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All There Is Season Three
Wherever you are in the world and wherever you are in grief, I’m glad you’re here. This is All There Is season three.
My mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, made this audio recording of a letter she sent me several years before she died in 2019.
I was ten when my dad died. His death forever changed the lives of my brother, my mom, and me. My dad had his first heart attack in 1976. Then the next year, he had another. He was placed in intensive care when a patient was very ill. The hospital relaxed its rules and allowed children in to visit. But on Christmas Eve, he had another heart attack and was moved into a unit with dying patients. I was permitted to be by his side only briefly. Much of the time he was unaware I was there. As he gasped for breath, one day he seemed to suddenly focus on me and said, “This was not part of my plan.” But you’re not going to die, I shouted back. He looked startled as if I knew something he didn’t.
Last season of the podcast, I came to realize just how much my dad’s death when I was ten and my inability to grieve completely altered the course of my life. His death forever changed the lives of my brother and my mom as well.
There are times, even now, when dark thoughts take over, wishing it had been me who died instead of your father. How much better he would have been at guiding you and Carter. Far better than I could ever be.
Carter, my brother, was 12 when my dad died. He, too, was slapped into silence by the heartbreak and terror and rage we both felt. We never talked about my dad. We never really talked about anything. Carter killed himself ten years later. He did it in front of my mom. I buried my grief over his death, too.
My brother died at 23. If your father had been there, it would not have happened. He understood your every mood and would have had the power to get you both through anything that was happening in your young lives.
The last year has been perhaps the most difficult of my life. The grief I’ve tried to keep buried for so long has finally risen. It’s banging on my door, but I don’t yet know how to face it.
Hello, my name is John Hood. My father took his life when I was 16. I’m 62 now. But the unresolved grief, rage, anger is still with me.
I’ve spent months listening to the more than 3000 voicemails we received at the end of last season.
When I was 16, my mom had a stroke and went and gave her CPR, but she died.
I’m struck by how many of you have tried to bury your grief as well.
I stifled and stuffed all that grief. So where we couldn’t share our grief, we had to hide it. We had to stop it. It’s a very debilitating life.
But I have tried to avoid face my whole life. That grief, weight, all these feelings came up that I never knew existed. But it will be dealt with at some point.
Like an extinct volcano that erupted violently out of nowhere.
I spent so many years being angry. I haven’t been able to grieve.
I just continue always to keep moving forward and being strong and saying, “I’ll be fine.”
A few months ago, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t fine and I couldn’t just keep moving forward and being what I thought was strong. I decided to reach out for help. And it’s been one of the best decisions I ever made.
Welcome back to All There is. My guest today is Andrew Garfield. He’s probably best known for his roles in The Social Network and The Amazing Spider-Man. He was also nominated for an Academy Award in 2017 for his performance in Hacksaw Ridge. His latest film, We Live In Time, comes out this week. It’s a love story, and it’s also about loss and grief. In 2019, Andrew’s mom, Lynn Garfield, died after a struggle with pancreatic cancer.
I heard you say something a while ago that after your mom, though, you felt like your psyche had been rearranged, that things tasted different. Can you explain?
Yeah, probably not. But that’s true. And it still is. I’m still. I’m still adjusting to a new reality. Like.
Do you feel like a different person?
No, I feel like the same person. I just feel deeper in the same person, more expanded, more cracked open. It’s like the heart breaks and breaks and breaks and lives by breaking in times of great loss. And you expand. Hopefully you become bigger, the heart becomes bigger, you become more confused and less certain of anything.
I want to be more curious about what we’re what we’re all doing here. Rather than narrow and driven and certain. I want it to break me open. I want to be I want to be lost. It feels healthier than to feel like you know where you are heading and.
Yeah. Yeah, it is. And and real. It’s like the rest is illusion. Like the idea that we have any jurisdiction over where we’re going or control. It’s. It’s a fabrication.
Is there something you’ve learned in your grief that would help others who are listening?
I remember when when mom died, I had I have a really incredible group of friends. And they were very, very they were ingenious in how they handled it emotionally. Very genius. And I feel very grateful for them. They would send me messages. And it would literally just be. I’m here. I’ve got you. It was like. Who? Sorry. It was like this web. It was like this net. Of. Love and care that a handful, 2 or 3 handfuls of friends assemble underneath me where my mother’s net used to be. It was like they all kind of joined hands and created a. A container for me. To feel safe in the loss. And I wasn’t orphaned. You know, I was to a degree. But the love that held me and it was profound in its simplicity. It wasn’t complicated and it wasn’t fixing. None of these people tried to fix it. They didn’t try to run away from it either. But basically they were saying, if you need us to sit with you while you cry, we can do that. So maybe that feels more for people with other people who are going through grief, because I know that that was a profound life saving thing for me and allowed me to continue to stay in that process with myself and with the spirit of my mom and with my family, because I knew I was I was held by a larger web and I include the ocean in that group of friends. I include the redwoods in that group of friends, and I include my mother spirit in that group of friends and ancestors and art and artists and writers and poets and filmmakers and theater makers and actors like, you know, I was held by great, generous, vulnerable artists who also said, I need help with this and made me feel less alone.
There’s a couple of new things we’re doing with All There is that I want to tell you about. You can now watch the video episodes of All There Is on CNN’s YouTube page. We’re also starting an online grief community. If you go there, you can hear for yourself some of the thousands of voicemails I’ve received from podcast listeners. I think hearing others talk about their experiences with grief is so powerful. It certainly has been for me. You can also leave comments of your own. They won’t post right away because the comments are going to be reviewed. We want this to be a supportive place for everyone. You can check out the online grief community at CNN.com. Forward slash. All there is online that CNN.com forward slash all there is online. It’s a work in progress, but I hope you find it helpful. Next week, Whoopi Goldberg is my guest. Her mom died in 2010 and her brother died five years later.
Grief comes when it comes. It comes in very strange ways. People would come up to me and say, “I’m really sorry about your mom.” And I’d say, “Okay, thank you.” And I’d get mad because I’d want them to stop asking or saying, “Are you okay?” No, I’m not okay.
That’s next week on All There Is. All There Is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is our executive producer. Support from Nick Godsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Hadad, Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Kerry Pricher, Shimrit Sheetrit, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manesseri, Robert Mathers, John Dionora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundige.
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