Anderson Cooper and Michelle Obama: Navigating Grief, Making Loss Less Lonely, and How to Know the People You Love Before It's Too Late

Hello, everybody.

“Today we're doing what's called a feed drop.”

That means we're taking an episode from another podcast and dropping it down our feed. We do this occasionally when there's a show. We really like. And we think you might like, this is a great way to just kind of let you know, to taste test.

The show we're highlighting today is hosted by Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the

United States of America, and it's co-hosted with her big brother Craig Robinson. And the show is called IMO. Anyway, you know how on this show, our whole goal is to translate complex ideas from modern science and ancient wisdom and turn them into actionable advice that you can put to use in your everyday life.

“Well, that's quite similar what Michelle and Craig are aiming to do over on IMO.”

Their goal is to bring you candid, useful perspectives on the everyday questions that shape your life, your relationships, and the world around us. Each week they're joined by a guest to tackle real questions from real people just like you. And then to serve up practical advice, personal storytelling, and some laughter. In the episode you're about to hear Anderson Cooper from CNN shares what he has learned

about grief Anderson has done some incredible work publicly on the often very private issue

of grief with which he has unfortunately a lot of experience. So what you're about to hear is Craig and Michelle and Anderson talking about how they have managed or frankly avoided the grieving process and how their moms prepared their children to live without them. I hope you enjoy it real quick.

Before we dive in, I just want to tell you about the meditation challenge we're running over on my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. The challenge runs from March 23rd through the 27th. It's a five day meditation challenge inspired by my new audible original.

It's an audio book called Even You Can Meditate, which I co-wrote and co-recorded with

the seven A.C. Lassie, my friend, the great meditation teacher. Here's how the challenge will work. Every morning you'll get a new guided meditation from Seb and then twice during the course of the five days, Seb and I will do a live video meditation and Q&A session where we can all practice together and you can get your questions answered.

There's no need to register, it will be available exclusively on the 10% with Dan Harris app. So head to Dan Harris.com to join us. Alright, we'll get started with Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama and Anderson Cooper and just to say you can get more episodes of IMO wherever you get your podcasts. The only connection to the Vanderbilt I had was as a kid my dad once took me to Grand Central

Station, which was founded by Tom and Orcormelius 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. It wasn't like his workers loved him and he did. 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 the

“statue when I was like six and the only thing that I took away from it was that Grand”

Parents turned into statues when they died, which is very relatable. I know everybody feels this. Hi Craig Robinson. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. How are you? I'm fine. I'm having such a good time out here in L.A. Yeah. So you've got some company with you this this trip. This trip. Aaron, our youngest, our fourth is here and and Kelly Robinson. Kelly. Made a me. Yes, yes. Kelly, Kelly. Give it up for she made an appearance. No walkie to be here.

Kelly in the house. Kelly's known to the whole staff only by her emails. Yeah, Kelly's emails are infamous. Kelly. I can count. This is what I love about my sister and on. Details, you know, there is no detail, which is why I don't communicate with you. You have no information. 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 run down. You will. Your wife is like, I tell her,

she's, you know, I'd hire her in a minute as a chief of set to run anything, any office, any project. She, yeah, she will. You'll love this because, you know, we, we, uh, Aaron and I have been staying in our Airbnb, which has been terrific. We have a normal life while you're away for a week. We look

So we get that, you know, it's all, he says he can breakfast. Like everybody here. No,

I haven't got breakfast and he boils to me. Okay, remember, we had to fix some other things to go with the eggs. And don't say toast and fruit and Aaron made himself waffles. Oh, now that's frozen. - No, well, in the toes there. - Okay, all right, well, but you had to, - We're too bad. - Too bad.

- Too bad, too bad. - Too bad, too bad, too bad. - In your ear, B and B. - We're living life.

“- And so, - Did you have to run a car this time?”

- No, no, we haven't, but Kelly, of course, we're in a Dakar because she figured out that that was cheaper than taking Uber so. - 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. Or she's probably priced out all the Uber trips that we're gonna be taken in this trip and decide it. We're running a car, it's better. - Yeah, but if we could run a car that we wanted,

I would have rented a Rivian. - You know, they're sleek and clean, and Kelly's just now starting to drive the Rivian. Are you now, she's Kelly's, Kelly's to get in on the Rivian? - Yeah, yeah, our listeners, as they know,

Rivian gifted both of us cars this past year and we've had fun driving them. - Well, we've got a great show, great guest. Someone who, so many of us know, he's been in our living rooms for good or bad, for most of our lives,

“do in the hard work of telling us what's going on”

in the world, Anderson Cooper is with us today. - 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 course-minded 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 best seller,

so without further ado, Anderson, come on out. - Anderson Cooper, how are you, sir? - Welcome, sir, I'm home. - Thank you for having me. - Welcome, I'm home, we're much great to see you.

- Thank you. - We're going to dress the same week. - We call it, I'm not sure. - No, you won't do that. - It says about me, given your fashion sense,

but hey, it's a little alarming. (laughing) - That's good, you guys look cute. - This is, this is very close. - Yeah, yeah, yes.

- Well, I like your style. (laughing) - Nobody has ever said that to me. - No one has said no one ever. Well, it's great to have you, I would just say

because you've spent some time with my husband. - A little bit, yes, but I actually saw you, I didn't interview with your husband in Ghana,

“and you were there, I think with your kids,”

at the last door. - Yes. - That enslaved people to go to before.

- Oh, yeah, that was first term.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Okay, yeah, yeah. - How old is your husband? - Experience.

- Yeah, it's nice to be here. - But you've been busy in the meantime. - It's been a little busy. - Well, let's get right down to that. Why would you do a grief podcast?

- You know, it started, my mom died in 2019, she was 95, and she was the last person left from my family. My brother had died, by suicide when I was 21. I've killed myself in front of my mom, and my dad died when I was 10, hard attack,

and so grief had, I mean, I kind of known loss early on, but so my mom was the last, and I was kind of, it's, you know, I was prepared for it. She lived in a 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 her life, unfortunately, and turned out to be also all my dad's things, you know, my brother's things,

which my mom could never go through.

She could never bring yourself. 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 was like, "New it is an intellectual concept." This is something that happens, but my mom saved everything,

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,

I wasn't a big podcast listener, I didn't really know what I was doing, but I just started talking to people 'cause I needed help in figuring out, how do you do this?

And it's been an extraordinary evolution since then.

I, yeah, it's been amazing.

Wow, well. - Well, you've had a pretty interesting childhood. I just recently watched a documentary about your family, mother's history, and I think-- - Yeah, I did a documentary for HBO, yeah, yeah, yeah. - I mean, that was, she was an amazing-- - She was cool, she was cool, yeah, my mom was Glorow Vanderbilt, and she was kind of in some ways larger than life, and, um, but, uh, 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, um, we, uh, yeah, so I was very glad that I was able to put together this documentary of HBO called Nothing Left On Said, and, and for me, it was really important that, I felt like with my brother and my dad, there was so much left on said, because I was so young when they died, and when my mom, actually when my mom reached the age of 91, she wrote in this really funny text about being 91 and yet feeling like 17, and I, it just kind of clicked in my head of like,

“you know, I, 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 necessarily know them as a human being, and it's only after where we kind of realized, well, 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 I meant I would be talking to her a lot, and, uh, we did it over email, and, and phone, and, um, we ended up making to a book called Nothing Left, um, the rainbow comes and goes, and then we made this documentary called Nothing Left On Said, and, and it was really important to me that, when she died, she knew me, and I knew her, and there was nothing left on said between us.

There was no, you know, there were no secrets, there were no things, I wish I had said that. We had said it all, and it was really, it was extraordinary. And what, what was the, the thing that you found out about your mom, as a human being that surprised me the most? I mean, I didn't know, I mean, as a kid, I was very, uh, 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,

he's the monitor or phone calls when I was a kid, like, I wanted to know what was coming down the pipe, 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 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 in the phone, and she said,”

starting the money, the phone, and she said, well, I'll always be able to make money, and I stopped,

and I was like, this ship is going down. I was like, if she thinks she's always going to be able to do this, like, and how were you when you heard that? I was like 12, so you knew, yeah, I knew I knew early on. You knew the oldest? No, I was the, I was the, I was the, I was the, my brother was two years older, and he, 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,

to help. I mean, not that they, you know, I wasn't, I was saving the money, because I was like, I'm going to need to, I'm going to, I'm building a life raft here, but, but she was remarkable,

and, and, you know, I was always very sympathetic to my mom, because she didn't really

didn't have parents have her own. She was kind of her dad died when she was an infant. She was raised in hotels in Europe by her mom and just wanted to party. She was the subject of a vicious custody battle when she was 10 years old. It was called the trial, the century, in the depression. And, you know, I kind of saw a sadness behind my mom's eyes or whole life, and I, I do not understand what the sadness was from, but I was sympathetic to her.

And so even if she was in the most kind of mom, mom, she, she was in cry. I viewed her as a, I mean, from the time as little, I viewed her as, like, a space alien who's rocket ship head, head like, you know, failed and landed on Earth by accident, and was my job to, like, help her, like, rent her apartment and learn how to breathe oxygen. Yeah. That's, that's a level of worry that most young people,

“yeah, but look who's talking about him. I listen to you and I think about him in his,”

the oldest, um, I think you called it catastrophic, you know, a catastrophe.

okay, all the worst possible scenarios. And I think he felt like the one that had to know it all.

“Right. He was going to be you. That's interesting.”

If things fell apart, if our dad ever could never function, then Craig was the one who was

going to make sure. It seems like 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 word's worth poem. Um, and it was a poem, my mom liked. And for her, it meant, well, the rainbow comes and goes. It's always going to come back. And so, like, right days are just ahead. They're just around the corner of the phone,

can ring your whole life can change. And for me, the title was like, yeah, the rainbow comes and it goes. And yeah, it's all going to ring in your whole freaking life and change. It's like, I saw it from a negative line. And she saw it. She's like, could not, it was so such an interesting kind of, and you just different ways. You just try to be realistic. Just cover all the bases in case something happened. It's a fine line between realistic and pessimistic.

“I think that's right. I think you two fell on the pessimistic side.”

Some are theistic family, but do you think that your mom did she know that you were kind of the the backup child? 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 didn't, you know, and she loved watching him. You know, being a father and she'd never had a father.

And so when my dad died, it was something like, who's 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, she would call. And I would have to see, I would steal myself. Like,

okay, who's she killed now? This body, do I gotta bury? Oh, no. And I would like, she'd be like, I really like to come over. And finally, I'd go over. And one time, nine out of ten times, it's because she had redecorated something and, uh, and, and wanted to show me. Um, one time, she, uh, uh, I, I, I started going out to the guy who's now the, the co-parent of my child. And, uh, we 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 to talk about. And she's like, drop this a couple days and around. 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. It was like, what are you talking about mom? You did in the basement. No, and she was like, I'm talking about the taxidermy. And there was a taxidermy, like, hit this guy had some taxidermy. She was like, you know,

it's just too much. The taxidermy. I was like, this is what it's been working for.

You're always about, you've dragged me there. It's good for me about it. It's hard. It was wrong.

But well, with your father being, you know, the way you describe your father, I mean, he's sound sounded like a wonderful man. He was your stability. He was your, 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. They need, they need certainty. You know, it's like, I got a schedule. I know when I'm going to 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. Yeah, certainly. 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. But what I came from, 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 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. It took to suddenly realize, oh, you know, what? Like it was enough. And well, that's if it's done right. Yeah. Right. Because there are a lot of kids who have 10 years of parenting from somebody and it's not enough. Yeah. Right. And it's funny that

“you mentioned that because one of the, one of the reasons why I think I talk about death in 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.

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 dropped dead, you're going to 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”

at the time because she did not talk to me about death. But a lot. And she apparently talked to me a lot about it. Maybe me as a daughter, as a mother, I think she wanted me to know throughout my life. She wanted to hand us our lives early. 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 and knowing that when you are gone as a parent, that your children are going to be okay. And I didn't understand that until I had kids. And I realized that's the scariest thing. It's not just losing them or something happening to them. It's something happening to me. And my kids are going to 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. You have come”

in 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 in their core, you've seen them. You've experienced them. If there's a loss, you're going to be okay. Yeah, 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 a poor and Mississippi on a farm during the Depression. And it's about the life of families then

and the family that he was born into and the family that he created with my mom 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. I've gone through my whole life thinking I would die at 50. I'm 58 now. And I realized I had this crazy idea which a lot of people have if you lose a parent early on that you're going to die at the age of their

parent died. Thankfully, there's advances in medicine. But it's really such a blessing to have this book because it's the family history and it's all these names. A people and stories that

never get told in history books. A people who were poor farmers who gathered for family reunions

and their stories don't get written up in the history books very often. But I know about my great uncle Raspberry who cried so much that people thought his bladder was just located too close to his eyeball. And all these kind of obscure, you know, characters that made up might be like the opera of my dad's childhood on this farm. 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 for some 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 and an archivist found an old TV interview my dad gave promoting this book and she sent it to me. And for 20 minutes I watched my dad sit there talking, moving. It was the first time I'd seen him moving. It was just like a problem. It was interesting. I mean,

it was it brought back. It's so interesting to me the cycles of history, the repeating 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

in my whole life. I'm not like you. You're not the buddy. Thanks very much. I'm not really and I've been going through these things still. And I've found all these letters that my dad's brothers and sisters sent 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 a buddy Cooper.”

And you had never heard anyone clap. I hadn't ever heard anybody call him buddy. And I mean, maybe somebody's a kid said this to me, but I had no memory of it. And then watching this TV thing, 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 like get the stream moving. Yeah, that's a unique thing. Yeah, you know. And, uh, you know,

Yeah, that's the 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. Yeah. And 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. And the fact that I am doing these things with my son without even realizing it, I just find

“kind of extraordinary. And so do you have any, any recollections of when your dad was alive?”

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 the floor with him watching television. My head was on a stomach or he was a writer. So I remember the sound at typewriter keys, you know, late at night. Uh, things like that. Um, 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. And one of my brother died 10 years later, I stuff 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. Um, but what I've learned in doing this grief podcast and in, in actually going through”

the things is I realized I came to the realization about two years ago that, that everybody

year ago that I'd never grieve. And, and I, 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, I'll just go back down the basement and start again. I, after a couple of months, I opened up a box and hadn't, I just randomly selected this box and they're like 100 of them basement. And it turned out to be a box of my dad's papers. And a bunch of files, molding, and molded it. I opened the first one up and there was an essay inside

that he'd read and I looked at it, put my glasses 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 it 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. And that was, for me, the beginning of, okay, how do I, you know, turn to that little child, it's 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. That's the, that's the answer”

to say I'm very first. Yeah, it's the long answer, but. No, but I mean, I'm just, I'm just picturing ten-year-old you. Yeah. I mean, it, my, 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? Because I, I got to tell you, I felt like we, we, we, the, when our dad died, my mom was the type where, okay, like like, like me, she was saying,

get up, get you to feel feels, feel sorry today, maybe tomorrow, maybe a third day, but then

after that, just get on up, whether you're, whether you're finished grieving or not, get up, go to work, go do your thing. Is there a right, wrong, is there a, well, I, I, I agree. I certainly, you know, in the world, I certainly know 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 ten-year-old boy who's still there. I would just want to get close to somebody who could, who can leave. Well, dire, 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 got to be wary about this. I'm not sure, but 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 on where, and it's exhausting, and it's not healthy. And so, I've been trying to figure out as an adult,

And I want to, I don't, there would be sadness behind my eyes like my mom had, and that I saw, and so it's, I'm highly motivated, and 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. I can feel, even the little boy I was, and I talked 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 when my dad grew up in this,

you know, the small town, Mississippi, everybody went to funeral every weekend. Like grief was much more, it was something spoken about, people were black. Even if you didn't know the person, you went to the funeral, you brought, you know, food, and my grandmother played piano at funeral, as my dad would go, and his job was like the whole baby's at funerals, and there was a, you know, there was more of a commons of the soul. There was more of a community

aspect to grief that has been shunted aside, as taboo has changed. 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. And grief is a ritual.

Yeah, we're losing a lot of rituals. Absolutely. And rituals are so important, which I had never

really thought about Francis Weller's, who, 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 bulls, and he's cornered 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,

it's kind of kind of cheesy, and yeah. In five minutes, I was like a weapon over my stone, I mean, it was incredible. And I don't like, I'm trying to be a person to display this motion in public. But like, it was a beautiful, like, everybody was into this, and so I was like, all right, I don't go pick up a stone, and suddenly I'm like, oh my god, I didn't even know this stone. And like, finally they're like, Anderson enough to stone. Like, you gotta give

“a move a long kid, but it was incredible. It was really incredible. And I think there's”

tremendous power in that ritual and communal aspect of it. And 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. You know, where retirement is honored, we didn't have nursing homes in senior centers because families reincorporated, you know, 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 the not only the family unit, but the community unit. And I think of just a crazy example when I was a young attorney, and I was a first year, and I've worked for a big law firm. They had like 34s 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. And I didn't even know this part of the firm existed. It was, it was almost like this, you know, this shadow system of a 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 you know, 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. It made me think about how, and I continued 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. And our 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.

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. 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.

“And I think people are younger people, especially are just sort of freaked out by,”

scared by the aging process. Don't want to deal with it. And so as some to decide, just as I think with grief, oftentimes when somebody in your office has lost a loved one and they come back after you know, but two days of bereavement and relief or whatever ridiculous tiny amount people are given. And people don't know what to say. And sometimes, and I hear this all the time from listeners of podcasts, 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 have lost all the time. It's always there. It's not like someone's

just 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 where they sick for a long time, where 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. And I was about this again. Right. I don't have to worry about

enemies. You feel better now. I was like, oh, not too bad. My mother, oh, okay, fine, fine.

“I have a question because I think you, it would be 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 it's okay if you don't have an answer. No, 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 stopped 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. And, and, you know, I asked them the name of the person. And, you know, sometimes it really depends on the situation. I mean, look, sometimes somebody doesn't really want to talk about it. And they just want to let you know that they, 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, sometimes I generally won't ask, well, what would have they died of?

Yeah, what would have? What would they? Are you telling me what happened? I'll usually ask like, how do you, how do you meet your husband? And immediately, someone smiles and has this story of like the first time they met or something that brings up the, that let's, the other person know you're interested in you care. Yeah. And, 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. Yeah, I feel like such a schmuck. Sorry, I mean, 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. Well, how is that? This is exactly how so. Sorry for your loss. You know, that's like, that's like the go to when you want to say something, but you don't want any more facts. Right. And, and that, that's me. And, and just hearing you say, asking, just asking more questions,

I'm like fearful of doing that. Fearful that it's going to upset them because it's, or just,

“or it's going to be absolutely upset. You. Yeah. Yeah. 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, that. Oh, the question is, have you grieved? Well, in my opinion, I've grieved the way I thought I would grieve, which is, okay, I have my three days and then off back to work, right? There are

Yeah. And that's. And that's probably why I don't say stuff to people because before it would be something where my mom and my father, and that then when it got far enough away, I was like, all right, I'm better now. Right. But I mean, I got to 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, it. Yeah. That would be an extraordinary moment to share with with someone you may never see them again.

Never see what I want. Yeah. 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. Yeah. But did you, um, when when my mom died, uh, I was ready for 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 and like, my mom had been talking about dying a 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't can you? Why are you saying that to a 14 year old? That's kind of freaking me out. Do I need to call authority or something? Um, but after a while, I turned 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 holding on for as long as she could. But that feeling of, wow, I'm, I'm the last one left who knows all like just the, 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. 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 all throw out. But it's, it's very hard to kind of, uh, I find it very hard to kind of let go of these things that,

that, because I feel like it's letting go of pieces down 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 that's in the White House, but she kept our childhood home. Um, and when, 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? So we got our condo downtown Chicago with dormant and everything. Um, 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, more 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. Um,

and so she finally did. You know, it may be, we, we, we, well, Kelly, Kelly. I'm sure Kelly did. Okay,

yeah, my sister-in-law, but we, finally she was like, okay, I'll get rid of this stuff. 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. I would 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. Do you think, if you had gone through that thing, that it would have been emotional for you already? Yes, it would have. Yeah. And it might have helped with the grieving process. 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

“send our 100 more hours. It was probably a little bit of a phone. And really, you had 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. Well, I mean, that's

better way to do it. But then when she died, she still had a bunch of stuff. And we just, like, took it all. It's our house. And then what we're trying to do is not have it, so that our, when we, our kids think into 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”

no books. My mom had a storage unit in Queens that she had never been to. And she would just send

stuff to the storage unit. We didn't have that. I didn't believe that. I don't have to do this, like when you're doing your dogs at the farm. Yeah. My mom sent a storage unit. And like, sometimes, like 20 years later, she'd be like, you know what, there's this chair I remember. And she'd a lady named Nora who worked with my mom for 60 years as her housekeeper. Nora would schlept to the storage unit. And then find this chair, bring it back. And my mom would embrace it,

like, was a long lost child for a week. And then be like, it doesn't work anymore. The chair would go back. So like, it was just, it's like the last scene that citizen came where there's this warehouse. And like, there's going through it from 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. 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 read for her. And going through my brother's, I remember the killed himself in front of her, going through his things were just, it was impossible for her. Yeah. 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 years of 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. Somebody five guests. Yeah. 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 expense of screens. I didn't know screens. I was like, what was like a screen? What was the screen screen? Like, what are we doing? I don't know. We're not on it. Anyway, she was like, you really got to get it. I mean, so much, so I was like, okay, I find I got it. And I mean, we're talking, like, it was like $50,000. I mean, this was like, I took the extra, like, I took out a couple of

speaking gigs to get these screens. And she embraces them like this. This was going to solve her life and her performance in her life. She brings them, gets them in a room. A week later, she calls me, I'm just like, I've had to redecorate the dining room around the screens. Which, I mean, I'm redecorating the dining room around the screens. And then two weeks ago, four, four weeks ago, 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 they just, it 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 know.

It's like the thing. She would redecorate constantly, but it never quite got it, but what the issue really was. Right. And it cost a lot of money along. Yeah. And so I'm, you know, I'm trying to practice, I try to practice that is 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.”

It's for me, stories matter. That it goes back to story. Yeah. You know, I'd rather sit and talk about all the times, remember the time. And do we remember and relay the past 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. Yeah. Yeah, I don't recommend that. Yeah. So Anderson, and I know where you're by the way,

want to leave from my kids. That's like, there's room full of stuff. They're like, who are these people?

It's like, and it's these things. What am I supposed to do? Exactly. 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 family? I mean, like telling the story of my parents and their parents to my kids is really

“important. Like, I want my kids to know that I didn't pay any attention to my mom's family,”

her history, her family history grown up, like the Vanderbilt's. I consciously want to nothing to do with them. I had my in my 12 year old, you know, lizard brain looked at like the poor

Cooper's farmers as the family you wanted. The messed up Vanderbilt's. I was like, I'm I'm going

around. I'm glad I don't have this thing. I was like, I want to connect with Uncle Randy. Right. Exactly. Like, so I'm 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 even like the Vanderbilt archives. They spent all that money very quickly. Vanderbilt stayed from what I, but once I had kids in my own, suddenly I was like, I know nothing about the Vanderbilt. I can tell you about the Cooper's. And so I actually

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. 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. No, it wasn't like his work was loved and he did. 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 the statue when I was like six. And the only thing I took away from it was that Grand”

Parents turned into statues when he died, which is very relatable. I know everybody feels this. I know you. I know you. I know you want that. It's not made that. It's not made that. I know I'm handicapped and it's fun to me. Any time I tell a child that story, he's like, "Oh, the Vanderbilt boy." You're teaching a true man, 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 a fair with the babysitter. I do think for me learning the history has been fascinating, but it's not something I ever paid any attention. I just thought no good can come of believing your part of this thing that doesn't exist. I mean I'm picturing the statue you in front of the statue, thinking that's where Grandparents go. Of course then, like a month later,

I went to the Museum of Natural History with my first graded class, Miss Crits with the teacher,

but we went to the Museum of Natural History in my class when 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 anyone know who this is and I raised my hand. I was like, "I think it's my grandfather."”

Again, relatable. It's just like... And then they beat me up and... But 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, 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, we have worked to do to understand it,

but there is just so much power in getting to know your own story. And those stories start in past on. They are not. And you know, with the generation, the details fade away. It gets a little murky here 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 is that a play cousin? Is that, you know, you want to know all that stuff? And that's,

that's worked. 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,

that was the site of the, the, the Astro Riots. And when there were competing groups in New York, are riding over two competing opera houses in Lower Manhattan, which makes no sense. Well, now that's on, what's the show? Gilding. Over the down the Gilding. That's the Gilding. That's the stuff that I know. Oh, my god, that's you. That's family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that is literally my family. Yeah, yeah.

Well, that we, that's all bloodlines. We saw the, there was the... Yeah, for rights. Okay, well, yeah. There you go.

Got to watch the Gilding. I don't need, like, yeah, I've never seen it. I've never seen it. I've never seen it.

It is too close to home. Are you ready? Right. Right. There for trail of dew, grandpa. It's not chocolate that's not right. The country, home, it's never that small. Hey, we could have taken so much. Exactly. Right. But it did make me, and knowing my dad's history, and I did the skip gates, you know, find a 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,

“it just makes you feel grounded in a way that I think so many of us don't grow up feeling grounded”

to, to our surroundings. We're kind of floating through. Well, we have a listener question.

Right. We always try and pay it forward here at IMO. And this question is from Nancy in Salt Lake City.

Hi, Cargan 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 I've spent hard to. As an only child, it really has been very difficult to process, and so 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 are 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. Every day. 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. So I don't want to, I'm still working that through. Or the memories tinge with sadness because of the loss, or is there just in that it, you can look at it without the... It depends on the time of day, right? I mean, there, there, there plenty of times when we sit and laugh, our family is laughter, you know, that's one of the ways we deal with 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, it's missing more than anything. And that hasn't gone away. It doesn't go away. My, 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?”

And 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, oh, 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, like life, his life is a part of me, his death is a part of me. Yeah, yeah. I feel them in different ways.

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. There can be no other way. So I think part, you know, hearing”

you say that you just have to develop a relationship with grief, it's, you know, 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 choose to have them and go through the loss. But do I ever just feel like, that's done. No, no, some days I do, some days I don't.

You know, I would say, to Nancy and 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? 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 some people have heard me tell the story. My mom said to us, or she said to”

me, I don't know, she said it to us when we were, we were fighting when my dad passed away, of course. We had one thing. 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 my, what do you love this? My mom said to us, 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, because he knew he told me all the time. And that eased my pay. 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 was a, that's a gift that parents can give their kids when they're alive to help the grieving process. I mean,

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 me she's point, you know, maybe I, 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 re-greed for him. Well, 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, and it's only some of it's more of a rhetorical

“question. It's not even a question. But it's only some antics 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? How do I, how 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 meats or something. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I understand the therapeutic nature of it and feeling things and their steps and all that.

process it. And then suddenly you find yourself back at step one because some you hear a song. And it takes you right back to your 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. 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 hard. But to suddenly like feel my dad and side 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 the terrible feeling. And I'm hoping that will change. But it's, 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 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 on wonder what's going on. And how about immediately going to what am I grieving? And and maybe be easier on yourself first about it or get, get help or reach out

or talk about it. So I would say to our listener to Nancy, like talk, don't sit alone in it. Reach out half 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 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, you know, grief support groups. Sometimes it's hard to

find communities, but they're, you know, often available. And 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 just know, and here I was talking to a woman, Mary, who's a son Diocleo Blastoma,

and I talked to her every couple of weeks. We 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, 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. Yeah. And I would say Nancy,

“whatever you're feeling, remember that probably everybody around you that you interact is”

trying to figure this out. That's for sure. And maybe it feels less lonely if we all see us as, you know, people in this process together. And it all hurts. And yeah, whether you had a great relationship with a 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 product program, this project of yours, is healing you. Yeah, and without a doubt.

“And you would think, my God, that's a lot. Like we started out, why did you, why are you doing this?”

Well, we were ending this conversation, wondering, like, what a gift you have that you have this healing experience happening, which ends up being you holding space for other people.

in these times. And all you can do is want you to 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. And I think that's,

no, it's better than tearing shit up. It would be very proud of you. Thanks, Anderson. Thank you,

man. This is a pleasure. You're a lover. Ealing me. Begling me.