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

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. 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 to 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 7a Salasi, 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 danharis.com to join us. All right, 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's I had as a kid, my dad once took me to Grand Central Station, which was founded by Tom and Orr Cormielli's 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. 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 died, which is very relatable. I know everybody feels this. Mish. 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 LA. Yeah. So you've got some company with you this this trip. So this trip, Aaron, our youngest, our fourth is here and and Kelly Robinson. Kelly. Made a. Yes. Kelly. Go ahead and give it up for her. She made an appearance. She left Milwaukee 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 will. I can count. This is what I love about my sister-in-law details. You know, there is no detail, which is why I don't communicate with you. You have no information. You give nothing. If I want to know what's going on, I'm like, excuse me, Kelly, tell me what's happening in your life and I will get the run down. Right. You will. Your wife is like, I tell her she's, you know, I'd hire her in a minute as a chief of staff to run anything, any office, any project. She, you know, she. Well, you'll love this because, you know, we, we, Aaron and I have been staying in our Airbnb, which has been terrific. Have a normal life while you're away for a week. We cooked breakfast this morning. What'd you make? So we is in. Aaron and I. Oh, okay. Aaron and I. So we boiled eggs last night so we could have our, you know, it's always, he says he cooked breakfast like everybody here know I cooked breakfast and he boiled some eggs. I haven't gotten to the finish with it. We had to fix some other things to go with the eggs. And don't say, don't say toast and fruit and toast and fruit and Aaron made himself waffles. Oh, now that's frozen. Oh, well, in the toaster. Okay. All right. Well, but you had two bachelors living life in your Airbnb. We're living life and so. Did you have to rent a car this time? No, no, we have them. Kelly of course rented a car 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. She's probably she's calculated all the Uber trips that are going to be taken in this trip and decided we're renting. Yes. We're renting a car. Yeah, it's better. Yeah, but if, if we could rent a car that we wanted, I would have rented a Rivian. You know, they're they're sleek and clean. And Kelly's just now starting to drive the Rivian. Are you now? Is she Kelly's Kelly's getting in on the Rivian action? Yeah, our listeners, as they know, Rivian gifted both of us cars this this past year and we've had fun driving them. Well, we've got a great, great show, great guest. Yes. And one who so many of us know he's been in our living rooms for good or bad. Yeah. For for most of our lives doing the hard work of telling us what's going on in the world. Anderson Cooper is with us today. Yes. Yes. Anderson Cooper, who is the anchor of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 host of the whole story with Anderson Cooper Cooper and the popular grief focused podcast. All there is with Anderson Cooper. And I'm really interested to talk to him about that. Yeah. He is also a regular correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes, which is on in the Robinson household every Sunday right before we watch the evening football game. And he's the New York Times bestseller. So without further ado, Anderson, come on out. Anderson Cooper, how are you, sir? Welcome to IMO. Thank you for being here. Welcome to IMO. Thank you very much. Great to see you. Thank you. We're kind of dressed the same way. We colored. I know you all didn't. It says about me given your fashion sense, but it's a little alarming. That's good. You guys look cute. This is very close. Yeah. Yes. But I like your style. Nobody has ever said that to me. No one has said no one ever. Well, it's it's it's great to have you here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here. It's great to have you. I was just saying you've spent some time with my husband over the years. I actually saw you. I did an interview with your husband in Ghana and you were there, I think with your kids at the last door that enslaved people would go to before. Oh, yeah, that was the first term. Yeah. Yeah. It was incredible. It was an incredible experience. It was a powerful experience. Yeah. Oh, it's nice to be here. But you've been busy in the meantime. It's yeah, you know, it's been it's been it's been a little busy. Well, let's get right down to it. Why would you do a grief podcast? You know, it started, I, my mom died in 2019. She was 95 and I, she was the last person left from my family. My brother had died by suicide when I was 21. He killed himself in front of my mom and my dad had died when I was 10 of a heart attack. And so grief had had, I mean, I'd kind of known loss early on, but so my mom was the last and and I was kind of, you know, I was prepared for it. She lived an extraordinary life and we were very close. But I suddenly found myself going through all the things that she had left behind, which is a process all of us will go through at some time in our life, unfortunately, and turned out to be also all my dad's things and all my brother's things, which my mom could never go through. She can never bring herself. So I found it to be such a lonely and overwhelming experience of, I didn't know, I mean, I hadn't heard people talk about it. I obviously knew it as an intellectual concept. This is something that, that happens, but my mom saved everything. And I just, the way I deal with things is I tend to kind of narrate them from a distance in my head. And I just started recording stuff on my phone. And then I thought it's weird that there's not more stuff out there about this process that is so universal. And I had never actually, I mean, I'd only listened to one podcast. I wasn't a big podcast listener. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I just started talking to people because I needed help and figuring out how do you, how do you do this? And it's been an extraordinary evolution since then. I, yeah, it's been amazing. Wow. Wow. Well, you've had a pretty interesting childhood. I just recently watched a documentary about your family, mother's history. Yeah. Yeah, I did a documentary for HBO about my mom. Yeah, I mean, that was, she was an amazing... She was cool. She was cool. Yeah, my mom was Gloria Vanderbilt and she was kind of in some ways larger than life. But she lived this extraordinary life of very early loss and this kind of crazy childhood she had and never really feeling, she felt like a changeling most of her life. And we, yeah, so I was very glad though I was able to put together this documentary for HBO called Nothing Left Unsaid. And for me, it was really important that I felt like with my brother and my dad, there was so much left unsaid because I was so young when they died. When my mom, actually when my mom reached the age of 91, she wrote me this really funny text about being 91 and yet feeling like 17. And it just kind of clicked in my head of like, I want to engage with her in a real conversation for the next year of her life. And because I think so often we know our parents as our parent, we don't naturally know them as a human being. And it's only after we kind of realize, wow, there's all this stuff we don't know about them. So I asked my mom if she would like have this intentional conversation with me for a year, which she was thrilled about because it meant I would be talking to her a lot. And we did it over email and phone and we ended up making to a book called Nothing Left, The Rainbow Comes and Goes. And then we made this documentary called Nothing Left Unsaid and it was really important to me that when she died, she knew me and I knew her and there was nothing left unsaid between us. So 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 was the thing that you found out about your mom as a human being that surprised you the most? Well, I had known, I mean, as a kid, I was very concerned about stability and 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 I used to read my mom's journal. I used to monitor her phone calls when I was a kid. Like I wanted to know what was coming down the pike. 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. Even though the world probably thought she was super rich, but she spent a lot of money and had no sense of money and I knew this from a little kid. And I remember I was actually walking up the stairs one day and my mom was on the phone and she said, starting the somebody on the phone, she said, well, I'll always be able to make money. And I stopped and I was like, this ship is going down. 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. Are you the oldest? No, I was the youngest. My brother was two years older, but he wasn't as 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 help family. Well, I mean, not that they, I was saving the money because I was like, I'm going to need to, I'm going to need, I'm building a life raft here. But she was remarkable. And I was always very sympathetic to my mom because she really didn't have parents of her own. Her dad died when she was an infant. She was raised in hotels in Europe by her mom who just wanted to party. She was the subject of a vicious custody battle when she was 10 years old. It was called the trial of the century in the depression. And I kind of saw a sadness behind my mom's eyes her whole life. And I didn't understand what the sadness was from, but I was sympathetic to her. And so even if she wasn't the most kind of mom-mom, she was incredible. I viewed her as a, I mean, from the time I was little, I viewed her as like a space alien whose rocket ship had like failed and landed here on earth by accident. And it was my job to like help her rent an apartment and learn how to breathe oxygen. That's a level of worry that most young people... Yeah, but look who's talking. I know, I knew you were worried about that. I listened to you and I think about him. Really? And he's the oldest. I think you called it catastrophic. Yeah, I was a catastrophist. He was a catastrophist at that age in the same way that you were, really thinking, okay, all the worst possible scenarios. And I think he felt like the one that had to know it all. He was going to be you. That's interesting. Like if things fell apart, if our dad could never function, then Craig was the one who was going to make sure. That's interesting because the title of this book, my mom and I wrote together, which ended up being basically our correspondence over the course of the year, was The Rainbow Comes and Goes, which is from a Wordsworth poem. And it was a poem my mom liked. And for her, it meant, well, the rainbow comes and goes. It's always going to come back. And so like bright days are just ahead. They're just around the corner. The phone can ring and your whole life can change. And for me, the title was like, yeah, the rainbow comes and it goes. And it's gone. The phone can ring and your whole frigging life can change. Like I saw it from a negative light. And she saw it. She like could not. It was such an interesting kind of different way of saying stuff. Yes, you just trying to be realistic. Just cover all the bases in case something happens. It's a fine line between realistic and pessimistic. I think you too fell on the pessimistic side. Somewhere in theistic family. But do you think that your mom, did she know that you were kind of 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. Yeah, yeah. And she didn't really know how to be a parent. She loved watching him 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 got to get to know her. And I had a nanny who was my mom. And my mom hated her because of that. My mom knew she could feel how attentive and I mean, I was there. I was always the one she would sort of call in. And it's funny, she would call in. I would have to steal myself like, OK, who is she killed now? And whose body do I got to bury? And I would like, I really like you to come over. And finally, I'd go over and one time, nine out of ten times, it was because she had redecorated something and wanted to show me. One time, I started going out with a guy who was now the co-parent of my child and we'd moved into a place together and she'd seen the place and then she called me. She was like, honey, there's something I'd like to talk about. And she just like dropped this a couple of days in a row. I finally went over. I was like, OK, what is it? And she's like, you know, when you love something, somebody you sometimes do things you wouldn't ordinarily do. I was like, what are you talking about, mom? He's dead in the basement. No, and she was like, I'm talking about the taxidermy. And there was a taxidermy, like this guy had some taxidermy. And she was like, you know, it's just too much. The taxidermy. I was like, this is what I've been worrying all week about. You've dragged me here to confront me about. Taxidermy. I mean, she wasn't wrong, but. Well, with your father being, you know, the way you describe your father, I mean, he sounded like a wonderful man. He was your stability. Yeah, he was. 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, very quick. I mean, yeah, very quick. And it's interesting because I used to think growing up like 10 years. I mean, I was so young. And but what I came to one of the things I came to realize among many things is just, you know, what 10 years was enough? I mean, I wanted more. I wish I'd had more. But in 10 years, he was able to do to give me that sense of this is what security feels like, and this is what love feels like. And that's, you know, again, I wish I had more, but it's it's been extraordinary. It 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 and mortality probably more with my kids and our mom always said this. I mean, it was funny as we were talking about, you know, briefing and prepping for you coming on. We realized we had different memories of how our parents talked about death. And I was like, mom talked about it all the time. And you felt like she didn't talk about it at all. She didn't talk about it in the way that she's talking about. She would always prepare us for her death. Like she's been dropping dead for 20 years. Right. Like, well, when I drop dead, you're going to have to do this, this, and this. And I think 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 a lot. But 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 in 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 is not just losing them or something happening to them. It was something happening to me. And I, 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 common sense. You're already making decisions as a child. I think she was trying to tell me what you came to realize. That if you know your parents' values 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 kind of poor and Mississippi on a farm during the depression. And it was 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 like, I realized I had this just this crazy idea, which a lot of people have. If you lose a parent early on that you're going to die at the age of their parent died. Thankfully, there's advances in medicine. But it's really, it's such a blessing to have this book because it's the family history. And it's all these names of people and stories that never get told in history books of people who were 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 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 the first time I heard his voice. Because I have no recordings of him or anything. I had no moving images of him. And a lady from Mississippi Public Radio, an archivist, found an old TV interview my dad gave promoting this book. And she sent it to me. And for 20 minutes, I watched my dad sit there talking and moving. It was the first time I'd seen him moving. It was just incredible. It was interesting. I mean, it was, it brought back, it's so interesting to me the cycles of history, the repeated families that we don't even know about. So like my son is named Wyatt because my dad was named Wyatt. But I've recently just randomly started calling my son Buddy, which I've never called anybody Buddy in my whole life. I'm not like that. You're not the Buddy type. No, I'm not really. And I've been going through these things still and I found all these letters that my dad's brothers and sisters sent him. They're all addressed to Buddy. And it turns out that was his name. That's how he was known back then. I mean, he wasn't Wyatt Cooper. He was Buddy Cooper. 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 like get the stream moving. Yeah, that's a unique thing. Yeah. You know, and, you know, it's very satisfying. You're out of 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? I 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. My head was on a 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, like 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 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, you know, to have rocket fuel of rage and anger and heartbreak. But what I've learned in doing this grief podcast and in actually going through the things is I realized, I came to the realization about two years ago, about a year ago, that I'd never grieved. And I had this realization when I'd 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. You know, maybe 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 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, Mildi and Mildude. I opened the first one up and there was an essay inside. He'd written, I looked at it, put my glasses on, I 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 the 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 who's still buried deep inside me and who's 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. Well, that's the answer to the very first question. Right, yeah, that's the long answer. But yeah. But I mean, I'm just, I'm just picturing 10 year old you. Yeah. I mean, it, 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 got to tell you, I felt like we grieve. We, when our dad died, my mom was the type where, okay, like, like Misha was saying. Get up, get up, get up. Feel, 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 way to grieve? I certainly, you know, in the world, I certainly am no expert. And, you know, I ran from it, I buried it, but it doesn't go away. And it is, it has stopped me from being able to, you know, I am wary all the time, which helps in my job at times, especially going to war zones and stuff, which is how I started my career. But it makes me, it keeps me distant from people. It keeps me, everything is a threat. Everything is seen through the lens of this 10-year-old boy who's still there. And why would you want to get close to somebody who could leave you? Well, die or be, 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 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 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- Yeah, and also give room or space for grief. And like you can hold it softly. And I want to, I don't under it be a 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, 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. My dad is alive inside me that 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 small town. Mississippi, everybody went to funerals every weekend. Like grief was a 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. And my dad would go and his job was like to hold babies at funerals. And there was a, 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 changed. It used to be you couldn't talk about sex, but death and grief he talked about it. Now you can talk about sex, but you can't talk about grief. It's a weird shift. And, you know, and grief is a ritual. We're losing a lot of ritual. Absolutely. And rituals are so important, which I had never really thought about Francis Weller's, 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 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 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 who displays emotion in public. But like, there were all, I mean, it was, it was a beautiful, like everybody was into this. And so I was like, all right, I'll go pick up a stone. And 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 get moving 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. 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, where retirement is honored. We didn't have nursing homes in senior centers because families reincorporated, you didn't lose the elderly. They stayed with you. They became a part of the fixture. They were, they played a critical role in the, 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've 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. And I didn't even know this part of the firm existed. It was almost like this shadow system of law 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. You know, there were corner offices and I went and I found the person. I gave the thing, but I left there feeling really creepy because I thought, okay, yeah, this is where this is the floor where old partners come to die. It made me think about how, and I continue to think about how we treat people and why people don't want to move on. And I think my husband said this recently. I mean, one of the problems with society today is that nobody wants to move on from leadership. People hang on too long and they hang on beyond their usefulness or even their practicality. I mean, as we get older, we think a different way. 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. 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 there's younger people, especially are just sort of freaked out by, scared by the aging process, don't want to deal with it. And so shunted aside, just as I think with grief, oftentimes when, you know, somebody in your office has lost a loved one and they come back after, you know, what, two days of bereavement and relief or whatever, ridiculous, some 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 the podcast, you know, people either don't say anything because they think, oh, I don't want to, maybe they think, oh, I don't want to, you know, bring this up and upset the person, as if it's not constantly in that person's head all the time. You know, I think about my dad and my brother and everybody I've lost all the time. It's always there. It's not like somebody's going to upset me by bringing it up. But also people don't know what to say. And sometimes when people do start to say things, it seems like people are kind of probing to see how bad they should feel. Like, well, how old was the person? And were they sick for a long time? Were you close? And 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. And it makes me feel better now. I was like, oh, okay, not too close. Oh, grandmother. Oh, okay, fine, fine. I have a question because I think you, I mean, you've talked to so many people through your show or connected with so many people. What would, what would be the first thing you said you would say to somebody who had lost someone when you, when you ran and walked into work because, and 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 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. 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, sometimes someone doesn't really want to talk about it. And they just want to let you know that they, they, they have had this loss. So a lot of it, I think is kind of just getting a sense from the other person. But, you know, sometimes I will, I generally won't ask, well, what would they die of? Yeah, what happened? Or they tell me what happened? I'll usually ask, like, how do you, how do you meet? How'd 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. 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 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's house? This is exactly how so. Okay. 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 going to be a tsunami. Upset new. 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, well, 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. Yeah. 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 to remind me of 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 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 them again. Never see them again. You probably won't. 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. 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 like, my mom had been talking about dying her entire life. And usually in the vein of like, well, I'll never be a burden. And you can always find 50 second all. I was like, can't can you? Why are you saying that to a 14 year old? That's kind of freaking me out. Like, do I need to call authorities or something? But after a while, like tuned it out because it was just, you know, people say stuff. You have no idea when the end of your life comes. My mom was was holding on for as long as she could. But that feeling of, oh, wow, I'm the last one left who knows all like just the little tiny memories that seemed important when I was a child or the little sounds in my house. And all of that just kind of, and I'm so, I think that's why going through 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, we're some random person and, and, you know, those all throw out. But it's, it's very hard to kind of, I find it very hard to kind of let go of these things that, that, because I feel like it's letting go 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, 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. 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. And so she finally did. You know, it may have been. We did. Well, Kelly, Kelly did. My sister-in-law did. 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 a burp. 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 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? Yes. 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 100 hours? I think it was probably a little bit of a 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 stories. Yes. Yes. It was a better way to do it. But then when she died, she still had a bunch of stuff. And we just like took it all to our house. And then what we're trying to do is not have it so that our kids, when we, our kids take it to their house, right? But I will say that you got across to mom because she was at a point when she was still alive, still living on Euclid, where she was like, come on over. Euclid is the place we grew up in. Come on over. Let's get rid of this stuff. And I think we got rid of just about everything. And that's why we probably can't find your spiral notebooks. My mom had a storage unit in Queens that she had never been to. And 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. They sent your dog to the farm. Yeah. Yeah. My mom would send stuff to the storage unit. And like sometimes like 20 years later, she'd be like, you know what? There's this chair, I remember. And she had a lady named Nora who'd worked with my mom for 60 years as her housekeeper. And Nora would schlep to the storage unit. Oh man. 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. The chair would go back. So like it was just, it's like the last scene in Citizen Kane where there's this warehouse and like they're just going through it throwing things in the fire. 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. 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 remember I killed himself in front of her. Going through his things were just, it was impossible for her. Yeah, 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 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. Okay, 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. So my mom just randomly found these screens and she was like, oh my god, that's the wallpaper. So my mom was like, you have to get it. I was like, I have to get it. I was like, okay. And they turned out to be like crazy expensive screens. I didn't know screens or so. I was like, who do you like a screen? What are we screening? Like, what are we doing? We're not, anyway, she was like, you'd really got to get it. I mean, so much. 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 to get these screen, frigging screens. And she embraces them like this, this was going to solve her life, her problems in her life. She brings them, gets them in a room, a week later, she calls me up. She was like, I've had to redecorate the dining room around the screens, which means I'm redecorating the dining room around the screens. And then two weeks, four, 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. As my mom would acknowledge, like, the things are redecorate constantly, but it never quite got it right. What the issue really was. And it costs a lot of money along the way. Yeah. So I'm, you know, I'm trying to practice, I try to practice that as maybe part of my grieving process, that it's, it's not stuff. You know, I don't want it as a memory of me. I don't want my kids to feel that, you know, keeping this thing that I just got forever and lugging it around with them for the rest of their life is a way to stay connected to me or to stay connected to my mother or my father. It's, for me, stories matter. 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, our elders, our, our, our ancestors, then with a storage room full of their stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I don't recommend that. Yeah. Anderson, and I know which, by the way, there's one, for one of the reasons I'm so motivated to go all through this stuff because I don't want to leave for my kids. That's like there's room full of stuff that they're like, who are these people? It's like, and it's the screens. What am I supposed to do with screens? That was just what I wanted to, to talk about. How does this work now that you know, and you've gone through this, how does this inform your parenting and how are you preparing yourself to sort of convey the right message to your boys? Well, to me, I mean, like telling the story of my, of my parents and their parents to my kids is really important. Like I want my kids to, to know that I like, I didn't pay any attention to my mom's family, her history, her family history growing up, like the Vanderbilt's, I consciously wanted nothing to do with them. I at my, in my 12 year old, you know, lizard brain looked at like the poor Cooper's farmers and the messed up Vanderbilt's. And I was like, I'm, I'm a Cooper. I'm glad I don't have this name. It's like, I want to connect with Uncle Raspberry. Exactly. Like so I'm, I'm that, I'm a Cooper. I'm not a Vanderbilt. And, and it wasn't like there was a pot of gold waiting for me in like the Vanderbilt archives. They spent all that money very quickly. The Vanderbilt's did from what I, but I, once I had kids of my own, suddenly I was like, I know nothing about the Vanderbilt. I know, I can tell you about the Cooper's. And so I actually, I actually ended up writing a book about them mainly because I wanted to study them and understand who they were. So I could figure out what to tell 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 Cormielli's Vanderbilt, who was not a nice guy. And there's a statue of him outside Grand Central Station, which by the way he paid for and had made and set up there. And it wasn't like his workers loved him. He did it. It was his. And he made photographs. He had paintings painted of himself and gave them out to all his children, not that they wanted them either. But, 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 died, which is very relatable. I know everybody feels this. Oh yeah. It's not made that mistake. I know Andy Cohen makes fun of me. Anytime I tell a childhood story, he's like, oh, the Vanderbilt boy. Oh, the Vanderbilt, though. Your team, Truman Company. But I wanted to like have a narrative to tell my kids about like this weird family that they came from who achieved remarkable things, but also, you know, this guy who wasn't nice to any of the women in the family. And he sent his wife to a mental hospital because he wanted to have an affair with the babysitter. And, you know, so it's, 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. Well, I mean, I'm picturing, 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, you know, I don't know, it was my first grade class, Miss Critts was the teacher. But we went to the Museum of Natural History of my class and we were outside and there's now that, you know, now infamous statue of Teddy Roosevelt on a horse with two Indigenous people. And the teacher was like, does anyone know who this is? And I raised my hand and was like, I think it's my grandfather. Again, relatable. It's just like, yeah, he's there. And then they beat me up. But I, 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, you know, 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. And those stories are not being passed on. They are not. And, you know, with each generation, the details fade away. It gets a little murkier and you don't know who was that. And, you know, in our family, it's like, well, are, were they really a part of our family? Is that a real cousin? Or was that a play cousin? It's a, you know, you want to, you want to know all that stuff. And that's, that's work. That's better than having a storage locker full of stuff. Because it does, I will tell you, once I read about the Vanderbilt and wrote a book about them, it made me feel more connected to America in a way. It made me feel more connected to New York City, like this city that they were in hundreds of years ago. And I became fascinated with, you know, the hidden history of New York. And, you know, I, the, there's the Starbucks near my house that was the site of, of the, the Astor riots when there were competing groups in New York, riding over two competing opera houses in lower Manhattan, which makes no sense. But now that's on, what's the show? Gildage. Is that on the Gildage? That's the Gildage. See, I stopped, well, I know. Oh my God, that's you. That's your family. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that is, that is literally my family. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we saw the, we saw the, there was the, the operas. Okay. Well, yeah, there you go. You got to watch the Gildage. Yeah. I don't need, like, yeah, I've never seen it. I've never, I've never seen it. It hits too close to home. Right. Right. They're for trail of do-ground-bomb-bomb. That's not right. That's not right. The country home was never that small. Hey, we can test this and it only takes so much. Exactly. But it did make me, and knowing my dad's history, and I did the Skip Gates following, you know, Finding 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. Yeah. We're kind of floating through. Well, we have a listener question. All right. We always try and pay it forward here at IMO. And this question is from Nancy in Salt Lake City. Hi, Craig and Michelle. This is Nancy. I would love to hear you both talk a little about dealing with the loss of your mom, which I'm sure is going to be a hard question. I recently lost my dad in 2022. My mom in 2023, which obviously still makes me emotional. That was a hard 13 months. And obviously the time since has been hard too. As an only child, it really has been very difficult to process because I don't have anybody to process with a lot of the time. I'd love to hear how you guys have processed the grief, helped each other, and moved on after losing your dad when you were younger and your mom more recently. Thank you. 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, I don't think that there's a you process it. And that's that. And I, and I'm learning that there's no need to have processed it. I mean, I don't want to process my parents' lives and feel like I can pack it up. And that's that now that, you know, their memory, they are in my head every day. Every the way I lead my life, how I show up in the world, the words that come out of my mouth, the impact that I'm trying to have, it's all, it's all because of that memory and the loss is a part of it. So I don't want to, I'm still working that through. Or the memories tinged with sadness because of the loss. Or is there a 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, you know, that's one of the ways we deal with grief. We sit and tell stories and we laugh about it. And then there are times just like Craig, that feeling of just a 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 I 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? 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 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, like life, his life is a part of me, his death is a part of me. Yeah. Yeah. I feel them in different ways. I mean, time, what I would say time matters, right? I mean, in terms of the day to day pain, loss, grief, that's one of those things where I believe time heals all wounds. It just, you know, after a while, the cut becomes, you know, skin healed, and then it's scab, and then it's scar. But the scar is always there. And the loss of my parents are scars on me, and they will be there forever. 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, 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 losses 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, 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, 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 really, really good job. And you'll remember this and, and some people have heard, 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 were, 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 my, you'll 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, 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. But to Misha's point, you know, maybe I am, maybe you just grieve until the end of time. I don't know because I felt like I had gotten over my father's death. I had gotten over my father's death until my mom died. And then I re-greed 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? And I'm not, it's more a rhetorical question. It's not even a question for you. But it's only semantics in my case. 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 use. 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. But 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 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, 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 is, we both went to our individual corners when my dad died. We never talked about it. And I think his death was so violent and sudden and shocking to me that I feel like I sometimes feel like I don't even know who he was. And that's a terrible feeling and I'm hoping that will change. But it's, you know, to feel 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. I wonder what's going on. And 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 communities, but they're often available. And 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. And apparently I was talking to a woman, Mary, who's a Sunday 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, I finally feel I can relax there because I don't need to explain, 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. That'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 pro-program, this project of yours, is healing you. Yeah, 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? But we're ending this conversation. And wondering, 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. And I think that's, no, it's better than tearing the shit up. It would be very proud of you. Thanks, man. Anderson, thank you, man. This is a pleasure. I truly love it.