podcast
All There Is with Anderson Cooper
Do we ever move on from grief, or do we just learn to live with it? In Season 2 of All There Is, Anderson Cooper continues his deeply personal journey to understand his own feelings of grief in all its complexities, and in moving and honest discussions, learn from others who’ve experienced life-altering losses. All There Is with Anderson Cooper is about the people we lose, the people left behind, and how we can live on – with loss and with love.
Love, Loss and Parenting
All There Is with Anderson Cooper
Dec 20, 2023
Amanda Petrusich, a talented writer for The New Yorker who often covers music, lost her husband, Bret Stetka, suddenly in 2022. Their daughter, Nico, was just 13 months old. Amanda talks with Anderson about grieving an unexpected loss, while navigating life as a single parent. They also explore the constantly changing nature of grief, the role music has played for Amanda and how she talks about Bret with her daughter.
Episode Transcript
Anderson Cooper
00:00:00
A couple of weeks ago, I found three boxes in my basement that were filled with the old Christmas ornaments. They'd been packed away in 1987. That was the last year we had Christmas with my brother, Carter. He died seven months later and my mom and I never celebrated holidays again. "The dreaded holidays." That's what my mom started calling them, which always made us giggle. I mentioned in the first season of the podcast that I didn't realize she and I had the same strange laugh until just shortly before she died. And I listened to this audio that I had recorded of her. She and I would still get together on Christmas and Thanksgiving, but we'd usually just go to the movies. I'd seen the boxes of ornaments over the years, but never opened them until last week. I was amazed that most of them were intact and I recognized so many of them from my childhood. On the back of one which looked like a gingerbread cookie, my mom had written my brother's name and noted that the ornament was a gift to him from her aunt Thelma. Another ornament had a photo in it of my dad and mom and brother and me in front of a Christmas tree. I was maybe three years old when we got our tree last week. I brought the boxes up from my basement. My son Wyatt was singing.
Wyatt Cooper
00:01:13
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.
Anderson Cooper
00:01:18
This is the first Christmas Wyatt is really excited about. He's nearly four and has fully woken up to the fact that Santa brings gifts, reindeer land on roofs, and Jingle Bells is a song he can sing all day long.
Wyatt Cooper
00:01:31
'In a one-horse open sleigh, hey!
Anderson Cooper
00:01:35
He made a list of what he's hoping Santa will bring him.
Wyatt Cooper
00:01:38
Dear Santa.
Anderson Cooper
00:01:39
'He wants a toy car, two candy canes, a rainbow, a pillow and knees. For the record, he has two knees that seem to work just fine but apparently he wants some back-ups. It was late and we decided to decorate the tree the following morning when I put Wyatt to bed, he was so excited.
Wyatt Cooper
00:01:58
After sleep, we can put "the normanens."
Anderson Cooper
00:02:02
We can put the what?
Wyatt Cooper
00:02:03
"Noramens!"
Anderson Cooper
00:02:05
The ornaments?
Wyatt Cooper
00:02:05
Yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:02:06
Yeah. We'll put the ornaments up.
Wyatt Cooper
00:02:09
The presents are gonna come soon.
Anderson Cooper
00:02:12
'Yeah, they come when Santa comes. Putting up the ornaments was lovely. I mean, I did get a little teary-eyed at times, but the kids didn't notice. And seeing their joy, it was incredible. I wasn't sure I was going to say anything about this in the podcast because I know how difficult this time of year can be for so many of you who are listening. And it's still difficult for me. But I decided to talk about it because I did get a glimpse of something that I don't think I had before. The hint that that feelings can change with time. The pain of loss, grief, it doesn't go away, but maybe it really can shift and move. I think it felt frozen in it for so long. It's hard for me to actually believe that, but I'm starting to and I felt it. It's taken me more than 30 years, but I'm actually kind of looking forward to Christmas morning. I'm just not sure where I can find Wyatt some knees. This is All There Is with me, Anderson Cooper. My guest today is Amanda Petrusich. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and writes mostly about music. But she came to my house last year to interview me about the first season of the podcast, and we've become friends. She'd started listening to the podcast because her husband, Bret, whom she met in college when she was 17, died suddenly in August 2022 after having a seizure. He was 43 years old and had an undiagnosed neurological condition. Their daughter, Nico, was 13 months old at the time.
Anderson Cooper
00:03:54
Well, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.
Amanda Petrusich
00:03:56
Yeah, it's my pleasure.
Anderson Cooper
00:03:58
You wrote recently that grief is an excruciating but nonetheless fascinating experience. What's fascinating about it to you?
Amanda Petrusich
00:04:09
Yeah. Grief. Oh, it is fascinating to me. I think bewildering is also a word that comes to mind. I feel like I've learned so much about myself, about others, about the world. As awful as it is, and as much as you feel kind of scooped out and annihilated by it, you kind of undergo this transformation. And in that there's so much it's like suddenly there's another room in the house of your consciousness.
Anderson Cooper
00:04:36
You recently passed the one year anniversary of Bret's death. He died August 6th. Did you do anything different on that day?
Amanda Petrusich
00:04:45
You know, I thought a lot about it. Leading up to it, sort of, what do I do with this weird day on the calendar? In the end, I think I just wanted to get through it. I just thought, I don't want anything to do with this stupid, awful day, you know? I just want to erase it from the calendar. So I didn't do anything to mark it. I could see that maybe changing as my daughter gets older, as I get a little more distance from that particular moment. But this year? No.
Anderson Cooper
00:05:13
How how does it feel different now than you felt a year ago?
Amanda Petrusich
00:05:19
I remember feeling really annoyed when people would tell me: "It takes time. Time will heal." You know, all these sort of cliches, just kind of facile and dumb sounding phrases people say to you when you're grieving. I was resentful of all of that. But at the same time, in my lived experience of it, I think something about making it through a full calendar year, I feel proud of myself. You know, I thought, okay, I did this like I am tougher than I thought I was, am stronger than I thought I was. I survived a kind of unspeakable, unimaginable trauma. And I'm here and I'm alive and the lights are on and my kids are okay, and I still have a job and there's food in the fridge. And I think something about hitting the year mark, It did open something up for me. I have felt a little bit lighter since then. I felt a little bit steadier on my feet. And I think, you know, obviously everyone sort of moves through grief at their own pace. There's no there's no kind of way to do this. I don't know. It almost almost like in AA when someone hands you like a 12 month chip and you just think there is something significant to the months stacking up and to the fact that you remain.
Amanda Petrusich
00:06:26
You know, it's funny, when I interviewed you for The New Yorker, you said something that really moved me, which is you said that when you were a little kid, the intensity of your mother's grief sort of frightened and disoriented you because you needed stability in that moment of tumult. And I thought about that a lot after we talked that day. How do I let my daughter see me grieving? How do I encourage her to understand that grief is normal, The grief is love, but also to make sure that she knows that I'm going to be okay and she is going to be okay. I think that the work of that is exhausting. It's really hard. And that has been my project, you know, for much of the last year. There's all the sort of practical things of like, I just wish there was another human being in the house. I wish there was another adult in the house. You know, we got the first Christmas after Bret died. Nico and I both got the flu, so it was already there's just going to be this really terrible, sad holiday. And then on top of it, we had to isolate. It was just the two of us alone in this house. She was really sick. I was really sick. You know, I had a high fever. She had a high fever. She's up all night. I can't sleep because I'm taking care of her. I remember one night just sort of having this baby kind of tucked in my arms, and I was crawling up the stairs of my house because I was so exhausted and just thinking, this is physically impossible. I can't do it. But I did it, you know? I mean, that's the thing. It's this sort of this weird survival that has been so incredible to me. And I think in a funny way, we have been a comfort to each other. I mean, I'm it's so hard to see her make expressions that remind me of him or to sort of do something that I think, oh my God, he would have died laughing to see this.
Anderson Cooper
00:08:13
She looks a lot like him.
Amanda Petrusich
00:08:14
Yeah, she looks a lot like him, which is beautiful and heartbreaking. Another kind of tricky part about losing a partner, but remaining a parent is that you really have to work to kind of not turn your kid into a surrogate spouse. My understanding of motherhood is that it's my job to love her with every cell in my body, but it's not necessarily her job to love me that way, although, of course, I hope she says, Oh my God, you've probably had a moment like this. Anderson. Last night I was putting her down in her crib to go to sleep. And, you know, as I do every night, I said, I love you, Nico. And I kind of turn around and do that little sort of like backwards walk parents do in or out of the room where you don't want to make a noise. And I just heard her, she's just beginning to string phrases together and I heard her say, "Me love mom.".
Anderson Cooper
00:09:01
Oh, my God.
Amanda Petrusich
00:09:02
And I just, you know, it's like my soul left my body. I just, like, disintegrated. But it does add another dimension to the pain because you're grieving for yourself, but you're also grieving for your kid. And in my case, I'm grieving everything she lost by never really knowing her father. And, you know, there's also this element of survivor's guilt kind of tangled up in this, too, which is, you know, why am I still here? Why do I get to watch her grow up? So grieving, I think, and raising a child at the same time, especially a really young child. Yeah. My God, it's hard.
Anderson Cooper
00:09:34
Is it also a grief you feel for her? For Nico? About what you know she will not have.
Amanda Petrusich
00:09:45
Yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:09:46
Growing up.
Amanda Petrusich
00:09:47
'Yeah. In some ways, I think that grief is bigger. You know, I got Bret for 25 years. You know, she got him for 13 months in which she was not yet a fully formed human who could create memories. And yeah, I mean, the unfairness of that. It's also true, I think, as an adult, when something terrible happens to you, part of you thinks, like, well, I deserve it. You know, like, somehow in my life I was, or, I don't know, somehow I had this coming. Some sort of very ugly, nasty part of, you know, the self-loathing part of one's brain kind of kicks in. But then you look at this baby, you know, this tiny, beautiful, perfect baby, and you think, Oh, my God, she did not deserve this. And sort of, how can the cruelness of the world be inflicted on this tiny, innocent, beautiful being? That part is much harder, you know, I think all right, I can take it. But for her. Yeah. My God. I mean, that I think in some ways has been the hardest piece of all of this.
Anderson Cooper
00:10:48
Do you also think about down the road, what are you going to say about Bret?
Amanda Petrusich
00:10:54
Yeah, I think about it constantly. I think I started thinking about it the day that Bret died. I have enlisted a lot of help in the project. You know, I have talked to Bret's friends, his family, and said, like, look, I need you to help me do this. I don't want the only things that she knows about her father to come for me. I want it to be this sort of rich, multifaceted portrait of all the people who loved him and all the lives he affected and all the people who have these amazing, kind of great, funny, weird stories about him. I want her to one day absorb all of that like a little sponge. And in fact, right after he died, I asked people to write letters to Nico and mail them to my house. And I have a huge box of those that one day I think I will, you know, have a stiff drink and hand to her when she's kind of ready for them, letters from his friends written to her telling her about her dad. So in some ways, there's this sort of practical.
Anderson Cooper
00:11:54
How many letters do you have?
Amanda Petrusich
00:11:55
Gosh, probably about 100. I mean, it was an amazing response. You know, people he worked with friends of ours, you know, friends of his just.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:04
It's such a lovely thing to do.
Amanda Petrusich
00:12:06
Yeah. God, I am sort of shocked I had the presence of mind to ask in that moment, because I think people also, you know, they were grieving, too, and it was sort of healing and helpful, I think, to to write it all out. And, you know, it's a weird thing to be paranoid about, but I worry about, you know, all of my photos and videos and things like that. They all sort of exist on some weird cloud that I don't totally understand. And I, you know, I think, Oh my God, what if they just, poof, disappeared one day? I will always have this box of letters. You know, I really appreciate how kind of tactile and and sort of real they are and the handwriting and the envelopes and all of it.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:40
Did you open them yourself? Did you read them yourself?
Amanda Petrusich
00:12:42
No. One day, I mean, again, I just I don't feel quite ready to look all of that squarely in the eye, but I'm so glad it's there. It's like a little weird security blanket for me. I actually keep the box under my bed, and it's just nice. It makes me happy to know that they're there. So I think that will be a part of teaching Nico about her dad. But. But yeah, you can't avoid it. It's like central in every, you know, children's book and cartoons. My kid has very recently gotten into Baby Shark, which is this absolutely, you know, psychotic...
Anderson Cooper
00:13:14
I've heard. Yeah, I've successfully avoided it thus far.
Amanda Petrusich
00:13:16
'Oh, my God. Go. Please. Just never, just avoid it as long as you can. It's insane. But there's a verse in Baby Shark that's, you know, daddy shark. And it's funny when she sings it. So she calls my dad, her grandfather, Pop-Pop. And when we get to the daddy shark verse, she sings Pop-Pop shark. So she sings the Pop-Pop verse twice, which is funny. And I think, Oh my God, already in her little head, she's somehow figuring out like, I don't know that, you know, I don't have a - I don't have a dad or my dad is not alive. Of course she has a dad, but I have a grandfather who loves me and I don't - it was heartbreaking to sort of see her make that little substitution on the fly, but I try to talk to her about him a lot, which I think I think it's better that it just kind of be in the air rather than one day having to sit her down and make this sort of gruesome.
Anderson Cooper
00:14:04
Shocking revelation.
Amanda Petrusich
00:14:04
'Yeah this big reveal of - I'd rather her just kind of sort of know all the time. And maybe it comes a little bit more in focus year after year as she gets older and can kind of understand a little bit more. Yeah, it's like on one hand, I look forward to telling her about her dad and then on the other hand I think, Oh my God, it's just it's going to be so hard. Her grief will be so abstract, I think, because she was so young when he died. It can't possibly be specific. You know, she will be mourning the loss of an idea, you know, the idea of a father, the idea of her father. And that's funny. You know, that's a funny thing to think about. Is obviously the way I feel is it's so precise. You know, I miss this person and I miss his arms and I miss his brain. And I you know, I miss the way he laughed. And for her, I my my sense is it will just be more diffused. It will be this sort of strange, vague longing.
Anderson Cooper
00:15:00
It's that, do you know that Welsh word, "hiraeth?"
Amanda Petrusich
00:15:03
No.
Anderson Cooper
00:15:05
My mom told me about it and I. I should have the definition. I don't have the exact definition in front of me, but it's a longing for. For something past that may not have even existed. But it's a longing for something that that may have existed in your life. But you you don't actually remember it. For my mom, it was sort of this this family that never was. And her father died when she was 15 months old and she didn't have a stable family. So it was sort of this longing for the idea of a family, something she had never actually experienced. But kind of. But it's a lovely word, hiraeth.
Amanda Petrusich
00:15:39
It's so beautiful and so real.
Anderson Cooper
00:15:44
We'll be right back after a short break.
Anderson Cooper
00:15:52
'Welcome back to All There Is. I'm talking to Amanda Petrusich, whose husband Bret died in August, 2022. I want to circle back to something you said about - that suddenly, there's another room in the house. Did grief open you up to something new?
Amanda Petrusich
00:16:10
Absolutely. And again, I don't want to romanticize the experience because as you're living through it, it does not feel romantic. And in fact, you don't feel like, oh, I'm opening up to the world. You feel the opposite. You feel like your world is suddenly, you know, shrunk to this sort of horrible little dark piece of coal or whatever.
Anderson Cooper
00:16:30
Well, I believe actually, let me just for our listeners, you described it in one scene that you wrote. You said that you sometimes feel like a zombie that's been stabbed in the heart with a sharp stick. But rather than collapsing or dying, I just keep on lurching about, moaning, haphazardly stumbling toward the horizon.
Amanda Petrusich
00:16:45
Yeah. That is sort of the feeling, right? It's like you kind of can't believe you're still functioning. That that the pain is so sort of all encompassing. But that being said, with a little bit of time and space and sort of air, I think I have really come to understand the idea that grief makes you more human. Parenthood does the exact same thing. And I think for me, experiencing both in such rapid succession was in some ways a kind of exploding of who I was before I became this different person. You just become a little more awake, I think, to not only how sort of fragile and scary everything is, although that is a piece of it, too. But I think also how sort of vast and and mystifying and possible everything is.
Anderson Cooper
00:17:33
Hmm.
Amanda Petrusich
00:17:33
And for me, it also really kind of kicked up my empathy, you know, for everyone around me. I sort of suddenly understood everyone as incredibly vulnerable. And we're all living and dying. It's inevitable. I think it made me feel a certain kind of warmth or sort of sense of fellowship that was not totally accessible to me before.
Anderson Cooper
00:17:56
I mean, it's similar along the lines of what Stephen Colbert had talked about in the first season of the podcast of, If you want to be the most human you can be. This is this is one of those experiences that is part of that. I just want to play a quick clip from that interview with Stephen Colbert.
Stephen Colbert
00:18:18
'I was struck with this realization that I had a gratitude for the pain of that grief. It doesn't take the pain away. It doesn't make the grief less profound. In some ways. It makes it more profound because it allows you to look at it. It allows you to examine your grief in a way that it is not like holding a red-hot ember in your hands, but rather seeing that pain as something they can warm you and light your knowledge of what other people might be going through.
Amanda Petrusich
00:19:03
It's tough. It's really tough. And I feel like you're catching me on a good day. Like, a good moment. I'm feeling okay right now. I mean, that's the other thing that you don't really understand about grief until you're moving through it, which is it's you know, it's not one thing. It's not a fixed experience. I mean, people talk a lot about waves of grief. I think that's a very real thing. You know, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine. Suddenly you're not fine, you know, And that can be a little unpredictable. You can kind of talk about grief with a sort of peace and gratitude. And then you'll see something that reminds you of the person you lost. And suddenly it's just, you know, all it is is kind of rage and and alienation and loneliness and deep, deep sorrow.
Anderson Cooper
00:19:41
When one person called in and talked about not so much waves, but more like she was on a boogie board riding the waves. And there was, like, moments of bliss where she's on the top of the wave and all of a sudden the wave just slams you down onto the sandy bottom.
Caller, Joan Hackbarth
00:19:57
And then you get up and you're like, Oh my gosh, where did that come from? I was just fine a moment ago. And other times you will ride that wave into the shore on the foam. And it is a magnificent moment.
Amanda Petrusich
00:20:13
Yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:20:14
There are those days.
Amanda Petrusich
00:20:14
Yeah, absolutely.
Anderson Cooper
00:20:17
You mentioned the letters that other people had written that you're storing away for Nico. You are a writer, obviously. Have you written memories that you want her to? I mean, do you worry about forgetting? Because I know that I have forgotten so much and it makes me. Yeah. I wish I had written down a lot more early on.
Amanda Petrusich
00:20:44
Yeah, with Bret, I know there are things that I'm losing, you know, memories, sounds, feelings, experiences, expressions, all of it. I know they are being lost every day that passes that he's not here. It's been really hard for me to kind of do the work of preserving them. It feels like a a loving gesture toward my future self. To do it to do it anyway, even though it's painful. But man, it's hard. I mean, this is going to sound sort of dark and and strange, but it's it's hard for me to think about him, you know, it's hard for me to stay there, to sort of picture him in my mind and hear his voice and think about him. It's hard. I feel like some switch flipped and I had to build a wall, you know? I mean, this is something probably I should be unpacking with my therapist for the next decade, but.
Anderson Cooper
00:21:41
I understand that.
Amanda Petrusich
00:21:42
I had to close it off and and maybe part of that was the sort of urgency or the immediacy of parenting, you know, of thinking, all right, I gotta be here. I have to be here. I have to make breakfast, like I have to change a diaper. I can't fall apart. I had to really kind of put it away. And I'm certainly not advocating, you know, denial as a great coping strategy.
Anderson Cooper
00:22:06
I've tried, you know, I've been doing that for about 40 years.
Amanda Petrusich
00:22:10
Yeah, right. I don't know. It's funny, you know, and I'm I'm a music critic. And so right after Bret died, I found music really impossible. I couldn't listen to anything, you know, It brought me back to him and our life together.
Anderson Cooper
00:22:25
And also, music was one of the early bonds between you when when you were in college.
Amanda Petrusich
00:22:30
'Yeah. I mean, that was really how we met and how eventually we fell in love was this sort of shared love for music. And it was a constant in our relationship the entire time we were together. It was just it was such a kind of inextricable, massive part of our lives. Music kind of hits me in my guts, you know, It's in my bones. I feel it in my teeth. And I think so for me, in those days and weeks and months after Bret died, it brought the grief into those places. And I wasn't ready. You know, I was too deep in denial. So I couldn't - I just I couldn't listen to anything. I just found it horrifying for a really long time. It was too hard.
Anderson Cooper
00:23:13
When Amanda was ready to play music again, there were only certain songs she found she could stand to listen to.
Anderson Cooper
00:23:20
You listened to Paul Simon. In particular, Paul Simon's Graceland.
Amanda Petrusich
00:23:24
Yeah. You know, when Bret died, Nico hadn't started talking yet. Back then, I found that music was a really effective way of communicating with her. And she loves Graceland, the title song from the record.
Anderson Cooper
00:23:35
Let me play a little bit of it.
Paul Simon
00:23:37
She said losing love is like a window in your heart. Everybody sees your blown apart. Everybody sees the wind blow. I'm goin' to Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee...
Anderson Cooper
00:23:56
It's really lovely.
Amanda Petrusich
00:23:58
Well, that lyric, "Losing love is like a window in your heart. Everybody sees you're blown apart. Everybody sees the wind blow." That, to me, I think in the immediate aftermath of Bret's death, was the first time I heard someone define what what my grief felt like. It's a song about a breakup. But of course, when you lose your partner, there's some overlap there. On top of everything else you're feeling, there's that very particular, very excruciating heartbreak of a relationship ending. I don't know. Something about that song in that record. I just thought, okay, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can sort of inch back toward letting music into my life again.
Anderson Cooper
00:24:39
Do you feel like that? You feel like everybody knows you've been blown apart?
Amanda Petrusich
00:24:46
Yes.
Anderson Cooper
00:24:48
Do you feel when you walk down the street, people know?
Amanda Petrusich
00:24:50
'Yeah. I think everybody must know. Everybody must know this thing happened to me. And I recognize that sort of neurotic, like, spotlight syndrome thing. And in fact, everyone else on Earth is not thinking about me or my friends. You know, they're thinking about their own stuff. But I think I did feel an enormous sort of self-consciousness about it at first.
Anderson Cooper
00:25:08
It's interesting because I had the have had my whole life, the opposite. Which is, I longed for somebody to just see it in me so that I wouldn't have to say anything. But other people would know that I was scarred.
Amanda Petrusich
00:25:24
'Yeah. Yeah. I thought a lot about that almost creepy old tradition of widows wearing black. You know, for the year. And there were times when I thought, like, Yeah, of course, like, I, you know, I was in - I joined a support group for people who have been through sudden loss. And I remember somebody in that group joking they wished somebody made t shirts that just said, "**** Off I'm Grieving," you know, that there was some way to sort of project to the outside world that you were you were not whole.
Anderson Cooper
00:25:54
Was that helpful, the group?
Amanda Petrusich
00:25:56
It was helpful. I think a big part of grief is that feeling of kind of alienation and lonesomeness. And you think, oh, everyone I know is is going on with their beautiful kind of untouched lives and somehow I am not. And I did really help me. I found a lot of solidarity in just how, you know, when you're grieving you kind of run into people a lot and they'll be like, Oh, how are you? And you know, you think you have to say like, I'm fine, I guess. I don't know. You know, you don't really know how to answer that question. I think for a long time. And one of the things I loved about this group was that nobody opened conversations by being like, Hey, how are you? I was like, we all just sort of knew like, not not great, you know, not great right now. It was just kind of implied. And it was such a relief, I think, to not have to pretend to be fine.
Anderson Cooper
00:26:44
'You did an interview with Nick Cave. His 15-year-old son, Arthur, died in 2015. It was an accident, fell off a cliff. His other son or his oldest son, Jethro, died in 2022. He was 31-years-old. His music was also one of the few kind of artists you could actually listen to, that you could tolerate listening to shortly after Bret died.
Amanda Petrusich
00:27:06
Yeah. There is this thing that happens for grieving people where I think you sort of seek out other people in grief. Nick Cave's music is sort of infused with this kind of ghostly, kind of otherworldly sense of of loss, yes, but also of possibility. And he was someone, too, who, like you, was really open about his grieving in a kind of public way. And I found that so moving and so generous. His record, Ghosteen is one of the strangest albums I've ever heard, but grief is strange.
Anderson Cooper
00:27:41
Let's listen to Bright Horse.
Nick Cave
00:27:42
My baby's coming back now. On the next train, I can hear the whistle blowing. I can hear the mighty roar. I can hear the horses prancing. In the pastures of the Lord. Oh, the train is coming...
Anderson Cooper
00:28:06
Is. I hadn't heard this song before. I listened to the whole thing. And I mean, it's beautiful. I love his voice.
Amanda Petrusich
00:28:11
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it's funny. You run into people at the funeral or people come over to your house and they say, I can't imagine what you're going through. You know, and there's all this sort of compassion in their voice. But it would make me so mad every time someone would say that, I would think, Oh, okay, well, let me help you. Like, I would just be like, okay, Todd, Like, imagine if your wife, you know, dropped dead. Like, I just would drive me nuts. And I think I was seeking out in those moments, again, this point of communion, I just wanted to, sort of, be around music and art and people who sort of understood who weren't going to say to me, I can't imagine what you're going through. People who in fact could imagine it and had been through it and through that, I would find a sense of community and a sense of belonging that would help combat some of the lonesomeness of grieving.
Anderson Cooper
00:29:05
I read a piece you did in the wake of Sinead O'Connor's death that was really lovely. And but you said, I want to read something you said in the piece. You said, It feels dangerous to say that it is possible to die of a broken heart. But anyone who has gone through it knows how grief can feel insurmountable. Sometimes it is a violent rupture. You prepare the tourniquets, you apply pressure, you pray that you will stop bleeding before it's too late. That's how it felt to you?
Amanda Petrusich
00:29:31
Yes, it did. It felt like getting shot, you know, or what I would imagine getting shot feels like. It feels like someone has just swung a baseball bat and hit you square in the back of the head.
Anderson Cooper
00:29:44
'But in writing about Sinead O'Connor, you wrote about a couple of different songs she sang and one was a duet she did with Kris Kristofferson. And I looked it up - I Googled it. It's beautiful. And I just want to play some of it, it's called Help Me Make It Through.
Sinead O'Connor
00:30:00
Come and lay down by my side. 'Til the early morning light. All I'm taking is your time. Help me make it through the night.
Amanda Petrusich
00:30:25
She was just a force. You know, one of those people who just felt fearless. And I admired that so much about her life and her work. And then to see it at the end, she had lost a son. And to see the way in which she was undone by that, I think it was tragic and heartbreaking. Also, it's a tiny bit validating for me, almost. You know, this woman that I thought like nothing frightens her. She is bold and she is brave and she's courageous to sort of see how grief in the end really destroyed her. It just found so moving. I found it so powerful and heartbreaking, certainly. And I think, yeah, I just wanted to pay tribute to that in some small way.
Sinead O'Connor
00:31:17
Is there something you have learned in your grief that that would help others?
Amanda Petrusich
00:31:23
I think about that a lot. Like, you know, a version of myself that existed a year ago right after Bret died. Like, what could I tell her to make this easier? I was frustrated by the literature of grief. I think I was frustrated by the culture of grief for sort of lack of a better phrase to describe the way we we as Americans kind of manage grieving. None of it felt resonant to me. All of it felt alienating. And we don't necessarily have a lot of practice, you know, in enduring tough feelings. I think the impulse, at least for me, you know, as a kid growing up in America, was just sort of how do I fix it? How do I manage it? How do I kind of get it away? And none of that works with grief. You can't fix it. You can't manage it. You can't push it away. In the end, I don't know. I mean, it's funny to talk about this as if I am somehow on the other side of it, which, of course, is very much I'm not. I'm still living and breathing this every day. I think for me in the early days was just I could not imagine a moment in which it was not the only thing I thought about. And then over time, other thoughts kind of crept in. You know, I still think about Bret every day. I still think about loss every day. I still think about grief. But I do think about other things, too, now. And I guess just trusting that that will will happen.
Anderson Cooper
00:32:51
Hmm.
Amanda Petrusich
00:32:52
You know, I wouldn't have taken that advice a year ago. I would have been like, who is this lady? What is she talking about? She doesn't understand. And that, too, is fair, you know? But I think it is, you just really have to trust that your heart will find a way. You know, we are tougher than we think we are.
Anderson Cooper
00:33:14
Amanda, thank you so much.
Amanda Petrusich
00:33:16
Anderson, thank you so much. This was such a pleasure.
Anderson Cooper
00:33:21
'Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She's also the author of three books, the most recent one entitled Do Not Sell at Any Price. She's on Instagram at @amandapetrusich. And that's all there is for this episode. Next week, we'll be re-releasing my interview with Stephen Colbert. That was part of the first season of the podcast. I'll resume new episodes of season 2, January 10th. Thanks for listening. All there is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producers are Haley Thomas and Felicia Patinkin. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. Support from Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Shimrit Sheetrit, Ronnie Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman.
