fphoto albums. notebooks. Notes with everyday, short messages. Furniture. Dress. When a loved one dies, there is so much that remains. Not only memories, but also very concrete things that have sometimes spent decades in the house or apartment and sooner or later have to be sorted by the relatives, who have suddenly become “survivors”: into important personal memorabilia, like relics , moving to another household, and – one has to say it like that – waste.
Millions of people have to face this process every year, it is as much a part of life as birth, tax returns and death. Anderson Cooper recently faced the challenge of organizing his late mother’s estate, and because Cooper is a journalist and one of CNN’s most well-known anchors, and because we all deal with grief differently, he taped himself in the process. Those recordings eventually became All There Is, Cooper’s podcast series, which began in September and in which he takes his audience, as the announcement unctuously put it, “on a very personal journey of discovery into loss and grief.”
These are emotions that have accompanied Cooper for a long time. He was 10 when his father, author Wyatt Emory Cooper, died and 21 when his older brother, Carter, committed suicide. But he is also the perfect host for such a podcast because he is never afraid to show his feelings. There are numerous videos on YouTube in which Cooper is close to tears or lets them flow freely: after the massacre at the LGBTQIA+ club “Pulse” in Orlando or the killing spree at an elementary school in Uvalde; given young children who have lost their parents in the Covid-19 pandemic; when, as a reporter from Ukraine, he describes Russian attacks on civilians; when he announces on air that he has become a father. Cooper is not a supposedly neutral presenter in these moments, he is the proxy for every compassionate person in front of the television.
His mother, actress, painter and author Gloria Vanderbilt, of one of America’s great East Coast dynasties, lived to be 95, but when she too was dying in 2019, Anderson saw the last connection to his father and brother fading. The podcast features footage Cooper made over her final few weeks of the two laughing together — the same childish giggles. In view of the blows of fate that she experienced in her life (a look at her Wikipedia entry gives a good overview), his mother never asked “Why me?”, but on the contrary: “Why not me?”, Because nobody has a right to be spared by fate. Cooper wants to pass on such memories to his sons, who never met their grandmother.
Cooper’s strength is the interview
The podcast starts out very private though. But one of Cooper’s greatest strengths is undeniably his interviewing. And that’s why he’s guesting in episode two to share their very own experiences of loss and grief—experiences that, as Cooper repeatedly points out, we all have to have at some point. Late-night presenter Stephen Colbert, for example, lost his father and two of his older brothers in a plane crash when he was ten years old. The conversation on the podcast is one of many that Colbert and Cooper have had publicly about grief.
