Transcript of Andrew Garfield’s Grief

Wherever you are in the world and wherever you are in grief, I'm glad you're here. This is All There Is, Season 3.

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.

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

Yeah, 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. 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. 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. 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 fifth, I followed as they wheeled him down the hall on a journey to surgery. 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. I waited in a small private room. Angel, the nurse on the floor, put her 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. We did the best we could. I went home to wake you and Carter. Daddy's dead, I said.

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.

There are times, even now, when dark thoughts take over, wishing it had been me who died instead of your father My brother. How much better he would have been at guiding you and Carter. Far better than I could ever be.

Carter, my brother, was 12 when my dad died. He, too, was slapped into silence by the heartbreak and terror in in rage we both felt. We never talked about my dad. We never really talked about anything. Carter killed himself 10 years later. He did it in front of my mom. I buried my grief over his death, too.

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. When your father 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. 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. 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.

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

When I was 16, my mom had a stroke. I went and gave her a SUPR, but she died.

I'm struck by how many of you have tried to bury your grief as well.

I stifled and stuffed all that grief. So where we couldn't share our grief.

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.

That grief wait. 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 spent so many years being angry. I haven't been able to grieve. I just continue always to keep moving forward and being strong and saying, I'll be fine.

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. We'll be right back with my guest, actor Andrew Garfield, whose mom, Lynn, died in 2019. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. One of my colleagues that I really deeply admire is someone you're going to get to hear from Dr. Theodore Schwartz. He's a fellow neurosurgeon. He is regarded as one of the foremost skull-based surgeons in the country. I'm going to share a conversation I recently had with Dr. Schwartz about what it takes to really do what we do. Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 had a cancer. Had you had much experience with grief before your mom died?

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. Yeah. But before that, I had lost friends, yes, grandparents, yes, mentors, some Mike Nichols, Keith Ledger, I think about Philip Seymour Hoffmann.

Tell me about your mom. Her name was Lynn.

Lynn, yeah. Linda Diane Garfield. She 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. On her hospice bed, she was more concerned with the nurses than she was with her own pain and discomfort.

It was she who encouraged you to look into acting?

Yeah. 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. 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 draft person for an architecture firm. She was a lampshade maker for my dad's lampshade company. 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 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 My experience. I tried art, I tried painting, sculpture, you name it, music. Then I did the last resort, which was join the circus and do an outside of school drama class when I was 15. That literally join the circus.No, not literally. But ultimately, that's what's happened.

Stranger than the actual circus, perhaps.

Yeah, more grotesque. Basically, I did my first drama class, and I loved it, and I felt I felt like I belonged. It was really the beginning of the rest of all of this. 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. My mom had a glass and a half of wine, which is a rare occurrence for her. She got loose and she got bold. We were all dancing and we were with Jack Black, the wonderful Jack Black. 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? My mom-I love that he's saying this on the dance floor.

He's shouted at the top of his lungs.

Exactly. My mom goes right out to him and grabs him by the lapels, and she says, It was me. It was all me. In those very rare flashes of expressed, This is who I am. She would never do that without some alcohol in her system, which was very rare. I think I do owe her, her unmet dreams, the sacrifices she's made, her longing. I think it probably emanated from her own deep, deep longing to encourage me in that way.

She died in 2019 of pancreatic cancer.

Just before COVID, yeah.

How long had she been ill for?

About A year and a half. She hung in, man. I was about to say she fought it for as long. I was like, I don't like that language. I don't like the idea of defeating cancer. It doesn't feel fair to me that that language is used because my mom fought until she couldn't fight anymore. It doesn't make her not a success story. I reject the idea that she was defeated in any way by any thing. 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, that I can't reconcile with the concept of a higher power or the concept of God or some universe universal, cosmic design, the suffering.

The pain she felt.

Yeah, the physical agony. There was no way of avoiding it. We did everything we could to avoid it, to circumnavigate it, to heal to treat it. She went through two or three rounds of chemo, radiotherapy, and experimental drugs. Her nausea was so unbelievably brutal every day that she had to go through lots of different cycles of deciding whether she was going to continue to try to stay alive.

You were able to be with her at the end? Yeah. I was able to do that with my mom, and it is among the most extraordinary experiences, certainly, of my life.

Yeah, same. I'm so happy that you had the privilege of that. 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 and 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. The idea of not being there for that fills me with a 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. 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.

I heard something you say there was a moment before your mom's death where you were walking along a beach.

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. I could feel in my body this stuckness in my chair, my solar plexus I'm in this area. When it's like, Oh, there's something there, and I can't cry. 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 a A low-level panic attack. I go for a walk on the beach, and it's not a very pleasant day. It's cold early autumn, and the waves are pretty wild and gray and choppy. Without thinking, I strip down and I find myself submerged in the ocean. It just 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 It's a bizarre thing that happens.

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. 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, 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 seeing this for millennia. 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. Again, my ego was holding on. My ego thought I knew better. My ego said, No, this doesn't make sense. No, no, no. 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. 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. You're in a realer version of the world now, and it's painful.

Yeah. 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? That's not. I take no credit.

You said those, but those aren't your words.

No. 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 a depth of longing to understand and to want comfort. It was like I was asking for comfort. 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. 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 answer, I think. I think the answer is relative to the question. And the willingness to ask the question and the willingness to not know the answer. 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 allowed myself. I didn't run away from it. I ran towards it and I said, Help me. And the ocean had a great answer, a really tremendous answer.

I say opponent there about the ocean, but for me, it's It's more like it's a mentor. It's like a grandfather or a grandmother.

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. 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. 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.

That's beautiful. As you're speaking, some images came up for me of indigenous people who we're just playing catch up here. You know what I mean? We, modern descendants of colonizing Western, Descartian values, cut off from the concept of death and integrated connection to death. What you just described so poetically is something that all all indigenous cultures know and practice and keep close to themselves. 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.

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. 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. It is only within the last year that I woke up to that, going through the boxes, my things that belong to my mom, my dad, and my brother, which had never been gone through. 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.Oh, my God.In it, he wrote about what happens to children who don't allow themselves to grieve when they're kids.Oh.

My God. Yeah.holy shit.

I'm not a big believer in things like that, but it's made me...

Come on, man.

Come on. I know. I realized that's exactly what I've done. For me, the last year, I've been trying to understand how to turn toward that grief that's been buried.

That's really... I mean, that strikes me in such a profound way in terms of I guess, sorry, I'm just caught. I'm so caught on finding this essay on top of this box and what made you go for that box.

I know. Literally the first file I opened up, and I've read most of my dad's writings. I'd never seen this essay before. It's remarkable. Yeah.

It feels, I don't know. It helps support the theory of divine plan and our interconnectedness.

There's a poem by Rilke, and it's It's 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. Everything is close to my face, and everything Being 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. Then your great transforming will happen to me, and my great grief cry will happen to you.

I love that poem, and I love Rilke, and I haven't heard that poem in a while. Why is that speaking to you, particularly right now?

I'm trying to learn how to grieve, basically. What I've come to realize is the little boy that I was who buried that grief, that little boy is still very much present in me and comes to the surface more and more in a way that I've never experienced before. 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. 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. I would tend to agree. 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 Steven Colbert's show in 2021. I just want to play the question that Steven asked you in some of your response. Okay.

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. Yeah. I love talking about it, by the way. So if I cry, it's always like, It's only a beautiful thing. This is all the unexpressed love, the grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, right? No matter if someone lives till 60, 15, or 99. 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.

Has that grief stayed with you?

Yeah, it's here now. You feel it now? Yeah, and it's the only route to feeling her close again. That's the crazy thing. It's like, again, it's the longing. It's the admission of the pain. It's the crying out. Hey, I need you. What are you? I miss you so much. 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 crying out That's the only moment that she comes. It's a necessity. It's so weird. 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 root to the vitality of being alive. The wound is the only root to the gift. 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. I don't know. It is a tragedy that we aren't educated earlier. It's a tragedy that we are encouraged earlier. 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. 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.

There's a writer, Francis Weller, who we've interviewed on the podcast, but he talks about developing a companionship with grief. I do think To your point, it is the only time I feel so close to my dad and to my brother. What I have found just in the small steps that I've begun to take to turn and toward the grief and 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. Yeah, it's lovely.

Yeah. And does it feel like you... Is it like small doses?

Yeah, because it still feels overwhelming. But I do think I can envision a day where for the first time, I think it won't be this this ginormous black abyss, which I feel like this little boy is standing on the edge of. It'll be something which I can carry with me and have space for and live with.

Right. Visit and know that you'll be back in a moment or 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 keychain, as a talisman.

Were you surprised when you said that on Colbert? Yeah. It got a huge amount of response. I had done an interview with Steven 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. 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. Every single person goes through this. It is wild to me that we're not talking about this all the time. That the people aren't on the bus like, who have you lost?

It It just feels like this enormous thing which we're all just ignoring. I don't know. Yeah, absolutely. Why? Why is that? Why is it not a supported topic? Why is it a threat? Why have we exiled the conversation? I'm genuinely curious about that. I feel like death is seen as this weakness, as this shameful thing. I'm really curious about our 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 is about grief. 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. There's a burgeoning awareness of that time being short and conditional, 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. Yeah, it's a beautiful film and it feels very wise, and it feels full of rage as well, raging against the dying of the light. It was a beautiful thing to inhabit. Do you feel rage? Do you feel anger? I have. I absolutely have, yeah. Not as strongly as I expected to or Yeah, the suffering, as I said before, it's the suffering where I can become Job on the mountaintop because this doesn't make sense because she was a pure spirit and would never hurt a fly. You explain this shit to me. There is no explanation. Again, it's a mystery why she had to have that ending. I don't know, and I'm never going to know.

Do you find it hard to live in a world where there isn't a why?

In moments, yeah, absolutely. 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. History wins. It would be egotistical for me to demand more answers. It would be... There's something beautiful about finding out the limits of our comprehension, I think. Again, it's humbling. I'm perpetually longing to be humbled in the face of the greater opponent. Yes, I think that helps temper any rage or anger I have. I have so much memory to hold on to. 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. She was a craftsperson. She would make things. I have a large crocheted blanket that she made, a paper machete dog that she made that was covered in lines of her favorite poem by Mary Oliver, Wild Geese.Oh, yeah.No, The Journey. It was The Journey. The poem The Journey.I love Mary Oliver.I love Mary Oliver, too. I would mostly read her, Mary Oliver, when she was in hospice. She was so polite and so considerate. She would never tell me to shut up. She would never ask for what she needed. After every A single poem, I would say to her, Again, another or quiet. I would give her three options, and she would say, Again. I would read Wild Geese to her again. I'd be like, Again, another or some quiet. She was like, Maybe some quiet, darling. 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, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the wild geese, some Something, something, something. I think we should pull it up quickly, actually, because it is exactly what we're talking about.Shall I just read the whole thing?Sure. Yes, please. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 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. 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. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination. Imagination calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over, announcing your place in the family of things.

I heard you say something a while ago that after your mom died, you felt like your psyche had been re-arranged, that things tasted different. Can you explain?

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. It's like the heart breaks and breaks and breaks and lives by breaking in times of great loss. You expand, hopefully, you become the heart becomes bigger, you become more confused and less certain of anything. 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. I want to be lost. It feels healthier than to feel like you know where you're heading.

Sounds scary.

Yeah, it is. And real. It's like the rest is illusion. Like the idea that we have any jurisdiction over where we're going or control, it's a fabrication. I really relate to what you said about that drive to create a life, to build something, to run towards achievement and success. When my mom passed, two-thirds of my ambition died with her. Or let me say it differently, two-thirds of my previous this 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. 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. 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 re-arranged. It's like 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.

It's like the world is being re-revealed to you or revealed in a deeper way.

Is there something you've learned in your grief that would help others who are listening?

I remember when mom died, I have a really incredible group of friends. They were very, very They were ingenious in how they handled it, emotionally very genius, and I feel very grateful for them. They would send me messages, and it would literally just be, I'm here, I've got you. 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. It was like they all joined hands and created a container for me to feel safe in the loss. I was an orphan. I was to a degree, 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. But basically, they were saying, If you need us to sit with you while you cry, we can do that. 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.

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. 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. Thank you. It's a service. This, what you're doing here. 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.

And thank you for letting us know about your mom. Thank you. There's a couple of 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. 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. 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. You can check out the online grief community at cnn. Com/allthereisonline. That's cnn. Com/allthereisonline. It's a work in progress, but I hope you find it helpful. Next week, Whoopie Goldberg is my guest. Her mom died in 2010, and her brother, Clyde, five years later.

Grief comes when it comes. It comes in very strange ways. People would come up to me and say, I'm really sorry about your mom, and I'd say, Okay, thank you. I'd get mad because I'd want them to stop asking or saying, Are you okay? No, I'm not okay.

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 Blum. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dizula is our Technical Director, and Steve Ligtai is our Executive Producer. Support from nick Godzel, Ben Evans, Chuck Haddad, Charlie Moore, Kari Rubin, Kari Pritchard, Chimri Chetreet, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, Jamis Andrest, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namerot. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.