So this is my podcast, All There Is with me, Anderson Cooper. I hope this podcast will help you as well, even if you aren't going through something like this right now. And I want to talk to other people who have experienced loss as well to hear what they've learned and how they survived. Somewhere in these notes and these boxes that I got to go through, I hope to find something that helps me to, to make sense of all this, that eases the pain of their absence. But what do I do with all these things? I need to learn something from all this. They're alive in these things and holding them and going through them. It's all the people they knew, whom I knew. It's evidence of my brother's life and my dad's- of their existence.
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I'm sitting now in her apartment, full of journals and notes, letters and postcards or thousands of books, every one of which she'd read and often scribbled her thoughts in. Because if I don't, my mom and my dad and my brother, the life that we shared and all those moments and all their friends, they'll all just disappear.
And I feel like I need to preserve all that happened. I feel like a lighthouse keeper on an empty island. The last person who knew the same stories as me and had the same memories. She was the last person from the little family that I grew up in. Which, the whole thing kind of freaked me out initially, but then I just started rolling my eyes at her and she'd laugh and recite the lines from Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanity, all is vanity." So I wasn't really surprised by my mom's death, but I was surprised by the loneliness I felt afterward and still feel. She recommended her makeup artist named Beeko, even if there wasn't an open casket. And she also like to remind me that she didn't, she didn't want a funeral parlor to do her makeup or hair. She'd occasionally say, "Well, I'll never allow myself to be a burden on you." And then she'd mention the yellow Fortuny gown that she wanted to be buried in which she made sure that I knew was kept in a box in the cedar closet. Also, she'd been talking about dying since I was a teenager, which is probably a little odd. She was 95 and had lived a full life totally on her own terms. It's been 34 years since Carter's suicide and the violence of it, the horror of it, it stuns me still. But still, I find it hard to talk about my dad and my brother.
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And I think that's how I learned how to survive. And the pain that I was feeling inside was matched by the pain all around me. And I ended up heading to Somalia and then Bosnia, South Africa and Rwanda- places where the language of loss was spoken. I felt like I couldn't speak the same language as other people. And ten years later, when my brother died, I went deeper still. After the shock of my dad's death, I withdrew deep into myself. I feel like a shadow of the person I was or was meant to be. Both of their deaths really changed me forever. And on a hot summer day in July of 1988, he killed himself in front of my mom, leaping over the balcony of her penthouse apartment while she was begging him not to. I was ten when my dad died of a heart attack, and I was 21 when my brother died by suicide. But my mom, she never asked, "Why me? Why did this happen to me?" She would always say, "Why not me? Why should me be exempt from the pain of living and losing?" And, yeah. Just coming here, frankly is- just coming here is hard. You know, and it's a lot of memories of people who are no longer here. So I guess this is kind of a long way of saying that this place has a lot of memories for me. A couple of days after he died, I came to the apartment by myself to pick out a suit for him to be buried in.
My brother Carter also lived here for a year after he graduated college. And I remember as a kid sitting at that desk looking through his drawers and just spending time with him as he was here writing. His desk was right where I'm standing right now. There was a small radio that would usually play opera or classical music off in the corner of the room. Next to it's a small sitting room, which is the room that my dad used to write in. Actually I should probably do this while I'm walking. You enter into a small foyer and into a large room my mom had painted white with bleached white wooden floors. I remember coming into this apartment when I was seven, eight, nine, ten years old.
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