Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert on grief

Lynne Baab • Thursday October 8 2026

Shortly after his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, died in 2019, TV journalist Anderson Cooper launched a video podcast that explores grief. Cooper was also thinking about the death of his father when he was 10 and his brother’s suicide at 21. In a New York Times article about the podcast, Anderson reflects on why he started it.

“What has struck me is the degree to which I had not dealt with this stuff at all. . . . I just felt like, ‘Why am I so alone in this? This is something we all go through.’ And this idea gave me great strength, that I’m on a road that has been traveled by everybody, in one form or another. Why every time somebody is going down this road should it feel like the first time?”

One of the podcast episodes is an amazingly honest and tender 21-minute video interview with Stephen Colbert. Cooper opens by talking about how much he valued total strangers coming up to him to tell them how sorry they were for the death of his mother. Often, they went on to tell their own grief stories. The stories helped him feel he was indeed not alone in grief.

Colbert also lost his father when he was 10, along with two of his brothers, in a plane crash. Both Colbert and Cooper talk about how their father’s death was a major dividing moment in their lives. “I am a different person than I would have been,” Cooper says. He goes on to say he wishes he had a scar, a visible sign of loss, rather than this interior experience that marked him so profoundly but which is invisible to others. Both men say they sometimes feel surprised that people don’t ask them about their grief because it feels so real.

Colbert talks about his mother’s faith, and then his own. He describes getting to a place where he can “love the thing that I most wish hadn’t happened.” He argues that loss gives us a gift, an awareness of other people’s loss, which enables us to connect with that other person. This helps us love more deeply.

You can’t have life without suffering, Colbert stresses. “The bravest thing we can do is accept with gratitude the world as it is.” Later in the interview, he repeats that suffering is an inescapable part of life. Then he adds, “That’s the great gift of God, the sacrifice of Christ. God does it, too. You’re really not alone.”

Colbert says that his mother’s recent death brought back the feelings of loss from the deaths of his father and brothers. Each death reminds us of other deaths, and we re-engage in grief that death has to exist. I have been experiencing that in recent months. Other parts of the interview resonated with me, too.

Other people’s grief stories help us not to feel alone in our grief.I have loved being in grief support groups and meeting with other widows. At a deep level, in the first months after Dave’s passing, I needed to hear the stories of other husbands’ deaths and the caregiving required of the wives in the months and years that preceded their passing.

Death can be a dividing line.On the day after Dave passed, I said to myself those cheesy words from decades ago, “This is the first day of the rest of your life.” Then the second day. The third day. The second week. The second and third months. To go from wife through caregiving to the loss of one’s spouse and then a life alone is a major shift, maybe like retirement cubed. I am now in the sixth month of the rest of my life.

Everyone suffers, so our suffering helps us love others.I was raised by a mother who practiced toxic optimism. She almost never expressed a weakness or any kind of sorrow. She truly seemed to believe that if someone suffers, it’s their fault. It has been astonishingly hard for me to let go of the deep-seated belief, learned so early, that we can avoid suffering by doing things right. I took me so long to learn that as I embrace my own suffering without criticizing myself for causing it in some way, I can grow in compassion for others.

Love the thing that I most wish hadn’t happened. Losing Dave was awful, a process that lasted over a decade. Mitigating that sense of awfulness was the fact that I had been expecting it all our marriage. Dave was six and a half years older than I am. He did not have longevity in his heredity, which I do. Add in the life expectancy difference between men and women, and I always believed he would die first. This has undoubtedly made a huge difference in my grief journey. Maybe this sounds unloving, but because I was expecting it, Dave’s passing was not the thing I most wish hadn’t happened.

The thing that I most wish hadn’t happened relates to my mother’s micromanagement of my eating and my response of binge eating. I tell the story of my healing in my 2025 book. I know that the binge eating and the depression I experienced gave me empathy, as Stephen Colbert describes. I’m grateful for the empathy, but I can’t yet love the thing that gave it to me. I found Colbert’s words, and the peace in his voice and body language when he spoke, to be both soothing and challenging.

I also found Anderson Cooper’s visible emotion to be moving. How wonderful that a veteran journalist is willing to explore grief in a public forum and that 3.1 million people have viewed such a strong testimony to God’s presence with us when we suffer.

Holy Spirit, Comforter, you give us the awareness that we are not alone when we suffer. You shape us into compassionate people through our suffering and loss. You bring forth the fruit of the Spirit in every setting of our lives, including in the midst of our grief. Thank you.

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Next week: More about my grief journey. Illustration by Dave Baab: Green Lake, Seattle

Previous posts about empathy:

A book of Dave’s watercolors is here. You can buy cards, T-shirts, bags and other items with Dave’s watercolors on them here.

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