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Episode: Creating A Companionship With Grief

Author: CNN
Duration: 00:37:55

Episode Shownotes

After suppressing grief for decades, Anderson reached out earlier this year to psychotherapist and author Francis Weller to ask for help. In this very personal conversation Anderson reveals some of what he’s learned about the strategies he developed as a child to shield himself from grief and why those strategies

are now working against him. Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of 'All There Is with Anderson Cooper', the host engages in a candid conversation with psychotherapist Francis Weller about the complexities of grief. Anderson shares his struggle with suppressed grief and how childhood coping strategies are now barriers to healing. The discussion emphasizes the importance of recognizing, honoring, and embracing grief as a necessary part of life, which fosters deeper connections with those who have passed. By developing a companionship with grief, individuals can achieve emotional growth and navigate their feelings more effectively.

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

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_05
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the person I was born to be, if the life I've lived really is the one I was meant to, or if it's some half-life, a mutation engineered by loss, cobbled together by the will to survive.

00:00:15 Speaker_05
The day my father died, the child I was disappeared. washed away by the turn of the tide. From time to time I still catch glimpses of that boy swimming through warm water towards his dad in a crystal blue pool.

00:00:30 Speaker_05
His father smiles as the boy wraps his arms and legs around him and holds him tight. A seashell wind chime gently blows in the breeze. He can hear waves crashing somewhere through the hedges and over the dunes.

00:00:44 Speaker_05
Many times I've wished I had a mark, a scar, a missing limb, something children could have pointed at, at which adults could tell them not to stare. At least then I wouldn't have been expected to smile and mingle, meet and greet.

00:00:59 Speaker_05
They would have seen, they would have known that, like a broken locket, I have only half a heart. I wrote that nearly 20 years ago. I found it recently in notes for my first book, Dispatches from the Edge, a memoir of war, disasters, and survival.

00:01:18 Speaker_05
When I published it in 2006, I had just started to understand the connection between my past and my present. I was just beginning to connect the dots. I mentioned in the first episode this season that I've been struggling this past year.

00:01:34 Speaker_05
The grief which I buried as a child and ran from most of my life has risen, and I can't run from it anymore. I need help. I've rarely said those words to anyone, but I wrote them several months ago to my guest on the podcast today, Frances Weller.

00:01:51 Speaker_05
We've been talking by Zoom once a week ever since.

00:01:55 Speaker_05
He's helped me start to turn toward my grief, to try and touch it, and perhaps even more importantly, he's helped me begin to see the strategies I've used since I was a kid to keep it and all kinds of feelings buried.

00:02:09 Speaker_05
These strategies, which I use still every hour of every day, they help me as a child and as a young adult, but they aren't helping me any longer. They're hurting me, and I need to figure out a new way to live.

00:02:24 Speaker_05
This is a particularly personal episode of all there is. So wherever you are in your grief, I'm glad you're here. I'm glad we're together.

00:02:43 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.

00:02:57 Speaker_00
That's when therapy can help. And BetterHelp is a convenient way to get started. It's 100% online, flexible, and surprisingly affordable. Connect with a licensed therapist by phone, video, or online chat at a time that works for you.

00:03:12 Speaker_00
Visit betterhelp.com slash allthereis today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash allthereis.

00:03:23 Speaker_03
I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast.

00:03:28 Speaker_03
Laura Schmidt is a leading expert in the field of sugar studies, and what she's going to teach us is that the truth about how much sugar we should eat and when we should eat it is far more complicated than you might think.

00:03:39 Speaker_02
If you're already struggling with craving and addiction, turning it into a big boogeyman probably isn't the greatest idea.

00:03:47 Speaker_03
Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.

00:03:53 Speaker_05
Francis Weller is a psychotherapist and author. His book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, was sent to me by a podcast listener named Cynthia. And if you're listening, Cynthia, thank you.

00:04:06 Speaker_05
It's one of the best books on grief I've ever read. Francis Weller joins me for the second time on this podcast. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.

00:04:16 Speaker_06
Absolutely. Absolutely.

00:04:18 Speaker_05
I feel like I'm at a fork in the road and This sadness resides just below the surface of my skin, and I hear, like, its whispers in every sentence that I speak, and, um... What do I do about that?

00:04:38 Speaker_06
Trust it. I mean, there's this insinuation that that's a problem and that it's wrong. And rather than saying, something is happening to me, How do I collaborate with this? What is my soul insisting on here?

00:04:55 Speaker_06
Well, it's insisting on you returning to something that had been abandoned, that had been neglected.

00:05:03 Speaker_05
I'm amazed that I'm 57 years old and from the outside, I guess, relatively high functioning. I held a job for a long time. And yet, as soon as I think about my dad, My voice cracks. I mean, I can't even express it without my voice quavering.

00:05:22 Speaker_05
Shouldn't I be over this? This was 47 years ago.

00:05:28 Speaker_06
To the boy, to your heart, to your soul, that time doesn't matter at all. It's grief that hasn't really fully been honored. There's a request from soul, from grief, that says we must honor these losses. If we don't,

00:05:44 Speaker_06
They really become like a sediment that settles on us and weighs us down.

00:05:50 Speaker_05
I certainly feel that. I feel that I put it in a box and lived my life and suddenly now I feel like it is banging on the door and I cannot get through a day without tearing up at times.

00:06:04 Speaker_06
Is this a problem?

00:06:08 Speaker_05
I mean, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's nice in some ways, because I'm feeling. Yes. Because I've deadened myself for decades.

00:06:15 Speaker_06
Yes, yes. I mean, you've lived strategically. How do I avoid those depths? But at some point, the strategies fail. And then something more genuine is asked to be encountered. Is this a problem? Or is this actually a deepening of you?

00:06:37 Speaker_06
drawing you into the depths of where your father still lives, where that loss still lives, where your brother still lives. They still are there. And when we honor them, we are deepened, we are ripened. Take your time.

00:06:59 Speaker_05
That idea that sitting here, You say those words, and the idea that deep inside me, my dad is still alive, and my brother's still alive.

00:07:10 Speaker_06
Yeah, and it's the grief that is the knit between the two of you. So when we refuse to feel the grief, in a sense, we're pushing that relationship far away. People say, I get to keep the love of those who have died.

00:07:26 Speaker_06
Well, the only way you get to keep that is by honoring the rights of grief. The rights of love involve grief. There's no separation between those two worlds.

00:07:36 Speaker_06
So to know your father, to know your brother, to stay in relationship with them, is to stay open to the tender melancholy of their absence.

00:07:45 Speaker_05
And wouldn't it be better if I have evolved to a place where I can think fondly of the memories I have without it, you know, bringing tears to my eyes?

00:07:56 Speaker_06
I think those tears are holy. And they speak to how much you loved your father and your brother and your mother. Those tears are the current expression of that relationship. They bring you tears.

00:08:12 Speaker_05
But it's so infused with sadness and longing and things I don't know about them. I mean, can this go on forever? Feeling like I'm hostage to this?

00:08:26 Speaker_06
I think what happens as we begin to become less avoidant and resistant to it is that we begin to develop a companionship with it.

00:08:34 Speaker_05
A companionship with grief.

00:08:35 Speaker_06
Yes, this is what I call the apprenticeship with sorrow. We begin to stop fighting it and begin to see that it's actually the way in which my deepest self comes fully present. And the soul does want to move this.

00:08:55 Speaker_06
Grief was never meant to be carried along in our bodies, stored. It's meant to move so that we can stay current, that we can stay alive and present to the current of life as well. And yes, it will be uncomfortable because of the strategy of control.

00:09:17 Speaker_06
Rising above it has been your main theme, right?

00:09:22 Speaker_05
Yeah, that's one of the things that has come out in my talking to you, the realization how much the little boy that I was back then is still all there.

00:09:34 Speaker_05
And the strategies that I developed as a little kid to deal with the things I couldn't deal with, which got me through it and were probably beneficial back then and got me into the world and working and able to function, it is the voice in my head

00:09:53 Speaker_05
I feel like those strategies are now working against me, and I am trapped with those strategies because

00:10:22 Speaker_05
They are what I have relied on my entire life to achieve whatever I've achieved, and they've been helpful, but I feel like they are no longer helpful. They're keeping me very isolated.

00:10:34 Speaker_06
Right. That's why I trust the grief. Grief is one of the most powerful solvents. It can soften the hardest places in us. It can loosen and open our hearts again. That's what I see happening to you. So like right now, all the strategies are failing.

00:10:54 Speaker_06
Right now, what's here is what's present between us in this conversation. The vulnerability of that, the tenderness of that. That's when I can feel you. That's when you're actually in the room.

00:11:09 Speaker_05
And I like that. I like the human connection. And there's very few times I actually get that or feel that because I don't allow myself to.

00:11:20 Speaker_06
Right. That interior world is so tender, so vulnerable. But the boy knew he couldn't show that. And now the man is learning he has to do that. That's a very important threshold of time for you. The adult man has the opportunity to father this boy.

00:11:40 Speaker_06
to give him that attention and that holding, that recognition, that understanding, when you can turn to him and say, I see you and I see all that you've been carrying for all this time. Those are the voices he's waiting to hear.

00:12:00 Speaker_06
That's the kind of holding he needs to have happen. So the strategies protected him. but they didn't allow the grief to move. It's been held at bay for, as you say, like 40 years.

00:12:14 Speaker_05
But it's crazy that I'm beholden to strategies that I developed when I was a little kid. I'm constantly ruminating on endless strategies about how to get through the day.

00:12:24 Speaker_06
Yeah. And grief brings you into the territory where the strategies just don't apply. Until we have some separation from them, and that's one of Jung's ideas is that We can't heal what we can't separate from.

00:12:40 Speaker_06
And so the idea of how do I separate from this boy, from this child state? It's the default mode that whenever circumstances are happening in your world and he senses the possibility of hurt or abandonment, strategy comes in.

00:12:57 Speaker_06
Before you even get to think about what do I want to do as a 57-year-old man? The 10-year-old boy's already acting. has already taken over.

00:13:09 Speaker_05
And that idea is incredible to me. That I can experience something now as an adult, but the way my brain interprets it is linked directly to the child that I was and strategies that I developed back then.

00:13:27 Speaker_05
So I am not actually seeing something as it really is in my brain. It is a child experiencing it.

00:13:36 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's what I was saying about the default. Carl Jung talked about them as complexes. So when you're out talking to somebody and that boy picks up a hint of mistrust, Well, he takes over instantly. He's the default mode, not you.

00:13:55 Speaker_06
And until there's separation, you are compelled to respond as the child rather than choosing, how do I respond in this moment as the adult man? That's really the crux of the work, separation.

00:14:09 Speaker_05
But I'm not even sure I know who I am if I'm not that voice in my head that I've had.

00:14:14 Speaker_06
That's OK. I'd rather have you be a very incompetent adult. than a very competent child. You get to learn, Anderson, how to be in relationship. The boy doesn't have a clue. There's nothing about the boy that is relational. It's survival that he's after.

00:14:35 Speaker_06
He doesn't want to go back into places of so much hurt and pain.

00:14:38 Speaker_05
People develop these strategies as little kids to protect themselves. Does everybody do this?

00:14:45 Speaker_06
in various ways, you know, for every wounded child, there's on the backside of it is an angry adolescent. And that adolescent's job is to protect the vulnerability of that boy. So yes, there's a part of us that's designed to do that.

00:14:59 Speaker_06
And we do it different ways. Some people try to be the nicest person on the planet. That was my strategy. I was gonna be a good boy and make sure that everyone liked me and no one would abandon me and no one would reject me.

00:15:11 Speaker_05
That was a strategy you developed as a child. Yes. Yeah.

00:15:16 Speaker_06
That strategy worked. I mean, in graduate school, I was called the golden boy. I looked polished like a church statue. I was beautifully posed, but inside it was cold plaster because I didn't let anybody get close. No one knew me.

00:15:31 Speaker_06
Rage, perfection, withdrawal, isolation, contempt. These strategies all work, but the cost, as you're feeling now, the cost of human connection is so high. Who knows that person, Anderson? Who knows the vulnerability that you're sharing right now?

00:15:51 Speaker_06
Who knows that place that feels sad and afraid and angry and lonely? Those places need witnessing and they need holding.

00:16:02 Speaker_05
How do you start turning to that child? Because getting, I assume getting rid of it is not enough.

00:16:11 Speaker_06
That would be like saying to the boy, I am not willing to feel what you have been carrying. It would be like slamming the door on him again, which is what he expects because those feelings weren't welcomed when he was young.

00:16:26 Speaker_06
They weren't held in an adequate way. And whatever doesn't get held begins to feel like it has no bottom. So one of the first things we have to do is slowly begin to put a bottom underneath the grief so we can begin to actually have faith in it again.

00:16:42 Speaker_05
What does that mean, put a bottom under the grief?

00:16:44 Speaker_06
That means when the boy or the child state feels into the grief, it feels like free fall. It feels if I go into that room, it's over. I'll never return. I've heard it thousands of times in my practice. If I go there, I'm never coming back.

00:17:03 Speaker_06
And I often say to these people, if you don't go there, you're never coming back. Because so much of our life force is tied up in pushing this energy away.

00:17:13 Speaker_06
So again, if we don't go there, we're saying to the boy, I'm not willing to feel what it is you've been caring for me. And so then the wound just persists, and the numbness increases.

00:17:30 Speaker_06
So it's really about coming into an inner intimacy with what is most vulnerable about our own lives and developing some kind of compassionate friendship to those parts of us that need to be held and need to be brought back into some tiny semblance of community, even if that's just one or two friends.

00:17:53 Speaker_05
One of the things you wrote in your book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which was so influential on me is, grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude.

00:18:11 Speaker_05
In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world.

00:18:18 Speaker_05
Grief is essential to finding and maintaining a feeling of emotional intimacy with life, with one another, and with our own soul." This idea that grief is not here to take us hostage, I think that's very much the way it feels to me.

00:18:34 Speaker_05
I'll be brought down. and not able to get back up, that if I give in to it, if I wail on the floor, I don't know what'll happen.

00:18:46 Speaker_06
You don't. What you said was accurate. You are being brought down. I've never seen anyone disappear into grief. That's all of our fear. partly because we've been conditioned to approach it privately.

00:19:03 Speaker_06
We don't have much knowledge in grief, as Rilke would say, and so consequently we push back against it and we don't know how to engage it, to write, to dance, to talk, to share, to bring it to ritual.

00:19:17 Speaker_06
We have very few communal practices that allow us to really drop to the knees and to be held in our grief so that we can return. We are so passive around grief so that when it comes, we are basically caught off guard and unaware of how to respond.

00:19:37 Speaker_06
So it's, how do I get out of this as fast as possible? And we have so many ways to do that. All the distractions, the busyness, the alcohol, the drugs, anything you need is available to get us away from the depth of those places.

00:19:52 Speaker_06
We get caught in kind of a suspended animation when we don't process the sorrow. It's a prolonged season of numbness, of dissociation, not full presence. So when you say you're being brought down,

00:20:08 Speaker_06
Yes, you're being brought down below the surface of those strategies into a place where you are undone. And that's the work of grief. Grief has an initiatory quality to it. It undoes us and remakes us if we let it do its work.

00:20:26 Speaker_06
If we resist it, that's what creates more of a neurotic pattern of living on the surface, being in control, and no friendships, no closeness, because we can't risk opening the floodgates.

00:20:41 Speaker_06
We can't risk letting somebody inside that, what Hillman, James Hillman, called their secret inside flesh.

00:20:48 Speaker_05
There's a loneliness epidemic in this country. Do you think a lot of that is unrecognized grief?

00:20:55 Speaker_06
Yes, this loneliness is a consequence of us not having permission to confess what is so utterly human, that I feel sad, that my heart is breaking. My daughter just died. My son just left and I miss him.

00:21:13 Speaker_06
And whatever the state is, somehow we have to just buck up and get back to work. But what the soul wants is to stop. and just bear witness to what is here.

00:21:28 Speaker_06
And yes, I think this epidemic of loneliness is very much tied into our refusal to let grief in the door.

00:21:37 Speaker_05
We'll be right back with my guest, Frances Weller. Welcome back to my conversation with Francis Weller.

00:22:01 Speaker_05
In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis suggests a writing exercise that he says can be useful to begin to turn toward our grief and explore its contours. He suggests starting with a few writing prompts to help you explore your feelings of loss.

00:22:15 Speaker_05
He also recommends reading what you've written to a close friend or a community of people that you trust.

00:22:22 Speaker_06
The writing practice is an excellent way to step in and step out. I can drop into the writing and I write for 10 minutes, keep the hand moving, never stopping if I can possibly do that.

00:22:35 Speaker_06
And the thread might be something like, I remember, or I miss, or now that you are gone. or goodbye, or I long.

00:22:44 Speaker_06
These are all little partial sentences that actually give you a chance to step in and work with that, and then step back out after 10 minutes.

00:22:53 Speaker_06
That helps build faith, that there's actually a way to touch this sorrow without feeling it's going to take me away. The beauty of it, doing it with a friend or with the community, is that you then read that statement allowed to somebody else.

00:23:10 Speaker_06
No one's ever allowed to comment on it. All they say is thank you. Thank you is basically saying I heard you, that that's welcome here.

00:23:21 Speaker_05
One of the things that you recommended for me, which I found helpful trying to understand the strategies that the boy that I was developed and that I now realize have been the strategies in my life. Can you just talk about that exercise?

00:23:38 Speaker_06
Yeah, when I really began to understand my own experience of the power of that boy and how much he dominated territories of my life, I wanted to see if I could work on that question that Jung brought up about separation. How do you do that?

00:23:54 Speaker_06
It's a nice thing to say, well, you've got to separate from that child's state. Well, how do you do that? And I realized what I needed to do was write out his worldview. What is the worldview of that child?

00:24:05 Speaker_06
And you write in third person, his, him, theirs, hers. And the first thing you write about is what is the child's worldview about love? Well, it's untrustworthy, it's erratic. What about power? Well, it only belongs to angry adults.

00:24:22 Speaker_06
The second step is out of that worldview, what are his basic expectations? So if love is temperamental and unsafe, the expectations are that he's not going to find it in the world.

00:24:36 Speaker_06
Out of those expectations, what are the core strategies of how that child is survived? Well, for me it was perfectionism and a certain degree of interior hiding. so that no one could find me. Then what triggers that child's state? For me, it was anger.

00:24:54 Speaker_06
Whenever somebody was angry, that boy would immediately get triggered and try to either placate, run away, go numb. He tried to survive. And then you write about, well, how does he show up in your body?

00:25:10 Speaker_06
in your sensations, in your thoughts, because you begin to see how different the boy's thoughts are from the adult's thoughts. And then emotionally, what emotions tend to occupy that boy's world? Fear? Shame? Mistrust? Rage?

00:25:27 Speaker_06
So you begin to know his emotional geography. The last one you write about, and I keep it this one for last, was what is this child state protecting?

00:25:37 Speaker_06
And then, because Jung had this amazing discovery, he said, at the core of every complex is a pearl of great price. And when you discharge the complex, it opens up again.

00:25:48 Speaker_06
And as I worked on this boy for quite a long time, what he was protecting was spontaneity and joy. Because in my family, to be spontaneous and joyful made you a target. And so you covered that up for me, and now it's available again.

00:26:06 Speaker_06
which is astonishing, you know, to feel the return of my own aliveness that he was protecting.

00:26:13 Speaker_06
So that's a beautiful practice to give you some sense of the world that he's occupying, the world that you are living in, and how to migrate the energetic charge from that boy into your body, into the adult body, so we can work with it.

00:26:31 Speaker_05
That idea of Spontaneity and joy is something I do not allow myself.

00:26:38 Speaker_06
The boy does not allow.

00:26:39 Speaker_05
For you, it's important to not say, I, when you're talking about the strategies of the boy or the girl that you were, that's part of the separation. Part of the separation. So you would say that the child can't allow joy, the child can't allow.

00:26:54 Speaker_06
Right, right. The idea of separating is so important, but there's many in there. And this child state, this adolescent state, there's multiple states of being, many of what I call the outcast parts of ourselves.

00:27:08 Speaker_06
If we don't make that separation, we still identify with the strategy. It's you not allowing grief or joy and spontaneity. Well, I don't think so. I think you'd be open to that. you might actually enjoy some of that.

00:27:24 Speaker_06
But as long as that boy's operational, not such a good idea. It's too exposing. Keep it under control. His main idea is control.

00:27:34 Speaker_05
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that has been the guide. I mean, that's how I've lived my entire life. And it's exhausting.

00:27:43 Speaker_06
Because there's no recharge, there's no recreation. There's no way that you're actually, through the consequence of intimacies and friendships, being replenished, being recharged.

00:27:56 Speaker_05
It's interesting having kids because it is the only time really that I feel complete joy and spontaneity with them because they are nothing but joy and spontaneity and I want to spend all my time with the kids because it's a different me and it's, to me, a sign of what is possible.

00:28:17 Speaker_06
Well, that's so beautiful because what you're just saying is that when you're not defended, when the boy's not on duty, What is there is somebody who engages his world, who knows how to play, to be silly, to laugh.

00:28:33 Speaker_06
There's no frequency being struck by them that would activate the child's state. They're not threatening. They're not judging you. They're not criticizing. They're not abandoning you. In fact, what they want is more of you. They want to be close to you.

00:28:48 Speaker_06
They want to touch you. That's a different signal frequency. And that one invites adult presence. And that's beautiful. And that is what's possible when you're outside the strategy, outside the defense mechanisms. You're actually able to connect.

00:29:04 Speaker_05
Is there anything else you would recommend for people listening?

00:29:09 Speaker_06
I think the most important thing is to begin to have some regular time with what's present in you. There's a way in which we operate so mechanically, and so I wrote.

00:29:24 Speaker_06
I remember one of my teachers saying, the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

00:29:29 Speaker_06
So when we're in these patterns, and research has shown, too, that 80 to 90% of the thoughts you're having today are the same ones you had yesterday and the day before and the day before.

00:29:40 Speaker_06
So to come into the present moment, to come into an intimacy with oneself, which is ultimately what this is about, is to be willing to radically accept all the guests at the door, as Rumi would say, in the guest house, just to let them in.

00:30:00 Speaker_06
They're not comfortable guests, but they're there nonetheless. And the less we resist them, the less trouble they cause. because we now begin to develop more of a companionship.

00:30:14 Speaker_06
I always imagine I'm walking beside grief all the time, rather than it being a kind of invasive incursion. No, it's an ongoing, tender conversation between the two of us.

00:30:29 Speaker_06
And he instructs me so much upon compassion, about connection, about vulnerability, about tenderness. And those are the qualities that are so missing in our collective rhetoric right now. That's what we need.

00:30:46 Speaker_05
This whole experience of grief has been such a revelation for me. And so much of it was sparked really by reading your book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow.

00:30:59 Speaker_05
because I always thought about grief as just you're sad because you've lost somebody and you miss them and you have to get over that or deal with it. I realize now grief leads you down all these other pathways.

00:31:15 Speaker_05
It unlocks these other rooms, which I had not examined.

00:31:22 Speaker_06
And this is the grace of this time for you. The strategies are failing. Those tears you have most every single day, Those are holy tears. They are bringing you back to the present. They're bringing you back to your own emotional life.

00:31:40 Speaker_06
And without those, there will be no relational life. So this is really a threshold time for you and for many of us.

00:31:50 Speaker_06
as we begin to really allow what is here to be here, softening us, opening us, turning the compost of our own grief over and over, letting it warm and soften so we can express it and move it, and actually might feel, you know, just a tinge of joy once in a while.

00:32:09 Speaker_06
Wouldn't that be sweet?

00:32:13 Speaker_05
Francis Weller, thank you.

00:32:15 Speaker_06
Thank you, Anderson. Good to be with you.

00:32:21 Speaker_05
You can watch a video version of this interview right now at cnn.com forward slash all there is online. It's our new online grief community.

00:32:30 Speaker_05
You can also listen to podcast episodes there, hear voicemails from other listeners and connect with others experiencing loss and grief. And you can leave comments of your own about your experiences. That's at cnn.com forward slash all there is online.

00:32:46 Speaker_05
Next week on All There Is, I talk to Irene Weiss. She's 93 years old and experienced grief and loss when she was 13 that is impossible to imagine. How do you live with this?

00:33:00 Speaker_01
There hasn't been a day that I have not lived with it. It's what that 13-year-old experience that can never be rectified, the pain can never go away. People say broken heart. The heart keeps working, but the soul never forgets.

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There is a soul that does not Forget any of it. It's imprinted on the soul that keeps the memory, the pain, the grief. It's just always there.

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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 D'Azula is our technical director, and Steve Lichtai is our executive producer.

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Support from Nick Godsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Haddad, Charlie Moore, Carrie Rubin, Carrie Pritchard, Shimmery Cheatreat, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John D'Onora, Lainey Steinhardt, Jameis Andrest, Nicole Pesseru, and Lisa Namorrow.

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Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.