Excited for Grief? Yes!
Anderson Cooper's excellent podcast "All There Is" is back for a third season talking about that emotion we all know and deal with differently.
Who knew you could get excited for grief, that gut-wrenching emotion that grabs us typically over the loss of someone we love but can also encompass the loss of a job, a friend, a pet or just the loss of a period in your life that you know is over? But when I saw that there were new episodes coming from Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast, I was genuinely excited. Go figure.
I've always been fascinated by whatever grief is in film, TV and then, of course, in life and I have written about it here before when I initially found Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is. I dove into the podcast where he shares so much about his own grief over losing his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, as well as talking to other folks (Stephen Colbert and Naomi Judd in the celebrity arena but he also talks to everyday people). It was an odd sensation to be listening to an episode while on a busy Bangkok subway train with a group of strangers that I’d look at and realize we probably all have shared grief in some way. It’s something that we all share and carry around with us just like our purses, backpacks and satchels. Though the podcast brings up a lot of emotions that maybe you haven’t dealt with or just haven’t felt in a long time, I found I was enjoying delving into this difficult and often painful topic.
Listening to the podcast also got me thinking about the grief that I had experienced around the passing of my mother, Patsy, over 30 years ago now, which I wrote about around Mother’s Day earlier this year. How did I feel about her passing now that she’s been gone so long? How did I deal with it back then?
As Cooper has said many times on the podcast and again does during his season 3 premiere episode with actor Andrew Garfield, grief is something we all have experienced yet it’s something we don’t talk about too much. “It is wild to me that we’re not talking about this all the time,” Cooper says during the podcast. “It just feels like this enormous thing which we’re all just ignoring. I don’t know.”
The conversation with Garfield is a beautiful one as he talks about the time he had with his mother, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2019, before she passed and how he’s dealt with the grief after it happened and now several years later. As a lot of us know, grief isn’t something that is dealt with quickly like a daily task that is just finished. It stays with us, it’s a part of us and the point of Cooper’s podcast is that it’s okay - even good and healthy - to talk about it. Garfield, who also talked about it during a 2021 interview with Stephen Colbert, is eloquent about the feeling of grief and loss that is both admirable and heroic at times.
Also during their chat, both Cooper and Garfield reference the Mary Oliver poem “Wild Geese.” Garfield grabs his phone and pulls up the poem and reads it around the 26:30 mark of the podcast video (posted below). It’s just beautiful and Garfield reading it really brought the words to life even more.
Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
….and if you want to watch more from the podcast video that’s on the CNN YouTube channel, here ya go:
You can hear this episode and more on Cooper’s All There Is podcast, which can be found here or anywhere you find your podcasts. It has become one of my favorite podcasts.
Until next time…