space to leave gracefully, to really give them a place of honor, so that they, they feel ready and anxious to go there. And it doesn't feel like the end of the road, it's the beginning of something new. And we don't do that well in America or in the world.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  And I think people are, are, you know, I think younger people especially are just sort of freaked out by, scared by the aging process, don't want to deal with it. And so shunted aside, just as I think with grief, oftentimes when, you know, somebody in your office has lost a loved one and they come back after, you know, what, two days of bereavement relief or whatever ridiculous tiny amount people are given.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  And people don't know what to say. And think sometimes, and I, I hear this all the time from listeners of the podcast, you know, people either don't say anything because they think, oh, I don't want to, maybe they think, oh, I don't want to, you know, bring this up and upset the person as if it's not constantly in that person's head all the time. You know, I think about my dad and my brother and everybody I've lost all the time. It's always there. It's not like somebody's going to upset me by bringing it up. But also people don't know what to say. And sometimes when people do start to say things, it seems like people are kind of probing to see how bad they should feel like, well, how old was the person? And were they sick for a long time? And were you close?

• 39:18Speaker 00

  And the kind of a checklist of like, okay, well, you weren't really close and they were old. So it was kind of expected.

• 39:24Michelle Obama?

  I'll never ask you about this again.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Right. I don't have to worry about it. And it makes me feel better now. I was like, okay, not too close. Oh, grandmother. Okay, fine, fine.

• 39:40Craig Robinson?

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• 40:23Craig Robinson?

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• 41:06Craig Robinson?

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• 41:29Craig Robinson?

  Hey everybody, Craig Robinson here. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. And I want to talk to you about last minute Christmas shopping and holiday shopping. Cause I was a chief offender there. And I tell you, before I found Amazon, it was a stressful time for me. I'd go around collecting everybody's list in the middle of December and try and get gifts. And I was running around all over the place. But then I discovered Amazon and I saw how they do their last minute deals. And I can always find savings on gifts for my family. Whether it's toys, electronics, fashion, cosmetics, you name it.

• 42:14Craig Robinson?

  House goods, they've always got stuff on sale and I can get it relatively quickly. Then I'm not running around the mall stressing and sweating and gifts show up. They're right on time. I can get them wrapped and under the tree, no problem. So this year, if you're in my position and you're stressing, Amazon makes last minute shopping feel like you planned it weeks ago. So that, my friends, is my tip for the day. Shop for gifts for everyone in your family on Amazon. And be ready, because they're going to have last minute deals for you to take advantage of.

• 42:57Craig Robinson?

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• 43:41Craig Robinson?

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• 44:16Craig Robinson?

  I have a question because I think you, I mean, you've talked to so many people through your show or connected with so many people. What would, what would be the first thing you said, you would say to somebody who had lost someone? When you, when you ran and walked into work because, and, and it's okay if you don't have an answer.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  No, yeah, I, I have people all day long now. The nice thing about doing this podcast is I have people. I mean, I flew from New York to LA this morning. I had some, I had two people in the airport stop me and tell me about somebody they had lost. And it is, I, it's beautiful. It's the most real conversation you can possibly have. And the fact that they took a moment to tell me about their loved one. And, and I, you know, I, I asked, I asked them the name of the person. And, um, you know, sometimes it really depends on the situation. I mean, look, sometimes, sometimes someone doesn't really want to talk about it. And they just want to let you know that they, they, they have had this loss.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  So a lot of it, I think, is kind of just getting a sense from the other person. But, um, you know, I, sometime, I will, I generally won't ask, well, what would they die of? Yeah, what happened? Or how old were they? Or you can tell me what happened. I'll usually ask like, um, how do you, how did you meet? How'd you meet your husband? And immediately someone smiles and has this story of like, the first time they met. Or, um, something that brings up, uh,

• 45:47Speaker 00

  That lets the other person know you're interested and you care. And yet also that maybe allows them to touch for a moment that that person and feel that person for a second. I think that's the most powerful. Again, I think it largely depends.

• 46:05Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, I feel like such a schmuck, sorry, Meech. I feel like such a schmuck because of the way I deal with grief. I put on the person who's grieving, right? So I'm very perfunctory.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Well, how so?

• 46:18Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, what do you mean?

• 46:19Craig Robinson?

  This is exactly how so.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 46:22Craig Robinson?

  Sorry for your loss. You know, that's like, that's like the go to when you wanna say something, but you don't want any more facts.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:31Craig Robinson?

  And that's me and just hearing you say, asking, just asking more questions. I'm like fearful of doing that.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Fearful that it's gonna upset them because it's gorgeous.

• 46:43Michelle Obama?

  Or is it gonna upset?

• 46:44Craig Robinson?

  It's gonna be a tsunami. Upset you.

• 46:47Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:48Craig Robinson?

  That's why I feel like a schmuck, cuz I'm thinking about myself this whole time. When I see your reaction to how moving this is for you, I'm like, dang.

• 46:58Michelle Obama?

  No, the question is, have you grieved?

• 47:01Craig Robinson?

  Well, in my opinion, I've grieved the way I thought I would grieve, which is, okay, I had my three days and then off back to work, right?

• 47:16Craig Robinson?

  There are times, and Kelly knows this, where something will remind me of my mom.

• 47:25Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, and you can't talk. Yeah. And that's.

• 47:30Craig Robinson?

  And that's probably why I don't say stuff to people.

• 47:33Michelle Obama?

  Because.

• 47:33Craig Robinson?

  Because before it would be something remind me of my father. And then when it got far enough away, I was like, alright, I'm better now.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  But I mean, I gotta tell you, for, you know, for somebody who's grieving, to have that interaction with you and to see the tears in your eyes, as I'm seeing right now.

• 47:53Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  That would be an extraordinary moment to share with some, someone you may never see him again.

• 47:59Craig Robinson?

  Never see him again.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Probably won't.

• 48:00Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  But you've had a genuine, like, connection with another human being about the most important fundamental thing, which you both share, even though you don't even know that person's name.

• 48:11Craig Robinson?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Did you?

• 48:15Speaker 00

  When my mom died, I was ready for her death. What I wasn't ready for was the realization that I'm the last one left. And that hit me, I mean, I was, my mom had like, my mom had been talking about dying her entire life. And usually in the vein of like, well, I'll never be a burden. And you can always find 50 second all. I was like, can you? I don't like, why are you saying that to a 14 year old? That's kind of freaking me out. Do I need to call authorities or something? But after a while, I tuned it out because it was just, you know, people say stuff. You have no idea when the end of your life comes. My mom was, was holding on for as long as she could.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  But that feeling of, oh, wow, I'm, I'm the last one left who knows all like just the, the little tiny memories that seemed important when I was a child or the little sounds in my house and all of that just kind of, and I'm so, I think that's why going through the stuff has been so hard for me because everything is infused with memory and meaning, even if it's, you know, 100 Christmas cards that my mom received in 1973. Like, I go through each one because some of them are for some pretty interesting people. I was like, oh, I didn't know Charlie Chaplin sent Christmas cards. But some of them are just, you know, some random person and, and, you know, those I'll

• 49:37Speaker 00

  throw out, but it's, it's very hard to kind of, I find it very hard to kind of let go of these things that, that, because I feel like it's letting go a piece of them, basically.

• 49:48Michelle Obama?

  I think I'm just the opposite.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  Really?

• 49:52Michelle Obama?

  And it may be protective, right?

• 49:54Speaker 00

  You have no, you have.

• 49:56Michelle Obama?

  I am not, I'm notoriously not a saver.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 50:01Michelle Obama?

  I mean, and even with mom, right? Our mom, you know, she lived with us in the White House, but she kept our childhood home. And when, when she left the White House, I, we didn't want her to go back to a home. Because we just thought for security reasons, right? So we got her a condo downtown Chicago with a doorman and everything. But the house was still there. It was sort of like an albatross for her, right? Because you still had to check the furnace and, you know, mow the lawn and all of that sort of stuff. But I used to push her to go through the basement and get rid of stuff, right? Because she had my law library books.

• 50:45Michelle Obama?

  I was like, Mom, they don't even have. You know, law books don't last. The law changes, they are obsolete. Don't save them. And so she finally did. You know, it may have been.

• 50:57Craig Robinson?

  We did.

• 50:58Michelle Obama?

  Well, Kelly, I'm sure Kelly did.

• 51:01Craig Robinson?

  Kelly actually.

• 51:02Michelle Obama?

  My sister-in-law did.

• 51:03Craig Robinson?

  But we finally, she was like, okay, I'll get rid of this stuff.

• 51:07Michelle Obama?

  But I didn't feel a connection to that. Because I just felt like that's, that's a, that's a lot. And I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be in a position where my mother would be gone and then I would be left sorting through all of that stuff. Now Kelly did that for me. And maybe my sister-in-law will have a harder time. It was just as hard for her. And thank God she did it. But I, I don't think I would have. And I didn't, I didn't want to have that work left to do.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Do you think if you had gone through that thing, that it would have been emotional for you?

• 51:49Michelle Obama?

  Yes.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  It would have, yeah.

• 51:50Michelle Obama?

  Yeah. And it might have helped with the grieving process.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  So was, was not wanting to go through it, not wanting that emotion? Or just this is incredibly inconvenient? And like this is, who wants to spend however, a hundred hours?

• 52:02Michelle Obama?

  I think it was probably a little bit of both.

• 52:04Craig Robinson?

  And, and, and really you have to remember, my mom was still alive. So when we were going through stuff, she was like, throw that away, throw that away. Don't throw that away. You should keep this. And we finally got it down to them.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  I mean, that's a nice way to do it. Because she tells you the story.

• 52:21Craig Robinson?

  Yes, yes. It was, it was, it was a better way to do it. But then when she died, she still. Had a bunch of stuff and we just like took it all to our house. And then what we're trying to do is not have it so that our when we our kids take it to their house, right? But I will say that you got across to mom because she was at a point when she was still alive, still living on Euclid, where she was like, come on over. Euclid is the place we grew up in. Come on over. Let's get rid of this stuff. And I think we got rid of just about everything. And that's why we probably can't find your spiral notebooks.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  I know. My mom had a storage unit in Queens that she had never been to.

• 53:04Craig Robinson?

  Oh, my God.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  And she would just send stuff to the storage unit.

• 53:07Craig Robinson?

  We didn't have that.

• 53:08Michelle Obama?

  I didn't believe that. I don't to this day believe in a storage unit.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  They send your dog to the farm.

• 53:12Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  My mom would send stuff to the storage unit. And like sometimes, like 20 years later, she'd be like, you know what? There's this chair, I remember. And she had a lady named Nora who'd worked with my mom for 60 years as her housekeeper. Nora would schlep to the storage unit.

• 53:29Michelle Obama?

  Oh, man.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Find this chair, bring it back. Um, and my mom would embrace it like it was a long lost child for a week and then be like, hmm, it doesn't work anymore. And the chair would go back. So like it was just, it's like the last scene in Citizen Kane where there's this warehouse and like they're just going through it, throwing things in the fire.

• 53:48Michelle Obama?

  I, I mean, I think you said this earlier. It's like there, there's not one way to grieve, right? And I can imagine for your mother, whose childhood was so precarious, like she didn't have, she didn't have one.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:01Michelle Obama?

  She didn't have a parent, you know? And the parent that she had through the custody battle, they took her.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:07Michelle Obama?

  From the woman that, I mean, I hear her story and I, and I grieve for her.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:13Michelle Obama?

  Um.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  And going through my brother's, I remember a brother that killed himself in front of her, going through his things were just, it was impossible for her.

• 54:19Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I can understand her, like that chair, like that's a memory.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:26Michelle Obama?

  That's like the thing that she didn't, she didn't have lessons.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Right. It was funny, actually, once, uh, like, I don't know, the last couple of years of her life, she called me up one day breathless. She was like, Like, I found this screen on First Dibs that was made out of some Chinese wallpaper that was once in a dining room my mom had in a house we had when I was a kid.

• 54:49Michelle Obama?

  She found it where?

• 54:50Speaker 00

  On First Dibs.

• 54:51Michelle Obama?

  Okay, First Dibs, yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  I guess when she sold the house, somebody took this Chinese wallpaper down, sold it to some store and they made screens out of it. So my mom just randomly found these screens and she was like, oh my God, that's the wallpaper. So my mom was like, you have to get it. I was like, I have to get it? I was like, okay. And they turned out to be like crazy expensive screens. I didn't know screens were so, I was like, who do you?

• 55:13Michelle Obama?

  It's like a screen, what are we screening?

• 55:14Speaker 00

  Screens, like, what are we doing? We're not, anyway, she was like, you really gotta get it, I mean, so much to me. So I was like, okay, fine, I got it. And, I mean, we're talking like, it was like fifty thousand dollars. I mean, this was like, I did extra, like, I took on a couple of speaking gigs to get, to get these.

• 55:30Michelle Obama?

  These screens, yeah.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  And she embraces them like, this, this was gonna solve her life, her problems in her life. She brings them, gets them in a room. A week later, she calls me up, she was like, I've had to redecorate the dining room around the screens. Which means I'm redecorating the dining room around the screens. And then, two weeks, four, uh, four weeks go by and she's like, do you have any room for these screens? They're just, you know, I thought it was the answer, but it just doesn't work. Yeah, so.

• 56:02Michelle Obama?

  And I've come to believe that things aren't the thing.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're not, right. As my mom would acknowledge, like, she would redecorate constantly, but it never quite got it, uh, what the issue really was.

• 56:15Michelle Obama?

  Right.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Uh, and it cost a lot of money along the way.

• 56:17Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, yeah, so I'm a, you know, I, I, I'm trying to practice, I try to practice that as maybe part of my grieving process. That it's, it's not stuff, you know? I don't want it as a memory of me. I don't want my kids to feel that, you know, keeping this thing that I just got forever and lugging it around with them for the rest of their life is a way to stay connected to me. Or to stay connected to my mother or my father.

• 56:47Michelle Obama?

  It's for me, stories matter, right? That it goes back to story.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:52Michelle Obama?

  You know, I'd rather sit and talk about all the times. Remember the time? And do we remember and relay the pass those stories on to our kids? As a better way of honoring our elders, our ancestors? Then with a storage room full of their stuff. Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't recommend that.

• 57:17Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Craig Robinson?

  And so Anderson, and I know.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Which by the way, is for one of the reasons I'm so motivated to go all through this stuff. Cause I don't want to leave for my kids.

• 57:26Michelle Obama?

  That's right.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  This room full of stuff, they're like, who are these people?

• 57:29Michelle Obama?

  It's like, and it's these screens.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  I know, right?

• 57:31Michelle Obama?

  What am I supposed to do with screens?

• 57:33Craig Robinson?

  That was just what I wanted to to talk about. How does this work? Now that you know, and you've gone through this, how does this inform your parenting? And how are you preparing yourself to sort of convey the right message to your boys?

• 57:50Speaker 00

  To me, I mean, like telling the story of my, my, of my parents and their parents to my kids is really important. Like, I want my kids to, to know that I like, I didn't pay any attention to my mom's family, her history, her family history growing up, like the Vanderbilts. I consciously wanted nothing to do with them. I at my, in my 12 year old, you know, lizard brain, looked at like the poor Coopers, farmers.

• 58:18Michelle Obama?

  As the family you wanted.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  The messed up Vanderbilts. And I was like, I'm, I'm a Cooper. I'm glad I don't have this name.

• 58:25Michelle Obama?

  It's like, I want to connect with Uncle Raspberry.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like, so I'm, I'm that, I'm a Cooper, I'm not a Vanderbilt. And, and it wasn't like there was a pot of gold waiting for me in like the Vanderbilt archives. They like, they spent all that money very quickly, the Vanderbilts did, from what I. But I, once I had kids of my own, suddenly I was like, I know nothing about the Vanderbilts. I know, I can tell you about the Coopers. And so I actually, I actually ended up writing a book about them mainly because I wanted to study them and understand who they were. So I could figure out. What to tell, like, explain to my kids, like, this weird lineage they have. Like, my dad, the only connection to the Vanderbilts I had as a kid, my dad once took me to Grand Central Station, which was founded by Commodore Carmelius Vanderbilt, who was not a nice guy.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  And there's a statue of him outside Grand Central Station, which, by the way, he paid for and had made and set up there. And it wasn't like, his workers loved him and he did it. It was his. And he made photographs, he had paintings, painted himself and gave them out to all his children. Now, they wanted them either. But, uh, but I remember my dad taking me to see this statue when I was like six. And the only thing I took away from it was that grandparents turned into statues when they die, which is very relatable, I know, everybody feels this.

• 59:38Craig Robinson?

  Oh, yeah. We all have.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Yes, none of us has not made that mistake.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  I know Andy Cohen makes fun of me. Anytime I tell a childhood story, he's like, "Oh, the Vanderbilt boy."

• 59:50Michelle Obama?

  You're too Truman.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  But I wanted to, like, have a narrative to tell my kids about, like, this weird family that they came from, who achieved remarkable things, but also, you know, this guy who wasn't nice to any of the women in the family. And he sent his wife to a mental hospital because he wanted to have an affair with the babysitter. And, you know, so it's, uh, I do think, you know, for me, learning the history has been fascinating, but it's not something I ever paid any attention to. I just thought, no good can come of believing you're part of this thing that doesn't exist.

• 1:00:25Michelle Obama?

  Well, I mean, I'm picturing.

• 1:00:28Craig Robinson?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:00:29Michelle Obama?

  I'm picturing the statue, you in front of the statue, thinking, that's where grandparents go.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah. Of course, then, like, a month later, I went to the Museum of Natural History with my, you know, I don't know, it was my first grade class, Miss Critts was the teacher. But we went to the Museum of Natural History with my class, and we were outside, and there's now that, you know, now infamous statue of Teddy Roosevelt on a horse with two indigenous people. And the teacher was like, "Does anyone know who this is?" And I raised my hand, I was like, "I think it's my grandfather." Which, again, relatable.

• 1:01:00Michelle Obama?

  It's just like, yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  And then they beat me up and, uh...

• 1:01:06Michelle Obama?

  But I, the, the thing that I like, I mean, I know we've got a listener question. And we'll, we'll get to this, but when I saw the documentary of you and your mother having those conversations, that's the thing that I, I, that I, I would encourage people to do now. It's like, collect those stories, you know, have those conversations now. I mean, grief is the thing, we, we have work to do to understand it, but there is just so much power in getting to know your own story while people are still alive.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  And those stories are not being passed on.

• 1:01:43Michelle Obama?

  They are not.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  And, you know, with each generation, the details fade away more and more.

• 1:01:47Michelle Obama?

  Fade away. It gets a little murkier and you don't know who was that. And, you know, in our family, it's like, well, are, were they really a part of our family? Is that a real cousin or was that a play cousin? It's a, you know, you wanna, you wanna know all that stuff. And that's, that's work, that's better than having a storage locker full of stuff.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Because it does, I, I will tell you, once I read about the Vanderbilts and, and wrote a book about them, it made me feel more connected to America in a way. It made me feel more connected to New York City, like this city that they were in hundreds of years ago. And I became fascinated with, you know, the hidden history of New York. And, you know, I, the, there's the Starbucks near my house that was the site of, of, of the, the Astor riots, when the, there were competing groups in New York are rioting over two competing opera houses in Lower Manhattan, which makes no sense. But.

• 1:02:43Michelle Obama?

  Well, now that's on, what's the show? Gilded Age.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Oh, is that on the Gilded Age?

• 1:02:46Michelle Obama?

  That's the Gilded Age.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  See, I stopped, well, I know, Dave.

• 1:02:49Michelle Obama?

  Oh my God, that's you. That's your family.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that is, that is literally my family. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:55Michelle Obama?

  Yeah. Well, that, we, we saw the.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  A lot of the plotlines.

• 1:02:57Michelle Obama?

  We saw the, there was the opera.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  The opera riots, okay. Well, there you go.

• 1:03:01Michelle Obama?

  Gotta watch the Gilded Age. We'll talk about it.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  I don't need, like, yeah, I've never seen it. I've never.

• 1:03:06Craig Robinson?

  I don't blame you.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  I've never seen it. It hits too close to home.

• 1:03:10Craig Robinson?

  Right, right.

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  Their portrayal of Di Gran Babi.

• 1:03:13Michelle Obama?

  That's not right. That's not right. Country home was never that small.

• 1:03:17Craig Robinson?

  Hey, we catastrophists can only take so much.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  Exactly. But it did make me, and knowing my dad's history, and I did the Skip Gates Follow Your Roots show, which was incredible. But it makes you feel more connected to the world and to where you are and to your community. And it just makes, it just makes you feel grounded in a way that I think so many of us don't grow up feeling grounded to our surroundings.

• 1:03:46Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  We're kind of floating through.

• 1:03:48Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Craig Robinson?

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• 1:07:38Craig Robinson?

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• 1:07:50Craig Robinson?

  Well, we have a listener question. All right. We always try and pay it forward here at IMO. And this question is from Nancy in Salt Lake City.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  Hi, Craig and Michelle. This is Nancy. I would love to hear you both talk a little about dealing with the loss of your mom, which I'm sure is going to be a hard question. I recently lost my dad in 2022, my mom in 2023, which obviously still makes me emotional. That was a hard 13 months and obviously the time since has been hard too. As an only child, it really has been very difficult to process because I don't have anybody to process with a lot of the time. I'd love to hear how you guys have processed the grief, helped each other and moved on after losing your dad when you were younger and your mom more recently. Thank you.

• 1:08:43Craig Robinson?

  That's one of the few questions that is aimed right square at our forehead. So you want to go first?

• 1:08:51Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, you know, I, I think I'm still processing. You know, I don't, I don't think that there's a you process it and that's that. And I, and I'm learning that there's no need to have processed it. I mean, I don't want to process my parents' lives and feel like I can pack it up. And that's that. Now that, you know, their memory, they are in my head every day. Every, the way I lead my life, how I show up in the world, the words that come out of my mouth, the impact that I'm trying to have. It's all, it's all because of that memory and the loss is a part of it.

• 1:09:37Michelle Obama?

  So I don't wanna, I'm still working that through.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  Are the memories tinged with sadness because of the loss? Or is there distance that it, you can look at it without the?

• 1:09:51Michelle Obama?

  It depends on the time of day, right? I mean, there are plenty of times when we sit and laugh. Our family is laughter, you know? That's one of the ways we deal with grief. We sit and tell stories and we laugh about it. And then there are times, just like Craig, that feeling of just the mention of their name, it can't come out. And it's not sadness, it's just like, it's grief, you know?

• 1:10:18Craig Robinson?

  Missing, it's missing more than anything.

• 1:10:22Michelle Obama?

  And that hasn't gone away. It doesn't go away. My, our dad died, it's been-

• 1:10:29Craig Robinson?

  Thirty-four years ago.

• 1:10:30Michelle Obama?

  Thirty-four years ago. And, look, I'm speaking all the time and I get interviewed all the time. And there's always the, what would your dad think of?

• 1:10:40Michelle Obama?

  I don't care how many times I get that question. Just answering it, it chokes me up because of joy, but it's also longing of what he missed and didn't get a chance to see. And, you know, that's, I don't think that's ever gonna go away.

• 1:11:00Michelle Obama?

  But I don't know that it needs to.

• 1:11:05Michelle Obama?

  I just think it's a part of me now. Like, like life, his life is a part of me, his death is a part of me. Yeah, yeah. I feel them in different ways. I mean, time, what I would say, time matters, right? I mean, in terms of the day-to-day pain, loss, grief, that's one of those things where I believe time heals all wounds. It just, you know, after a while, the cut becomes, you know, skin healed and then it's scab and then it's scar. But the scar is always there. And the loss of my parents are scars on me and they will be there forever.

• 1:11:50Michelle Obama?

  But that's a part of life. There can be no other way.

• 1:11:57Michelle Obama?

  So I think part, you know, hearing you say that you just have to develop a relationship with grief. It's, it, you know, it's, the goal isn't to grieve and have it gone. It's just like, this is now a part of my life. I've had the blessing of having these two amazing people whose loss I feel. And I couldn't have that without, you know, the loss is a part of having them. So if I had to do it all again, I'd choose to have them and go through the loss. But do I ever just feel like, phew, that's done? No, no, some days I do, some days I don't.

• 1:12:37Craig Robinson?

  You know, I would say to Nancy and in this discussion,

• 1:12:44Craig Robinson?

  my parents, my, my mom particularly, because my dad died first. She did a really good job of, well, first of all, my parents did a really good job of loving us unconditionally, right? And letting us know they loved us. There's nothing better than that. Especially when you lose one early. Because my mom did a real, really good job, and you'll remember this, and, and some people have heard me tell this story. My mom said to us, or she said to me, I don't know if she said it to us, when we were, we were fighting when my dad passed away, of course.

• 1:13:26Michelle Obama?

  We had one fight.

• 1:13:27Craig Robinson?

  That was like, our, yes, we had one fight. But it was like the only fight we had in our lives was when my dad died.

• 1:13:35Michelle Obama?

  And that was grief.

• 1:13:36Craig Robinson?

  And that was grief at the time. But my, you'll love this, my mom said to us.

• 1:13:45Craig Robinson?

  You know, your dad loved you. And you knew how, you knew how much he loved you. And he knew how much you loved him. So you don't have to be upset about not knowing you guys loved each other. Cause he knew, he told me all the time. And that eased my pain, I don't know about you, but it eased my pain. And it made me sadder at the same time. And as my mom was getting older, we would talk about that. And that was her way of saying that she loved us.

• 1:14:26Craig Robinson?

  And don't worry, when I die, I know you love me. That was a, that's a gift that parents can give their kids when they're alive. To help the grieving process. I mean, it was, it, it, and, and when I get choked up, it's only because I miss her. I don't think I missed out on anything. And would love to have her back, but to Misha's point, you know, maybe I am, maybe you just grieve until the end of time. I don't know. Because I, I felt like I had got over my father's death. I had gotten over my father's death until my mom died.

• 1:15:11Craig Robinson?

  And then I regrieved for him. While I was grieving for my mom.

• 1:15:15Michelle Obama?

  But even the thought of I got over my father's death. Why? Why, why would that be? Why is that a mission?

• 1:15:24Craig Robinson?

  Well, it's only semantics.

• 1:15:26Michelle Obama?

  It's more a rhetorical question. It's not even a question for you.

• 1:15:29Craig Robinson?

  But it's only semantics in, in my case.

• 1:15:32Michelle Obama?

  Yeah, but I, but I think that that's what people are trying to get to. They're like, when do I get over this? How do I, how do I get over this?

• 1:15:39Craig Robinson?

  And we're learning, we have learned today that maybe you, you, you never get over it. And you, maybe you don't need to get over it. Maybe it's a relationship, like you said. It's a relationship now for the rest of your life.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think that word process is.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  I'm not big on jargon and I think that word process is very overused because to me, it's like a word everybody uses. I don't really know what it means to process grief, like a cured meat or something. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I mean, I understand the therapeutic nature of it and, you know, feeling things and there are steps and all that. But I think a lot of people I hear from will say, okay, there's, you know, there's steps you go through and you process it and then suddenly you find yourself back at step one because you hear a song and it takes you right back to you're a kid again.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  I ran from this stuff for so long. I know what it is not to process and to try to push it down and it doesn't go away. And I know I feel better. It's harder feeling, but I like feeling and it makes me more able to feel your sadness and to feel your sadness. And I think that's a bond. You know, I've received the benefit of feeling my dad again and that's an incredible thing. I would always hear people talk about, oh, you know, I feel them in my heart or and to me it always felt like a Hallmark card, but to suddenly

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  like feel my dad inside is beautiful. I don't feel it as much with my brother because I think there is, we both went to our individual corners when my dad died. We never talked about it and I think his death was so violent and sudden and shocking to me that I feel like I sometimes feel like I don't even know who he was and that's a terrible feeling and I'm hoping that will change. But it's, you know, to feel, yeah, to feel these people alive inside me is incredible and it's such a blessing and you can only get that if you process or whatever word you want to use.

• 1:18:06Michelle Obama?

  I want us all to just kind of. Hold space for it to say, yeah, this, this is going to have an impact on me, or it has had an impact on me. And maybe by doing that, we can think about when something triggers us, when we're having a bad day, don't brush off, I wonder what's going on? You know? How about immediately going to, what am I grieving? You know? And, and maybe be easier on yourself first about it.

• 1:18:39Michelle Obama?

  Or get, get help, or reach out, or talk about it. So I would say to our, our listener, to Nancy, like, talk, you know? Don't sit alone in it.

• 1:18:56Michelle Obama?

  Reach out, have conversations, find somebody to unburden yourself with the feelings. And that, you gotta do that. Don't sit alone. If she's thinking about it, then I'd say, don't, don't spend a whole lot of time just thinking about it. Do it. Find a place, find a person.

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the, the power of, you know, grief support groups, sometimes it's hard to find in communities, but they're, they're, you know, often available. And, and they, that could be an extraordinary thing, to be in a place where you don't have to explain yourself to, you know, people who are in that room, because they, they just know inherently. I was talking to a woman, Mary, whose, whose son died of glioblastoma, and I, I talked to her every couple of weeks. Um, we'd just talk on the phone late at night, and I never met her, but, um, but that's one of the things, she just started going to a, a, a support group. And she says, like, I finally feel I can, I can relax there. I can, because I don't need to kind of explain, you know, or am I going crazy? I can just be.

• 1:19:57Michelle Obama?

  And I would say, Nancy, whatever you're feeling, remember that probably everybody around you, that you interact is trying to figure this out.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  That's for sure.

• 1:20:07Michelle Obama?

  Um, and maybe it feels less lonely if we all see us as, you know, people in this process together, and it all hurts. And, you know, whether you had a great relationship with the person, or whatever their age, or how it happened, it's a thing that happens. And if we could just be more gentle with other people in the way we would want to be gentle to our 10-year-old selves.

• 1:20:37Michelle Obama?

  That just that process of offering gentleness is helpful. I mean, I, I, I see that in you. The process of taking in other people's, leaving space for other people's empathy. This whole pro- pro- uh, program, this project of yours is healing you.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, without a doubt.

• 1:21:00Michelle Obama?

  Um, and you would think, my God, that's a lot. Like, we started out, why did you?

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Michelle Obama?

  Why are you doing this? But we were ending this conversation under like, what a, what a gift you have that you have this healing experience happening, which ends up being you holding space for other people. That's a lesson. I, that's the power of kindness and empathy. And we need to be thinking about that in these times. And all you can do is, once you leave somebody, is to live a life worthy of theirs. That's, that's how I think about it. My, my grieving is my life. It's like, I'm honoring Marion and Fraser

• 1:21:49Michelle Obama?

  by showing up every day in a way that would honor them. And I think that's, you know, it's better than tearing shit up.

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  They would be very proud of you.

• 1:22:03Michelle Obama?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Craig Robinson?

  Thanks, man.

• 1:22:05Michelle Obama?

  Anderson, thank you, man.

• 1:22:07Craig Robinson?

  This is.

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  This is a pleasure. It's really lovely.

• 1:22:09Craig Robinson?

  Really neat. Really neat.

• 1:22:32Craig Robinson?

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