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Episode: Andrew Garfield’s Grief

Author: CNN
Duration: 00:44:32

Episode Shownotes

Andrew Garfield's mother Lynne died from pancreatic cancer in 2019. In this deeply moving and emotional episode Andrew talks with Anderson about how grief is now the only way for him to feel close to his mom again. “The wound is the only route to the gift,” Andrew says. “The

grief and the loss are the only route to the vitality of being alive.” Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline Watch this conversation on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ruMKk26pW8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this emotional episode of 'All There Is with Anderson Cooper,' actor Andrew Garfield shares his journey of grief after the death of his mother, Lynne, in 2019 due to pancreatic cancer. Garfield reflects on the surreal experience of losing someone so integral to his life and emphasizes that grief can foster a deeper connection with the departed. He discusses his struggle with the notion of a higher power during times of pain, and how nature provided him solace. Through this experience, Garfield highlights the universal nature of grief, the importance of embracing vulnerability, and the need for open dialogue about loss and love within society.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Andrew Garfield’s Grief) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_09
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.

00:00:10 Speaker_02
Your father once said to me, I don't think we will live to be very old. I didn't know what he was talking about. When he died at 50, then I understood.

00:00:22 Speaker_09
My mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, made this audio recording of a letter she sent me several years before she died in 2019.

00:00:29 Speaker_02
He 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.

00:00:45 Speaker_02
We made plans to spend Christmas Day with him and brought a tape recorder to create a memory of our conversation. But on Christmas Eve, he had another heart attack and was moved into a unit with dying patients.

00:00:59 Speaker_02
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.

00:01:19 Speaker_02
He looked startled, as if I knew something he didn't. I'm not, he asked. No, you're not. And I believed it. The next night, January 5th, I followed as they wheeled him down the hall on a gurney to surgery.

00:01:37 Speaker_02
He appeared as a man taken from a crucifixion, his body limp, stuck with needles, face unrecognizable, covered with breathing equipment. I walked by his side, leaning in close, telling him I loved him. He didn't know me.

00:01:54 Speaker_02
I waited in a small private room. Angel, the nurse on the floor, put her head in the doorway as she departed her shift. Be brave, she said. Hours later, we heard footsteps coming down the dark, empty, silent hall. It was nearly midnight.

00:02:13 Speaker_02
We did the best we could. I went home to wake you and Carter. Daddy's dead, I said.

00:02:23 Speaker_09
Last season of the podcast, I came to realize just how much my dad's death when I was 10 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.

00:02:38 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:53 Speaker_09
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 10 years later.

00:03:09 Speaker_09
He did it in front of my mom. I buried my grief over his death, too.

00:03:14 Speaker_02
Carter 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.

00:03:29 Speaker_02
When your father and I went together to parent-teacher meetings at your school, I would look around at the other mothers and marvel at how much better equipped they were to be mothers than I could ever be, how much more suited to be wives to my beloved husband.

00:03:45 Speaker_02
These were thoughts I never voiced, but they were there, hidden, so painful I tried to block them, believe that everything was going to turn out all right. But it didn't. It was your father who died when it should have been me.

00:04:00 Speaker_02
In my deepest heart, I know this to be true, and I will know it till the day I die. A lifelong sentence with no reprieve.

00:04:14 Speaker_09
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.

00:04:27 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:40 Speaker_09
I've spent months listening to the more than 3,000 voicemails we received at the end of last season.

00:04:46 Speaker_07
When I was 16, my mom had a stroke. I went and gave her a CPR, but she died.

00:04:53 Speaker_09
I'm struck by how many of you have tried to bury your grief as well.

00:04:56 Speaker_07
I stifled and stuffed all that grief where we couldn't share our grief.

00:05:02 Speaker_08
We had to hide it. We had to stuff it. It's a very debilitating life. I have tried to avoid grief my whole life. Grief waits.

00:05:10 Speaker_08
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've spent so many years being angry I haven't been able to grieve.

00:05:25 Speaker_08
I just continue always to keep moving forward and being strong and saying I'll be fine.

00:05:34 Speaker_09
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.

00:05:50 Speaker_09
We'll be right back with my guest, actor Andrew Garfield, whose mom Lynn died in 2019.

00:06:02 Speaker_00
All there is with Anderson Cooper is supported by BetterHelp. Unfortunately, we don't get an owner's manual for ourselves. There are no simple instructions for what to do when we feel down or when we have relationship problems or family conflicts.

00:06:16 Speaker_00
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00:06:31 Speaker_00
Visit betterhelp.com slash allthereis today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash allthereis.

00:06:41 Speaker_03
I'm CNN's John King. Join me for the podcast, All Over the Map, where I'm traveling across the country to find out what American voters think. The energy is different. It's a lot different from when we were here last time.

00:06:53 Speaker_03
Eric Jones is an entrepreneur in Milwaukee. We're in the final days here now. It's a cliche, but every vote does count, especially in the battleground states.

00:07:02 Speaker_03
And the math is really complicated, the most complicated in the 10 times I've covered presidential elections. Listen to All Over the Map wherever you get your podcasts.

00:07:13 Speaker_09
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.

00:07:27 Speaker_09
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.

00:07:41 Speaker_09
Had you had much experience with grief before your mom died?

00:07:47 Speaker_06
I had a certain amount of experience. Nothing like this absurd, surreal event of the person that gave me life is no longer here. It is surreal. It's bizarre. It doesn't make any sense. It's crazy.

00:08:03 Speaker_06
Yeah, but before that I had lost friends, yes, grandparents, yes, mentors, some Mike Nichols, Heath Ledger, I think about Philip Seymour Hoffman. Tell me about your mom. Her name was Lynn. Lynn, yeah, Linda Diane Garfield. She

00:08:22 Speaker_06
was a whole person that is still a mystery to me in certain ways even though I am a part of her and she is a part of me. She was a person that felt most herself when she was able to heal, care, nourish and contain others in a gentle way.

00:08:43 Speaker_06
On her hospice bed she was more concerned with the nurses than she was with her own pain and discomfort.

00:08:51 Speaker_09
It was she who encouraged you to look into acting?

00:08:54 Speaker_06
Yeah, so I was in a bit of a lost place and she had the trust in me, or the trust in my as yet undiscovered soul. that it would emerge if given the right space and the right encouragement.

00:09:07 Speaker_06
She was a very creative person herself, but it was always applied to things that were practical. She was an amazing cook. She was a draftsperson for an architecture firm. She was a lampshade maker for my dad's lampshade company.

00:09:19 Speaker_06
But I imagine if she was given free reign of her own creativity, she could have made masterpieces. She was desperate for me to find something that I could connect to. Maybe there was a part of her that was speaking.

00:09:32 Speaker_06
that had been unlived, that she was saying, maybe give this to Andrew, maybe Andrew could take some of what we didn't get to experience. And I tried art, I tried painting, sculpture, you name it, music.

00:09:45 Speaker_06
And then I did the last resort, which was join the circus and do an outside of school drama class when I was 15. No, not literally, but ultimately it's kind of what's happened. Stranger than the actual circus perhaps. Yeah, more grotesque.

00:10:04 Speaker_06
And basically I did my first drama class and I loved it and I felt accepted. I felt like I belonged and it was really the beginning of the rest of all of this.

00:10:15 Speaker_06
I'm reminded of a moment the night before the Oscars when I was nominated for a film called Hacksaw Ridge and I took my parents to this night before party at the Fox lot. And my mom had a glass and a half of wine, which is a rare occurrence for her.

00:10:31 Speaker_06
And she got loose and she got bold and we were all dancing and we were with Jack Black, the wonderful Jack Black. And he's dancing with my mother and he says, you must be so proud. You must be so proud of him. What is it? Is it nature or is it nurture?

00:10:48 Speaker_06
And my mom- I love that he's saying this on the dance floor. It's shouted in the top of his lungs. Exactly. And my mom goes right out to him and grabs him by the lapels and she says, it was me. It was all me.

00:11:01 Speaker_06
And in those very rare flashes of like expressed This is who I am. She would never do that without some alcohol in her system, which was very, very rare. And yeah, I think I do owe her, her unmet dreams, her, the sacrifices she's made, her longing.

00:11:25 Speaker_06
I think it probably emanated from her own deep, deep longing to encourage me in that way.

00:11:30 Speaker_09
She died in 2019 of pancreatic cancer.

00:11:33 Speaker_06
Just before COVID, yeah.

00:11:35 Speaker_09
How long had she been ill for?

00:11:39 Speaker_06
about a year and a half. So she hung in, man. Like, I was about to say she fought it for as long. It's like, I don't like that language. I don't like the idea of defeating cancer.

00:11:49 Speaker_06
It doesn't feel fair to me that that language is used because my mom fought until she couldn't fight anymore. and it doesn't make her not a success story. I reject the idea that she was defeated in any kind of way by any kind of thing.

00:12:05 Speaker_06
She fought it for a long time. We treated it in lots of different ways. She suffered. That's the thing that I still am struggling with when I really think about it.

00:12:16 Speaker_06
that I can't reconcile with the concept of a higher power or the concept of God or some universal cosmic design, the suffering. The pain she felt. Yeah, like the physical agony. There was no way of avoiding it.

00:12:35 Speaker_06
We did everything we could to avoid it, to circumnavigate it, to heal it, to treat it. She went through two or three rounds of chemo and radiotherapy and experimental drugs.

00:12:47 Speaker_06
Her nausea was so unbelievably brutal every day that, you know, she had to go through lots of different cycles of deciding whether she was going to continue to try to stay alive.

00:13:03 Speaker_09
You were able to be with her at the end.

00:13:05 Speaker_06
Yeah. Yeah.

00:13:07 Speaker_09
I was able to do that with my mom, and it is among the most extraordinary experiences, certainly of my life.

00:13:15 Speaker_06
Yeah, same. And I'm so happy that you had the privilege of that.

00:13:21 Speaker_06
And I think the fact that she died at the end of 2019 was a small blessing, or a big blessing, because if it had been a few months later, my family may not have been able to have our skin touching hers.

00:13:36 Speaker_06
read her poetry that she loved or rub her feet or be the ones to be putting the ice around her mouth and to hear her cry out when she was in pain like the idea of not being there for that

00:13:55 Speaker_06
fills me with a kind of a borrowed grief from those people that have lost their closest people and had not been able to be with them. I can't imagine anything more horrific.

00:14:13 Speaker_06
I had the best possible version of a goodbye with my mother without the ending that I had. I'm not sure where I'd be. I'm not sure if I'd be able to eloquently talk about it, to be honest.

00:14:28 Speaker_09
I heard something you say, there was a moment before your mom's death where you were walking along a beach.

00:14:32 Speaker_06
Yeah. Do you remember this moment? I do. What happened? Yeah, so I've had some profound moments with nature, and this one was one of the most, I think. It was before she passed. She was really sick, and it was unsure what the future would be.

00:14:46 Speaker_06
I could feel in my body this stuckness in my solar plexus area.

00:14:56 Speaker_06
And you know when it's like, oh there's something there and I can't cry, I can't like, there's no release here right now, I'm just anxious and I'm stuck somewhere and I can't relax and I'm fidgety and I'm maybe having like a low-level panic attack.

00:15:11 Speaker_06
So I go for a walk on the beach. And it's not a very pleasant day, it's kind of cold, early autumn, and the waves are pretty wild and grey and choppy. And without thinking I stripped down and I find myself submerged in the ocean.

00:15:27 Speaker_06
And it just kind of happened like a flash. It was like a download of information. I get a bunch of information or a bunch of knowledge, and then I'm able to put it into some kind of words. It's a bizarre thing that happens.

00:15:41 Speaker_09
The quote that I read from you, and which is why I bring this up, and it was this particular part, which I found just so fascinating.

00:15:48 Speaker_09
You said, as soon as my full body and head were submerged, it was like I got the medicine and my chest released and I let it all go. My interpretation of that moment was that it was the wisdom of nature, the wisdom of the earth,

00:15:59 Speaker_09
The wisdom of the ocean letting me know, hey, yeah, it's hard, it's horrible. I'm not taking away this unique pain you're feeling, but just so you know, us out here, us water molecules, we've been seeing this for millennia.

00:16:11 Speaker_09
And actually, this is the best case scenario for you to lose her rather than for her to lose you. This is a much better situation. And again, my ego was holding on. My ego thought I knew better. My ego said, no, this doesn't make sense. No, no, no.

00:16:22 Speaker_09
It should be this way. It should be that way. But actually, it took the ocean, the greater opponent, to just hold me under and say, it's really horrible. And suns have been... Hmm.

00:16:32 Speaker_03
Hmm.

00:16:39 Speaker_09
And sons have been losing their mothers for thousands and thousands of years and they will continue to. And you've just been initiated into that awareness and into that reality. Some illusion has been lifted.

00:16:50 Speaker_09
You're in a realer version of the world now and it's painful.

00:16:55 Speaker_06
Thank you for connecting with it with your heart. I know that it's true because those aren't my words. You know what I mean? Like that's not, I take no credit.

00:17:14 Speaker_09
You said those, but those aren't your words.

00:17:16 Speaker_06
No, no. I had, I guess my ears were open enough to hear or my body was open enough. Maybe it was, maybe the pain in my chest was like, a depth of longing to understand and to want comfort. It was like I was asking for comfort, like I had to.

00:17:37 Speaker_06
We have to ask to be helped in these moments, otherwise we don't get any medicine, we don't get the help. We have to be in enough pain and enough longing to say, help me.

00:17:50 Speaker_06
And only with that, with collaborating in that way, with approaching the mystery in that way, with all that vulnerability and with all that confusion and with all that lostness, do we get any kind of answer, I think.

00:18:05 Speaker_06
And I think the answer is relative to the question and the willingness to ask the question and the willingness to not know the answer.

00:18:14 Speaker_06
So I think the only thing I can take credit for in terms of receiving that information was I allowed myself to feel broken. I just allowed myself to be in pain and I didn't run away from it. I ran towards it and I said, help me.

00:18:30 Speaker_06
And the ocean had a great answer, a really tremendous answer. And I say opponent there about the ocean, but for me, it's more like it's a mentor. It's like a grandfather or a grandmother.

00:18:44 Speaker_09
That idea, sons have been losing their mothers for thousands and thousands of years, and they will continue to. And you've just been initiated into that awareness and into that reality. I find that so extraordinary.

00:18:54 Speaker_09
And that idea is something which I had never put it into words like that. But there's something comforting about I mean grief feels so lonely and yet this is a road that has been well traveled.

00:19:11 Speaker_09
We live in apartments that belong to other people before us and we don't know anything about their lives and we're living in their rooms and we think that what is happening to us is so unique and so tragic and so horrible and yet it has happened to our fathers and to their fathers and to their fathers before them.

00:19:29 Speaker_06
That's beautiful. And I, as you're speaking, I get some images came up for me of indigenous people who were just playing catch up here. You know what I mean? Like we

00:19:48 Speaker_06
modern descendants of colonizing Western Descartian kind of values cut off from the concept of death and integrated connection to death.

00:20:05 Speaker_06
what you just described so poetically is something that all indigenous cultures know and practice and keep close to themselves.

00:20:16 Speaker_06
And the tragedy of the culture that we've been born into, one of the main tragedies is this dislocation from that reality and the humility that it brings. The humility that an awareness of death and an awareness of our fragility brings.

00:20:36 Speaker_09
We'll be back with more of my conversation with Andrew Garfield. You said that you allowed yourself to be broken and that you asked for help.

00:20:50 Speaker_09
I've just really, in the last year, been struggling a lot and I came to the realization that I have never actually grieved, that I buried all of that as a little boy and propelled myself forward.

00:21:04 Speaker_09
It is only within the last year that I woke up to that, going through the boxes, things that belonged to my mom, my dad, and my brother, which had never been gone through.

00:21:13 Speaker_09
A year ago, I opened up the first box, and it turned out to be a box of my dad's papers. He was a writer, and the first file I opened up was an essay he wrote called The Importance of Grieving.

00:21:23 Speaker_09
And in it, he wrote about what happens to children who don't allow themselves to grieve when they're kids.

00:21:28 Speaker_06
Oh my god.

00:21:30 Speaker_09
Yeah, holy shit.

00:21:31 Speaker_09
I mean, I'm not a big believer in things like that, but it's made me come I know And I realized that's exactly what I've done and so for me the last year I've been trying to understand how to turn toward that grief that's been buried that's a really that I mean that strikes me in such a profound way and in terms of I

00:21:55 Speaker_06
I guess like, sorry, I'm just caught, I'm so caught on finding this essay on top of this box and like, what made you go for that box?

00:22:03 Speaker_09
I know, literally the first file I opened up and it's, I've read most of my dad's writings, I'd never seen this essay before.

00:22:09 Speaker_06
It's remarkable. It feels, I don't know, it helps support the theory of divine plan and our interconnectedness.

00:22:22 Speaker_09
There's a poem by Rilke, and it sort of relates to stuff that I'm thinking about a lot, he wrote, it's possible I am pushing through solid rock in flint-like layers as the ore lies alone. I'm such a long way in and I see no way through and no space.

00:22:37 Speaker_09
Everything is close to my face and everything close to my face is stone. I don't have much knowledge yet in grief, so this massive darkness makes me small. You be the master. Make yourself fierce. Break in.

00:22:49 Speaker_09
Then your great transforming will happen to me, and my great grief cry will happen to you."

00:22:55 Speaker_06
Mmm, I love that poem and I love Rilke and I haven't heard that poem in a while What why is that speaking to you particularly right now?

00:23:01 Speaker_09
I mean, I'm trying to learn how to breathe basically and what I've come to realize is The little boy that I was who buried that grief that little boy is so still very much present in me and comes to the surface more and more in a way that I've never experienced before and

00:23:19 Speaker_09
And I've realized that the voice inside my head is this voice that I have been using to protect that little boy my entire life and keep everything safe and at bay.

00:23:31 Speaker_09
And by doing that, I've not allowed myself to experience great sadness, but also not allowed myself to experience great joy, because I don't think you can have one without the other.

00:23:41 Speaker_09
So this idea that I do feel small in front of this massive darkness that I feel lays ahead of me. For a lot of people, I think the first time they learned perhaps of your mom's death was when you were on Stephen Colbert's show in 2021.

00:23:54 Speaker_09
I just want to play the question that Stephen asked you and some of your response.

00:23:59 Speaker_05
OK. I know that you yourself have suffered great grief just recently with the loss of your mother, and I'm sorry for your family's loss. Thank you. And I'm wondering how doing this show or any show, how art itself helps you deal with grief?

00:24:16 Speaker_06
Yeah. I love talking about it, by the way. So if I cry, it's only like... It's only a beautiful thing. This is all the unexpressed love, right?

00:24:29 Speaker_06
The grief that will remain with us, you know, until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, right? No matter if someone lives till 60, 15, or, you know, 99.

00:24:43 Speaker_06
So I hope this grief stays with me because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her. And I told her every day. We all told her every day. She was the best of us.

00:24:54 Speaker_09
Has that grief stayed with you? Yeah.

00:24:56 Speaker_06
It's here now.

00:24:59 Speaker_09
You feel it now?

00:25:00 Speaker_06
Yeah. And it's the only route to feeling her close again. Crazy thing. It's like, again, it's It's the longing, it's the admission of the pain, it's the crying out, hey I need you, where are you, I miss you so much.

00:25:23 Speaker_06
And only in that absence, only in really inhabiting that absence, being that little boy at the bottom of that empty cave in vast darkness and just kind of crying out That's the only moment that she comes. It's a necessity. And it's so weird.

00:25:49 Speaker_06
It's like the longing and the grief, fully inhabiting it and feeling it is the only way I can really feel close to her again. The grief and the loss is the only route to the vitality of being alive. The wound is the only route to the gift.

00:26:06 Speaker_06
I really am grateful for you sharing what you've shared about yourself as a little boy and the little boy that continues to live in you and the melancholy that seems to have followed you and I don't know.

00:26:19 Speaker_06
It is a tragedy that we aren't educated earlier. It's a tragedy that we aren't encouraged earlier and I think no one is exempt from that to a degree. I think it's cultural, it's a taboo even though your dad was writing about it. It's so wild.

00:26:38 Speaker_06
Or maybe this is part of the grand design as well and you were meant, maybe you needed to run away so that you could be here to then reveal it.

00:26:48 Speaker_09
There's a writer, Francis Weller, who we've interviewed on the podcast, but he talks about developing a companionship with grief. And I do think, to your point, it is the only time I I feel so close to my dad and to my brother.

00:27:04 Speaker_09
And what I have found just in the small steps that I've begun to take to turn toward the grief and sort of touch it and then come back and touch it again, I'm actually able to feel them in a way that I've not allowed myself to for a long time.

00:27:21 Speaker_09
And it's, yeah, it's lovely.

00:27:24 Speaker_06
Yeah. And does it feel like you, is it like small doses? Yeah. Cause it still feels overwhelming.

00:27:32 Speaker_09
Um, but I do think I can envision a day where for the first time, I think it won't be this giant enormous black abyss, which I feel like this little boy is standing on the edge of, it'll be something which,

00:27:46 Speaker_09
I can carry with me and have space for and live with.

00:27:51 Speaker_06
Right, right. Visit and know that you'll be back in a moment. You can hang out for as long as you want or even, I mean, the ultimate feels like to be able to travel with it constantly as a companion, as a key chain, as a talisman.

00:28:06 Speaker_09
Were you surprised when you said that on Colbert?

00:28:08 Speaker_09
Yeah, he got a huge amount of response and and I'd done an interview with Stephen several weeks after my mom died and I had asked him a question and that had also gotten a similarly huge response at the time and it really struck me as I just think there's such a dearth of people talking about this thing which all of us go through and

00:28:29 Speaker_09
And which all I mean every single person goes through this it is wild to me that we're not talking about this all the time People aren't like on the bus like yeah, who have you lost?

00:28:38 Speaker_09
I mean like it just feels like this enormous Thing which we're all just ignoring.

00:28:44 Speaker_06
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Why why is that? Why why is it not? um Why is it not a supported topic? Why is it a threat? Why have we exiled the conversation? I'm genuinely curious about that.

00:29:00 Speaker_06
I feel like death is seen as this weakness, as this shameful thing. So yeah, I'm really, really curious about our fear of it, our avoidance of it. Your new film, We Live in Time, it is a lot about grief. Yeah, it feels like every scene's about grief.

00:29:18 Speaker_06
It follows just a couple of ordinary people who love each other and want as much time together as possible and want to create a life together. And there's a burgeoning awareness of that time being short and conditional.

00:29:33 Speaker_06
And therefore, every single moment feels very sacred, tiny little moments, big expansive moments. It's like a meditation on the shortness and sacredness of life. And yeah, it's a beautiful film and it feels very wise and it feels full of rage as well.

00:29:53 Speaker_06
Raging against the dying of the light, you know, it's, yeah, it was a beautiful thing to inhabit. Do you feel rage? Do you feel anger? I have, I absolutely have, yeah.

00:30:05 Speaker_06
Not as strongly as I expected to or, so yeah, the suffering, as I said before, it's the suffering where I can become Job on the mountaintop and, because this doesn't make sense, because she was a pure spirit and would never hurt a fly, so you explain this shit to me.

00:30:25 Speaker_06
And there is no explanation. Again, it's like, it's a mystery why she had to have that ending. I don't know. I'm never going to know.

00:30:34 Speaker_09
Do you find it hard to live in a world where there isn't a why?

00:30:38 Speaker_06
In moments, yeah, absolutely. And then you bang your head against that brick wall enough to where you're brain-dead exhausted and dizzy and bruised and then you go, okay, you win. Like, mystery wins, the ocean wins, you know, history wins.

00:30:56 Speaker_06
It would be egotistical for me to demand more answers. It would be, and I just... There's something beautiful about finding out the limits of our comprehension, I think. Again, it's humbling.

00:31:11 Speaker_06
I'm perpetually longing to be humbled in the face of the greater opponent. So like, yes, I think that helps temper any rage or anger I have. I have so much memory to hold on to.

00:31:25 Speaker_06
I have so much, I know her smell still, I know her voice, I know all the different phases of our relationship. Do you have recordings of her? Yes, I have recordings of her and lots of photographs and I have a perfume bottle of hers.

00:31:39 Speaker_06
She was a craftsperson, she would make things. I have a large crocheted blanket that she made, a paper mache dog that she made that was covered in lines of her favorite poem by Mary Oliver, Wild Geese. The Journey, it was The Journey.

00:31:53 Speaker_06
I love Mary Oliver. I love Mary Oliver too. I would mostly read her Mary Oliver when she was in hospice. And she was so polite and so considerate.

00:32:05 Speaker_06
She would never tell me to shut up, she would never ask for what she needed, so after every single poem, I would say to her, again, another, or quiet. And I would give her three options and she would say, again.

00:32:18 Speaker_06
So I would read Wild Geese to her again. I'd be like, again, another, or some quiet. And she's like, maybe some quiet, darling.

00:32:25 Speaker_06
Like it's like yeah, I had to force I had to force her to ask for what she wanted There's a line in the Mary Oliver poem wild geese Tell me about despair yours. I will tell you mine meanwhile the wild geese Something something something.

00:32:40 Speaker_06
I think we should pull it up. Yeah, actually because it is exactly what we're talking about Should I read the whole thing sure yes, please you do not have to be good. I

00:32:49 Speaker_06
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.

00:33:05 Speaker_06
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.

00:33:18 Speaker_06
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.

00:33:34 Speaker_09
I heard you say something a while ago that after your mom died, you felt like your psyche had been rearranged, that things tasted different. Can you explain?

00:33:42 Speaker_06
Yeah, probably not, but that's true, and it still is. I'm still adjusting to a new reality. 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.

00:34:01 Speaker_06
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.

00:34:16 Speaker_06
And for me, what I want to be is more curious about what we're all doing here. Rather than narrow and driven and certain. I want it to break me open.

00:34:28 Speaker_06
I want to be I want to be lost it feels healthier than to feel like you know where you're heading and Sounds scary. Yeah. Yeah it is and and real it's like the the rest is illusion like the idea that we have any Jurisdiction over where we're going or

00:34:49 Speaker_06
control, it's a fabrication. I really related to what you said about that drive to create a life, to build something, to run towards achievement and success. When my mum passed, I think two-thirds of my ambition died with her.

00:35:06 Speaker_06
Or let me say it differently, two-thirds of my previous ambition or the style, the type, or the feeling of that ambition died. It's unequivocal now. I know for a fact that this is a short life and the things that mattered before don't matter anymore.

00:35:26 Speaker_06
And I think when I say things taste differently, I think things can taste much more sweet now because of the sorrow that I've felt. And they can taste much more bitter.

00:35:37 Speaker_06
Like a friend of mine, Spike Jones, talked about it so beautifully to me when he was going through something similar and he would say, it's like the landscape gets rearranged. It's like,

00:35:52 Speaker_06
Where there was once a hill that you knew really well, there's now like a waterfall. And in the place where the river once was, now there's just desert. And behind you where your house was, there's a swamp.

00:36:07 Speaker_06
It's like the world is being re-revealed to you, or revealed in a deeper way.

00:36:12 Speaker_09
Is there something you've learned in your grief that would help others who are listening?

00:36:15 Speaker_06
Hmm. 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.

00:36:31 Speaker_06
They would send me messages and it would literally just be, I'm here. I've got you.

00:36:43 Speaker_06
It was like, sorry, it was like this web, it was like this net of love and care that a handful, two or three handfuls of friends assembled underneath me where my mother's net used to be.

00:37:10 Speaker_06
It was like they all kind of joined hands and created a container for me to feel safe in the loss. And I was an orphan, you know, I was to a degree.

00:37:27 Speaker_06
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.

00:37:43 Speaker_06
But basically they were saying, if you need us to sit with you while you cry, we can do that.

00:37:49 Speaker_06
So maybe that feels more for people that are 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 held by a larger web and I include the ocean in that group of friends.

00:38:12 Speaker_06
I include the Redwoods in that group of friends. And I include my mother's spirit in that group of friends and ancestors. And art, and artists, and writers, and poets, and filmmakers, and theater makers, and actors.

00:38:29 Speaker_06
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. Andrew Garfield, thank you so much. Thanks, Anderson. This is wonderful. And it's a service, what you're doing here.

00:38:49 Speaker_06
It's like the beginning of a cultural shift for people and welcoming of this topic, this experience that we're all heading towards, whether we like it or not. So thank you for all you do here.

00:39:03 Speaker_09
And thank you for letting us know about your mom. Thank you. There's a couple 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.

00:39:16 Speaker_09
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.

00:39:29 Speaker_09
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.

00:39:40 Speaker_09
You can check out the online grief community at cnn.com forward slash all there is online. That's 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.

00:39:58 Speaker_09
Her mom died in 2010, and her brother, Clyde, five years later.

00:40:02 Speaker_01
Grief comes when it comes. It comes in very strange ways. People would come up to me and say, oh, I'm really sorry about your mom. And I'd say, OK, thank you. And I'd get mad because I'd want them to stop asking or saying, are you OK? No, I'm not OK.

00:40:17 Speaker_09
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 DiZula is our technical director, and Steve Liktai is our executive producer.

00:40:32 Speaker_09
Support from Nick Godsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Haddad, Charlie Moore, Carrie Rubin, Carrie Pritchard, Shimmery Cheetreet, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, John D'Onora, Lainey Steinhardt, Jameis Andrest, Nicole Pesceru, and Lisa Namarro.

00:40:46 Speaker_09
Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.