Anderson Cooper Breaks Down During Emotional Conversation on Grief

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper repeatedly choked up on Thursday as he shared his experiences with grief during a panel discussion about his podcast All There Is.

Speaking with colleague Audie Cornish at the On Air podcast festival, Cooper walked through how he decided to bring his own battles with grief over his mother, father, and brother’s deaths to the public sphere. His father, writer Wyatt Emory Cooper, died in 1988 at 50; his brother Carter Cooper died in 1988 by suicide at 23; and his mother, socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, died in 2019 at 95.

The CNN podcast started in 2022 and launched its third season in October.

Cooper, 57, said he began reading Viktor Frankl’s memoir Man’s Search for Meaning, which left him wondering why people were so reticent to speak about such a common experience like grief.

“I just thought, ‘Why isn’t anyone else talking—why aren’t people talking about this?' he said. “We all go through the things of our loved ones at one point, we will all experience the loss and grief. Why isn’t everybody talking about this all the time?”

The conversation got deeply emotional throughout the 45-minute session as Cooper discussed how he filtered through the documents of his brother and those of his parents. He said his children have begun asking about his processing—and how it does not stop. “It wasn’t just a one-shot deal,” he said about his conversation with his eldest son, named after his father. “We had an ongoing conversation about it.” Cooper shares two sons, Wyatt and Sebastian, with his former partner Benjamin Maisani.

Cooper said he goes through thousands of voicemails listeners leave for him about their own experiences with grief. He also shared examples of how people have thanked him for sharing his experiences, including a therapist who once left a note in his pocket as he slept on a flight. He also thanked CNN for allowing him to share episodes of the podcast on his show Anderson Cooper 360.

“I get stopped on the street now, and it’s not like, ‘Hey, can I take a selfie?’” he said. “People tell me things, and it’s beautiful.”

During one particularly moving moment of the exchange, Cooper said he had spent Wednesday night pilfering through some of his dad’s old photographs and found one of his family home on Manhattan’s 67th Street. His dad has planted wisteria on the side of the home, he said. When he turned the photo over, he saw his dad had inscribed on the back of it: “I planted the wisteria early in the morning, and it survived the frost. Wyatt Cooper.”

“And I realized,” he said, his voice quivering, “I realized last night that he knew he was going to die at 50 because his dad died at 50 and he was making notes.”

Cooper said he found the grim cycle interesting, questioning why he spent so much time filtering through the thousands of documents and photos his family left behind when many of the “bold-faced” names his family spent time with were long forgotten.

“These cycles repeat,” he said. “All the important people of today will be forgotten in 20 years, and including myself—not that I’m an important person—but I find it interesting that we all follow these cycles that repeat."

“You’re not getting to the next sentence, which is you’re doing it for them,” Cornish said, referring to Cooper’s children.

“I’m organizing all these things so that one day, whether it’s, you know, as teenagers and I’m alive and they want to know about the past or I’m dead and it’s 30 years from now, they will be able to look and know like, ‘Oh, this is where I came from. This is part of my past,’” he said.