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CNN
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In a deeply personal and intimate conversation about loss and grief on Anderson Cooper’s new podcast All There Is, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert talks about the importance of “learning to love the thing you most wish was never happened”.
Colbert, the youngest of 11 siblings, lost his father and two teenage brothers, Peter and Paul, in a plane crash near Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 11, 1974. He was just 10 years old at the time.
“It’s such a cliff that I fell off emotionally, mentally and spiritually at that age,” he said.
Cooper was also 10 years old when he lost his father in 1978 at the age of 50 after a heart attack. Ten years later, Cooper’s brother, Carter, died by suicide.
Stephen Colbert on overcoming grief and loss as a child
Colbert told Cooper that losing his father and brothers had “broken” his and his mother’s lives, but had not “destroyed” them. “It’s a gift to exist,” Colbert told Cooper, “and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping it, but if you’re grateful for your life, then you should be grateful for everything.”
Colbert went on to say, “You can’t beat grief because you are the one who causes it to you. Grief itself is a natural process that must be experienced.
Cooper admitted that he always assumed he would die by the age of 50, like his father. He was afraid that if he had children, they would be left without a father.
After having turned 50 and received assurances from his doctor that he was in good health, Cooper said he felt more certain that he had children. He now has two young sons, Wyatt and Sebastian.
Similarly, Colbert shared that because he never experienced life with a father past the age of 10, he looked at his own mortality through the ages of his three children and said he would constantly be doing “this terrible math all the time,” fearing are expected to die when each approaches the age of 10.
Colbert has learned to accept his losses, but describes his grief as “like living with a beloved tiger. It can surprise you, it can attack you. And it may really hurt you, but this is my tiger and it will live as long as I do.
Colbert advised Cooper, who said he is still trying to understand his grief, to talk about his loved ones and share stories from their lives. Instead of thinking of grief as a depression trap, Colbert said he tries to look at it as a door, “because you’re going to be a different person on the other side of it.”
Since debuting her podcast last week, Cooper has received thousands of messages from listeners writing about their own journeys through loss and why it’s so important to finally talk about it out loud.
New episodes of CNN’s All There Is with Anderson Cooper are available Wednesdays on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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