Hold Space for Grief with Anderson Cooper

26:23It was interesting. I mean, 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've recently just randomly started calling my son Buddy, which I've never called anybody Buddy in my whole life. I'm not like a buddy. Thanks very much. 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.

26:58I mean, he wasn't Wyatt Cooper. He was Buddy Cooper. And you had never heard anyone call him Buddy. 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. And then watching this TV thing, my dad, like literally I had just been, I've got a place 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 get the stream moving. Yeah, that's a unique thing. Yeah,

27:31it's very satisfying. You're out in nature and it's fun and there's snakes jump out and stuff. Oh, yeah, that sounds like a blast. 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. And I was just like, and then the memory came back to me of like, oh my God, I remember doing this with my dad. And the fact that I am doing these things with my son without even realizing it, I just find kind of extraordinary. So do you have any recollections of when your dad was alive?

28:08I do, yeah, but they're not, you know, they're more like the memory of the softness of his stomach when I would lie on the floor with him watching television and my head was on his stomach. Or he was a writer, so I remember the sound of typewriter keys, you know, late at night. Things like that. But there's a lot, they're very fragmentary. There's not, it's not, 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 was so terrified by his death and just shocked and angry and filled with rage. And I just buried it.

28:48I just stuffed it all down. And when my brother died 10 years later, I stuffed that down too. And I propelled me into the world. And in some ways, it was a very effective strategy for a kid 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, or about a year ago, that I'd never grieved. And I had this realization when I stopped doing the podcast. I was like, this is too overwhelming. I can't do this. I listened to a lot of these voicemails. And finally, one day I was like, oh, I'll start it.

29:34Maybe I'll just go back down the basement and start again. After a couple of months, I opened up a box and 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, Mildy and Mildew. it. I opened the first one up and there was an essay inside he'd written. I 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.

30:09And I realized like, oh my God, that's me. That is what I've done my entire life. And that was for me the beginning of, okay, how do I turn to that little child who's still buried deep inside me and who's the framework through which I see everything and how do I start to grieve? And so that's why I keep doing this podcast. That's the answer to the very first question. It's a long answer. I'm just picturing 10-year-old you. I mean, my heart breaks. 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?

30:59Because I got to tell you, I felt like we grieved, when our dad died, my mom was the type where, okay, like Mish was saying,

31:15feel 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? I certainly, in the world, I certainly am no expert. And I ran from it. I buried it, but it doesn't go away. And it has stopped me from being able to, 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 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.

32:05And why would you want to get close to somebody who could leave you? Well, die. 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 me all the signals it sends me are, hey, don't trust this person. You got to 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 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... Let go. Yeah, and also give room or space for grief.

32:42and like you can hold it softly. And I don't want there to be a sadness behind my eyes like my mom had and that I saw. And so I'm highly motivated. And it's an incredible thing that there is, you know, it will still be painful, but 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. You know, I can feel even the little boy I was, And I talk to them. And our current culture is not helpful. I think it's strange that society has set up that we no longer talk about grief. I mean, it wasn't always this way.

33:22When my dad grew up in this small town in Mississippi, everybody went to funerals every weekend. Grief was much more, it was something spoken about. People wore black. Even if you didn't know the person, you went to the funeral. You brought food. And my grandmother played piano at funerals. My dad would go and his job was to hold babies at funerals. And there was more of a commons of the soul. There was more of a community aspect to grief that has been shunted aside as taboos change. 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.

34:05It's a weird shift. And grief is a ritual. Yeah, we're losing a lot of ritual. Absolutely. And rituals are so important, which I had never really thought about. Francis Weller, this writer I mentioned, he does grief rituals. And he did a small ritual of, for it was about 200 people in this room and there were bowls in each corner with stones and then you could take a stone and basically whisper the name 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, I don't know about this.

34:43It seems 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 to display this emotion in public. But like, they're all, I mean, it was a beautiful, like everybody was into this. And so I was like, all right, I'll go pick up a stone. And suddenly I'm like, oh my God, I need another stone. And like, finally they were like, Anderson, enough with the stones. Like you got to move it along, kid. But it was incredible. It was really incredible. And I think there's tremendous power in that ritual and communal aspect of it.

35:18And respecting aging. We don't do it well. We don't celebrate the moving on into that stage, which should be beautiful, of wisdom and knowledge, where retirement is honored. 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 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 partners who still had an office.

36:20And I didn't even know this part of the firm existed. It was almost like this shadow system of firms. And they had everything that the regular office had, but it was older. It wasn't remodeled. There was an older receptionist. It was a quiet floor. And the offices were still set up. 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 the floor where old partners come to die. 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.

37:10I 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 senior leaders to go with honor and dignity, I think people hold on too long. And I think we suffer as a society, 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 feel ready and anxious to go there.

38:03And 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, quite frankly. And I think people 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 shunt it aside, just as I think with grief, oftentimes when somebody in your office has lost a loved one and they come back after, what, two days of bereavement or relief or whatever ridiculous tiny amount people are given, and people don't know what to say. And I hear this all the time from listeners of podcasts, people either don't say anything because they think, oh, I don't want to, maybe they think, oh, I don't want to bring this up and upset the person as if it's not constantly in that person's head all the time.

38:55I 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? 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. I'll never ask you about this again. Right. I don't have to worry about it.

39:27And it makes me feel better now. I was like, okay, not too close. Oh, grandmother. Okay, fine, fine.

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44:15I have a question because I think you've talked to so many people through your show or connected with so many people. What would be the first thing you would say to somebody who had lost someone when you walked into work? And it's okay if you don't have an answer. No, yeah. 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 two people in the airport stop me and tell me about somebody they had lost. And it is, 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.

45:00And, you know, I asked them the name of the person. And, you know, sometimes it really depends on the situation. I mean, look, sometimes someone doesn't really want to talk about it and they just want to let you know that they have had this loss. So a lot of it, I think, is kind of just getting a sense from the other person. But, you know, I generally won't ask, well, what did they die of? Yeah, what happened? Or how old were they? Or you can tell me what happened. I'll usually ask, like, how did you meet? How did you meet your husband? and immediately someone smiles and has this story of like the first time they met or something that brings up, that lets the other person know you're interested and you care.

45:51And yet also that maybe allows them to touch for a moment that person and feel that person for a second. I think that's the most powerful. Again, I think it largely depends. Yeah, I feel like such a schmuck. Sorry, Mish. 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. How so? Yeah, what do you mean? This is exactly how so. Okay. Sorry for your loss. You know, that's like the go-to when you want to say something, but you don't want any more facts. Right. And that's me. And just hearing you say, just asking more questions, I'm like fearful of doing that.

46:40Fearful that it's going to upset them because it's going to be a tsunami. Or is it going to upset you? That's why I feel like a schmuck because I'm thinking about myself this whole time. When I see your reaction to how moving this is for you, I'm like, dad. The question is, have you grieved? 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? There are times, and Kelly knows this, where something will remind me of my mom.

47:25Yeah, and you can't talk. Yeah. And that's… And that's probably why I don't say stuff to people. Because before it would be something remind me of my father. And then when it got far enough away, I was like, all right, I'm better now. But I mean, I got to tell you, 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, that would be an extraordinary moment to share with someone you may never see him again. You probably won't. But you've had a genuine 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.

48:11Yeah. But did you... 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 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 know. 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 like tuned it out. It was just, you know, people say stuff. You have no idea when the end of your life comes.

48:52My mom was holding on for as long as she could. But that feeling of, oh, wow, I'm the last one left who knows all like just the little tiny memories that seem 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 this 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. three. 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.

49:32But some of them are just some random person and those I'll throw out. But it's very hard to kind of I find it very hard to let go of these things because I feel like it's letting go of a piece of them, basically. I think I'm just the opposite. Really? Yeah. And it may be protective, right? You have no, you have. I am not, I'm notoriously not a saver. Okay. 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 she left the White House, we didn't want her to go back to a home because we just thought for security reasons, right?

50:19So we got her a condo downtown Chicago with 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 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. 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. It may have been - We did. Kelly and I. Kelly, I'm sure. Kelly did. Kelly actually went to. My sister-in-law did.

51:04Finally, she was like, okay, I'll get rid of this stuff. But I didn't feel a connection. You didn't feel attachment to that. Because I just felt like 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 don't think I would have. And I didn't want to have that work left to do. Do you think if you had gone through that thing, that it would have been emotional for you?

51:49Yes. It would have. Yeah. Yeah. And it might have helped with the grieving process. So was not wanting to go through it, not wanting that emotion? Or just, this is incredibly inconvenient, and this is who wants to spend however hundred hours? I think it was probably a little bit of both. 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. I mean, that's a nice way to do it. Because she tells you the story. Yes, yes. It was a better way to do it.

52:25But then when she died, she still had a bunch of stuff. And we just took it all to our house. And then what we're trying to do is not have it so that 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. My mom had a storage unit in Queens that she had never been to. Oh, my God.

53:05And she would just send stuff to the storage unit. See, we didn't have that. I didn't believe that. I don't to this day believe in a storage unit. It's like when they told you that they sent your dog to the farm. Yeah, yeah. My mom would send stuff to the storage unit. And sometimes, 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. And Nora would schlep to the storage unit, find this chair, bring it back. And my mom would embrace it like it was a long lost child for a week and then be like, it doesn't work anymore.

53:40And the chair would go back. So like it was just, it's like the last scene of Citizen Kane where there's this warehouse and like they're just going through it, throwing things in the fire. I mean, I think you said this earlier. It's like 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 one. Yeah, yeah. She didn't have a parent, you know, and the parent that she had through the custody battle, they took her from the woman that, I mean, I hear her story and I grieve for her. And going through my brother's, I mean, my brother killed himself in front of her, going through his things were just, it was impossible for her.

54:19Yeah, absolutely. So I can understand her, like that chair, like that's a memory. That's like the thing that she didn't, she didn't have lessons. Right. It was funny, actually. Once, like, I don't know, the last couple of years of her life, she called me up one day breathless. She was 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. She found it where? On First Dibs. 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.

54:59So 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 use? It's like a screen. What are we screening? Like, what are we doing? We're not hunting. Anyway, she was like, you really got to get it. It means so much to me. So I was like, okay, fine. I got it. And I mean, we're talking like, it was like$50 ,000. I mean, this was like, I did extra, like I took on a couple of speaking gigs.

55:29To get these screens. Friggin' screens. And she embraces them like, this was going to solve the problems in her life. She brings them, gets them in her 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 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. And I've come to believe that things aren't the thing. Yeah. They're not. Right. They're never, as my mom would acknowledge, like she would redecorate constantly, but it never quite got it to what the issue really was.

56:15Right. And it costs a lot of money along the way. Yeah. So I'm a, you know, 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. I don't want it as a memory of me. I don't want my kids to feel that 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. It's, for me, stories matter. It goes back to story. 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 than with a storage room full of their stuff.

57:16Yeah. Yeah, I don't recommend that. Yeah. So Anderson, and I know - Which by the way, it's for one of the reasons I'm so motivated to go all through this stuff because I don't want to leave from my kids. That's right. Like this room full of stuff that they're like, who are these people? It's like, and it's these screens. I know, right? What am I supposed to do with screens? That was just what I wanted 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?

57:51Well, to me, I mean, like telling the story of my parents and their parents to my kids is really important. I want my kids to know that... 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, in my 12-year-old lizard brain, looked at the poor Cooper's farmers and the messed up Vanderbilts. I was like, I'm a Cooper. I'm glad I don't have this name. It's like, I want to connect with Uncle Raspberry. Right, right, exactly. So I'm that. I'm a Cooper. I'm not a Vanderbilt. And it wasn't like there was a pot of gold waiting for me in the Vanderbilt archives.

58:38They spent all that money very quickly, the Vanderbilt's did. But once I had kids of my own, suddenly I was like, I know nothing about the Vanderbilt's. I can tell you about the Coopers. And so 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 them, like explain to my kids, like this weird lineage they have. Like my dad, the only connection to the Vanderbilt's I had as a kid, my dad once took me to Grand Central Station, which was founded by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was not a nice guy.

59:11And there's a statue of him outside Grand Central Station, which by the way, he paid for and had made and set up there. 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, 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. Oh, yeah. We all have. Who among us has not made that mistake? I know Andy Cohen makes fun of me.

59:46Anytime I tell a childhood story, he's like, oh, the Vanderbilt boy. Oh, the Vanderbilt boy. Your team Truman. 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. babysitter. And, you know, so it's, 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.

1:00:25Well, I mean, I'm picturing, I'm picturing the statue, you in front of the statue, thinking that's where grandparents go. Yes. 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 Critz was the teacher. But we went to the Museum of Natural History in my class. They're 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 and was like, I think it's my grandfather. Which, again, relatable.

1:01:00It's just like, yeah, he's there. And then they beat me up. And the thing that I like, I mean, I know we've got a listener question and 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 would encourage people to do now. It's like collect those stories, have those conversations now. I mean, grief is the thing 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. And those stories are not being passed on. They are not. And with each generation, the details fade away more and more.

1:01:47It gets a little murkier and you don't know who was that. And in our family, it's like, well, were they really a part of our family? Is that a real cousin? Or was that a play cousin? You want to know all that stuff. And that's better than having a storage locker full of stuff. Because it does, I will tell you, once I read about the Vanderbilt's 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 the hidden history of New York. And there's the Starbucks near my house that was the site of the Aster riots when there were competing groups in New York are rioting over two competing opera houses in Lower Manhattan, which makes no sense.

1:02:42Well, now that's on, what's the show? Guild Age. Oh, is that on the Guild Age? That's the Guild Age. See, I've stopped. Well, I know. Oh my God, that's you. That's your family. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that is literally my family. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, we saw the opera. A lot of the plot lines. We saw the opera. Okay, well, there you go. Gotta watch the Gilded Age. We need to talk about it. I don't need, I've never seen it. I don't blame you. I've never seen it. It hits too close to a home. Right, right. Their portrayal of Deo Grand Baba. That's not right. That's not right. The country home was never that small.

1:03:17Hey, we catastrophists can only take so much. Exactly. But it did make me, and knowing my dad's history, and I did the Skip Gates Find Your Root 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 you feel grounded in a way that I think so many of us don't grow up feeling grounded to our surroundings. We're kind of floating through.

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1:05:29Craig Robinson here. And, you know, I was just thinking about traveling with the kids and how confining a hotel can be. Let me tell you, sharing one bathroom with two adults and two teenagers trying to keep the lights off at bedtime, not waking anybody up, just doesn't work. That's why I love finding a place to stay on Airbnb. I mean, can you just imagine the four of us in one tiny room and we're sharing two queen beds? can't handle it. And personally, this has been a game changer because I tell you, I like getting up in the middle of the night sometimes and turning the TV on to help myself go back to sleep.

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1:07:45Well, 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. 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. to 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.

1:08:28I'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. That's one of the few questions that is aimed right square at our forehead. So you want to go first? Yeah, you know, I think I'm still processing. You know, I don't think that there's a you process it and that's that. 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.

1:09:15The 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 because of that memory and the loss is a part of it. So I don't want to, I'm still working that through. Are the memories tinged with sadness because of the loss? Or is there distance that you can look at it without the... It depends on the time of day, right? I mean, there are plenty of times when we sit and laugh, our family is laughter. 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.

1:10:09And it's not sadness. It's just like, it's grief. Missing. It's missing more than anything. And that hasn't gone away. It doesn't go away. Our dad died. It's been 34 years ago. 34 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? 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 all. I don't think that's ever going to go away. But I don't know that it needs to. I just think it's a part of me now.

1:11:03Like life, his life is a part of me. His death is a part of me. Yeah, yeah. I feel him 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. But that's a part of life. Um, I, there, there can be no other way. Um, so I think part, you know, hearing you say that you just have to develop a relationship with grief.

1:11:59It'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 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, whew, that's done? No, no. Some days I do. Some days I don't. You know, I would say to Nancy in this discussion, my parents, 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?

1:12:57And letting us know they loved us. There's nothing better than that. Especially when you lose one early. Because my mom did a really good job, and you'll remember this, 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, we were fighting when my dad passed away, of course. We had one fight. That was like, yes, we had one fight. But it was like the only fight we had in our lives was when my dad died. And that was grief. And that was grief at the time. But you'll love this. My mom said to us, you know, your dad loved you and you knew how much he loved you.

1:13:48And he knew how much you loved him. So you don't have to be upset about not knowing you guys loved each other because 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. And don't worry when I die, I know you love me. That's a gift that parents can give their kids when they're alive. Yeah. To help the grieving process. I mean, it was, 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.

1:14:45But to Misha's point, you know, maybe I am, maybe you just grieve until the end of time. I don't know. Because I felt like I had got over my father's death. I had gotten over my father's death until my mom died. And then I regrieved for him while I was grieving for my mom. But even the thought of I got over my father's death. Why? Why would that be? Why is that a mission? Well, it's only semantics. It's more a rhetorical question. It's not even a question for you. But it's only semantics in my case. Yeah, but I think that that's what people are trying to get to. They're like, when do I get over this?

1:15:32How do I get over this? And we're learning, we have learned today that maybe you never get over it. And 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. Well, I think that word process is, 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 feeling things and there are steps and all that.

1:16:18But I think a lot of people I hear from will say, okay, 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. 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. I've received the benefit of feeling my dad again, and that's an incredible thing.

1:17:09I would always hear people talk about, oh, I feel them in my heart. And to me, it always felt like a Hallmark card. But to suddenly feel my dad inside is beautiful. I don't feel it as much with my brother because I think there's, 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 I want us all to just kind of hold space for it to say yeah 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.

1:18:21I wonder what's going on. How about immediately going to, what am I grieving? And maybe be easier on yourself first about it. Or get help or reach out or talk about it. So I would say to our listener, to Nancy, talk. Don't sit alone in it. Reach out, have conversations, find somebody to unburden yourself with the feelings. And that, you got to do that. Don't sit alone. If she's thinking about it, then I'd say don't spend a whole lot of time just thinking about it. Do it. Find a place. Find a person. Yeah, I mean, the power of grief support groups, sometimes it's hard to find in communities, but they're often available.

1:19:18And that could be an extraordinary thing to be in a place where you don't have to explain yourself to people who are in that room because they just know inherently. I was talking to a woman, Mary, whose son died of glioblastoma, and I talked to her every couple of weeks. We just talked on the phone late at night, and I never met her. But that's one of the things she just started going to a support group. And she says, like, I finally feel I can relax there. Because I don't need to kind of explain, you know, am I going crazy? I can just be. And I would say, Nancy, whatever you're feeling, remember that probably everybody around you that you interact is trying to figure this out.

1:20:02That's for sure. And maybe it feels less lonely if we all see us as people in this process together, and it all hurts. And 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, that just that process of offering gentleness is helpful. I mean, I see that in you, the process of taking in other people's, leaving space for other people's empathy. This whole program, this project of yours is healing you. Yeah, without a doubt.

1:20:56And you would think, my God, that's a lot. Like we started out, why did you, why are you doing this? But we're ending this conversation under like, 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. 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 how I think about it. My grieving is my life. It's like I'm honoring Marion and Frazier by showing up every day in a way that would honor them.

1:21:50And I think that's, no, it's better than tearing shit up. They would be very proud of you. thanks man Anderson thank you man this is it was a pleasure it was really lovely really neat really neat