What Anderson Cooper Gets So Right About Grief

The holidays are in full swing, and for many of us, that means grief is rearing its ugly head no matter how hard we try to ignore it. Bringing salve to the pain, however, is Anderson Cooper’s podcast on grief, “All There Is.” Cooper just released the second season of his podcast which chronicles his own journey in grieving his mother’s recent death and as a result the prior deaths of his father and brother. Central to his podcast are also interviews with famous celebrities about their own grief journeys.

As a grief expert and professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center whose career has been dedicated to the work of death, dying and grief, I was awestruck at how perfectly the first season of Cooper’s podcast tackled the topic of grief. His release of the second season, right in time for the holidays, invites his audience to find a space for their own grief.

The truth is that none of us escape living in this world without experiencing grief. Each one of us will lose someone, and often many people, dear to us. This means we face grief over and over again throughout our lives. My own research and work focus on developing tools to support terminally ill patients and their loved ones walk through the difficult process of grief. Through over a decade of this work, I have seen both the weight of grief and the debilitating effects on patients and their families of failing to deal with this grief. Overwhelmingly, grief is an isolating experience that requires us to process in order to heal. But in a culture that is death avoidant, most Americans lack the space to do this.

That is why Cooper's podcast is so critically important; it creates space to grieve in a culture largely devoid of public grieving. Cooper outlines the journey of grief so well and with such vulnerability as he speaks about the compounding effect his grief had on him after losing his father as a young boy, his brother by suicide as a young adult, and most recently his mother. So, what does he get so right?

He engages with the universality of our grieving as humans. And most importantly, he invites us to create space for our grief.

First and most powerful, he shares in the moment recordings of him sorting through his mother’s things, which leads to reliving the deaths of his father and his brother. Like an unboxing of grief, you hear Cooper experience and process his grief in real time. You hear him break down crying in the middle of looking through old things and you can hear the heaviness of his grief, which threatens to bury him. These rare insights into the weight and suddenness of grief when it hits you perfectly capture how overwhelming and immense it feels to grieve. Research demonstrates that grief impacts us biologically, meaning it hits us physically. When it happens to us, the intense physicality of grief catches us off guard. But by inviting listeners into these tender yet heavy moments, Cooper paints an honest picture of how overwhelming, messy, and uncontrollable grief is. Too often grief gets tied into a bow of sad remembrance, but in actuality it’s messy and heartbreaking. Cooper displays this reality to his listeners, making it authentic, raw, and reflective of the biological nature of grief. In other words, we get to bear witness to how grief lives in the body.

The second and perhaps most unique thing Cooper does in his podcast is interview famous people about their grief journeys. One of the most commonly reported feelings of those grieving is a feeling of loneliness. Feeling such an immense weight of sadness has an isolating effect on individuals, but Cooper invites his audience to hear about how even these seemingly “untouchable” celebrities have faced immense pain and loss in their lives. Seeing these giants in terms of fame and recognition grapple with grief reminds us that none of us escape our humanity. In other words, all of us including celebrities will face grief in our lives. With that knowledge, those who are grieving can feel less alone in it.

Finally, Cooper allows for the expression of the full range and complexity of grief. We so often think the narrative of losing a loved one, like a parent, is full of sadness in missing them or fondness in remembering them. But the truth is that grief brings a lot of complicated emotions, both about how you feel about that person you lost and how you feel in your grief. Sadness, anger, confusion, regret, and even relief are all allowed to emerge in his interviews, which reflects the chaos and complexity of grief. For instance, I work with many caregivers who provide a lot of support to their loved one as they die. When their loved one finally passes away, these caregivers often report both deep sadness and relief at the loss of caregiving responsibilities. This tension about how we might feel about our grief is rarely discussed in an honest and open matter but critically important for the many people losing loved ones with whom they have complicated relationships.

At the heart of Cooper's success, I believe, is not only immense talent as a journalist but the reality that he is walking through his own grief journey in tandem with his guests. This powerful combination swings open the gate to have an honest and raw look at grief. This powerful, heartbreaking gaze shows both the bitterness and the beauty of grief in that it is so heavy precisely because something so dearly loved was lost. And doing this in front of people brings the topic of grief back into the public space so that we can grieve more collectively.

In a subtle but genius way, Cooper’s podcast invites his listeners to see the value in grieving. Cooper notes this reality himself in his recent article about his grief journey: “I’ve seen now that in burying my grief, I’ve also buried my ability to feel joy.” Cooper invites listeners to grieve what they have lost and, in that grieving, find their joy again. I’m hopeful that for anyone out there grieving this holiday season, Cooper’s podcast is a welcome companion to grieving to allow a little more joy in this season.