The Healing Journey

January 29, 2024

“Learn to love the thing you most wish had never happened. Be grateful for what it taught you.”
— Stephen Colbert on grief

After Anderson Cooper’s mother, fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, died at 95 four years ago, he was the only one left in his immediate family. His father Wyatt Cooper died when the CNN anchor was 10, and his brother died when he was 21.

Sorting through her boxes of personal belongings rekindled memories of their lives together. In an interview with Robert Firpo-Cappiello for Brain & Life magazine, Cooper said, “I found myself overwhelmed by this wilderness of grief. One of the ways I got through it was by creating a narrative. I started recording voice memos of my thoughts and feelings on my phone.”

And those memories became the basis of a podcast about grief titled “All There Is,” which began in September 2022 and has ten episodes with interviews of people like Late Show host Stephen Colbert, whose father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash when he was 10; writer and poet Elizabeth Alexander, whose husband died suddenly; and composer and performance artist Laurie Anderson, who lost her husband singer-songwriter Lou Reed and her dog Lolabelle.

Working through his emotions and talking to others about their experience led him to a deeper understanding of grief and loss. Cooper’s podcast quickly became one of the most popular on the Apple podcast chart.

“I’ve always been empathetic to the loss and pain in others,” he told writer Firpo-Cappiello. “I think that’s what first drew me to travel to Somalia to cover the famine in 1992 for Channel One….But you can only do that for so long. After my mom’s death, I had no choice but to face it. I realized I could deal with my own feelings of sadness in a journalistic way — as a correspondent from the world of grief.”

(“All There Is” is available on a number of sites, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, CNN Audio and Pandora.)

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