Ken Burns' History With Grief

Summary

Podcast Summary: All There Is with Anderson Cooper

Episode: Ken Burns' History With Grief

Date: November 5, 2025
Host: Anderson Cooper
Guest: Ken Burns

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Overview

In this moving episode, Anderson Cooper sits down with legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns for a candid, deeply personal conversation about grief, loss, family, and the enduring impact of early trauma. Drawing on their own experiences, Cooper and Burns explore how loss shapes individuals, manifests across generations, and can, paradoxically, fuel creativity and empathy. The discussion balances anguish with hope, touches on the complexities of American attitudes toward grief, and offers hard-won insights on navigating pain and remembrance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Anderson’s Reflections on Family, Memory, and Generational Cycles

• Anderson opens the episode grounding listeners in his own experience with loss – sifting through old family photographs and discovering a rare video of his father, Wyatt Cooper, which triggers powerful memories and emotions.
  • “It’s a bit like looking at a stranger. There’s so much about him I still don’t know, and so much I’ve forgotten over time.” (00:16)
• He shares poignant anecdotes about found family treasures, such as letters from his grandmother to his dad addressed “Dear Buddy” – a nickname he now, subconsciously, calls his own son.
  • “I started occasionally calling my son Wyatt Buddy … I’d forgotten that was the nickname he was called in the small town of Quinton, Mississippi, where he grew up.” (02:29)
• Anderson draws parallels between his own rituals with his children and his father’s, such as cleaning a spring together in the woods, reflecting on how cycles repeat through families.

Grief as Foundational and Formative

• Ken Burns discusses how his mother’s death from cancer when he was 11 irrevocably shaped his life, fueling both his insecurities and his drive.
  • “We forget that these losses are often the most important and animating aspects of who we are, that … sometimes our accomplishments are issuing out of that.” (03:28)
• Burns recalls the constant awareness of impending loss and describes being told as a child that his mother’s illness was terminal.
  • “They told us when I was seven years old that she was going to die within six months.” (07:09)
  • “I would blow the candles out at my birthday, wishing she’d come back. So that was the secret I held with the universe.” (08:28)

The Enduring Nature of Grief

• Both men speak to the never-ending “half-life” of grief, the sense of isolation it brings, and the ways it drives them in work and life.
  • “So the half life of grief is endless. And that’s okay, because it is an engine of accomplishment …” – Ken Burns (10:17)
• They describe the challenge of letting go, as if to do so would be a betrayal of their loved ones.
  • “If I let go of this, then you’re betraying them in some way.” – Anderson Cooper (20:08)

Work, Achievement, and the Roots of Drive

• Both Anderson and Ken trace their relentless drive for achievement to early losses and insecurity.
  • “I started working to earn money when I was like, 12 because I was very concerned about … financial stability and safety … I knew I would end up supporting her one day.” – Anderson (17:01)
  • “I also started working and have never stopped working. It’s almost like the red shoes … You can’t take them off because there are too many people that need that support.” – Ken Burns (17:42)
  • “Nothing is big enough, by the way.” – Ken Burns (18:07)

Rituals of Remembrance and Making Meaning

• Ken recounts the years he and his brother spent searching for their mother’s ashes, culminating in a bittersweet memorial.
  • “We tracked the widow down to Florida … went out there and the guy with the little filing cabinet goes, yes, she’s with 28 other cremains … We were able to put [a plaque].” (12:41)
  • “The date is never lost. And it’s … not always the immense pain of the loss, but it’s not going to go away.” (13:50)
• Ken describes naming his granddaughter after his mother as lifting a generational pall:
  • “My oldest daughter had my first grandchild, a daughter whom she named Lila … the black crepe has disappeared …” (33:48)

The American Experience of Grief

• The conversation examines how American culture has sidelined and privatized grief, shifting from a once-public practice to something hidden.
  • “History has given me solace to know that grief is a landscape generations of people have found themselves in and found a way to walk through …” – Anderson (05:14)
  • “I think it has to do with consumerism, which means you focus on what’s happening now … pretending that there’s going to be an exception made in your case and you’re going to live forever. And it just isn’t going to happen.” – Ken Burns (39:03)
• Anderson associates the privatization of grief with the American pursuit of happiness, positing that grief feels unwelcome in a society chasing constant happiness.
  • “If everybody’s pursuing happiness in what they think it means, grief is not welcome in that conversation.” (39:10)

Processing vs. Avoiding Grief

• Both agree that active engagement with grief—confronting pain and loss rather than avoiding them—is ultimately rewarding, bringing connection, release, and sometimes reconciliation.
  • “It is only once you turn to the grief, the pain which I ran from always, that you actually get the reward which is feeling again or feeling your loved one again.” – Anderson (27:12)
  • “Anxiety is a kind of friend, right? It’s keeping you from the thing that really hurts … to pierce through it and to be able to sob …” – Ken Burns (27:38)
• Ken tells the story of his daughter overcoming her fear of the vacuum cleaner as a metaphor for facing pain:
  • “To sit on the vacuum cleaner is to face your fears.” (25:19)

The Gifts and Burdens of Grief

• The men reflect on how grief, while isolating, can also foster empathy, drive, and creativity, if transformed rather than denied.
  • “Grief, actually, as painful as it is ... is also a gift that can’t be squandered either. We can’t not try to transform it ... into something that … could help other people.” – Ken Burns (19:28)
• Burns offers three “truths” for surviving hard times:
  • “This will pass. Get help from others. And the hardest, be kind to yourself.” (41:15)
• Both recognize the cycle of inherited pain but acknowledge the healing potential of confronting it openly.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We’re more defined by these losses than we are by the Nobel Prize or the Oscar nomination … None of those things matter.” – Ken Burns (23:33)
• “The cycles of history in the world and in families play out across generations in patterns we only sometimes see.” – Anderson Cooper (02:54)
• “If we can’t let loss and grief be part of our common language, then the stuff that we did as little boys to ourselves happens.” – Ken Burns (41:09)
• “Love multiplies. And I think it’s the only equation in the universe that I know to be absolutely [true].” – Ken Burns (37:17)
• “I see your films and they’re drenched in grief and they’re drenched in connection and emotion. You’re an emotional archaeologist.” – Anderson Cooper (31:31)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:02–03:28 | Anderson’s personal reflections on memory, loss, and family cycles
• 03:28–05:14 | Introduction of Ken Burns; the roots of grief in childhood loss
• 06:43–09:27 | Ken’s story of his mother’s illness and the enduring impact
• 10:17–14:57 | The half-life of grief, isolation, and its effect on daily life and work
• 17:01–19:50 | Economic insecurity, work as a response to loss, and “the red shoes” metaphor
• 25:19 | “Sit on the vacuum cleaner”: confronting pain as a path to growth
• 27:12–28:43 | Facing grief to reconnect with feeling and memory
• 33:48–36:39 | Naming a granddaughter after a lost matriarch; cycles and healing
• 39:03–41:09 | The privatization of grief in America and the necessity of communal language for loss
• 41:15–41:40 | Ken Burn’s three truths for enduring hard times

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Tone & Atmosphere

• The episode is raw, unsentimental, yet compassionate. Both Cooper and Burns are forthright about their vulnerabilities, often punctuating sadness with moments of humor or gentle self-mockery. Their language is direct, thoughtful, and at times poetic, inviting listeners into the intimate work of mourning and memory.

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a rare, unfiltered look at how loss weaves through lived experience, shaping both public achievement and private longing. Listeners are left with a sense of shared humanity—loneliness mitigated by understanding, pain made meaningful by presence and compassion. Both Anderson Cooper and Ken Burns demonstrate how even the deepest wounds can, with honesty and courage, become engines for connection, creativity, and love.

Transcript

[Anderson Cooper]

The last couple days, I've been sifting through old photographs of my dad. He worked as an actor and screenwriter in Los Angeles, the 1950s, long before he met my mom. It's a bit like looking at a stranger. There's so much about him I still don't know, and so much I've forgotten over time. I've never had any videos of my dad as he was when I was a kid. And I've struggled to remember how he moved, to the look in his eyes when he talked. Still, photos don't give you that. A few weeks ago, I got an email. An archivist found a TV interview my dad gave on Mississippi Public Television, and she sent me the link to watch. I waited a few minutes. I was nervous. And then I clicked on the link, and suddenly, there he was, alive. And I want to show it to you. I want you to meet my dad, Wyatt Cooper. I'm at home. Anywhere I am, I really am. Because whether I'm in a big city or in the country, I am the same person. And in the city, in New York City, for instance, my kids and I go into the park. And Central park in New York is a marvelous place. We have a spring that belongs to us. It belongs to us because only we know about it. We go there and we clean leaves out of the mouth of the spring. And when the water gurgles gratefully out and goes down the thing, we have affected this so we have had something to do with the soil and with growing things. And that exists in the city as it does in the country. I watched him, how he moved his hands, the way he listened and connected with the person he was speaking to. And I remembered the feel of those hands and the way he connected to me when we spoke. I remember those eyes looking into mine. Not just the brightness of the blue, but the delight and wonder and love I saw in them. That spring he was talking about in Central Park, I'd forgotten we used to go there. Let me see. Here, let me try. But about six months ago, I found a spring in the forest near my house. And every weekend, my kids and I have been going there to clear out leaves. And I now delight in seeing my Wyatt and Sebastian help the water grow, gurgle gratefully out, as my dad once did with me and my brother. I see my kids with the same eyes he once saw me. One more thing. Several months ago, I started occasionally calling my son Wyatt Buddy. Now, I don't really know why. It's not a name I've ever used for anyone. Ever. But a few days ago I found a bunch of letters my dad's mom and his sister sent him over the years. Each began the same way. Dear Buddy, I'd forgotten that was the nickname he was called in the small town of Quinton, Mississippi, where he grew up. The cycles of history in the world and in families play out across generations in patterns we only sometimes see. My guest on the podcast today has made history come alive for millions of Americans. Ken Burns is the most well known documentary filmmaker of our time. You've probably seen some of his award winning series on public television, baseball, jazz, the Civil War. What you don't know, what I didn't know, is how early loss and grief has shaped his entire life.

[Ken Burns]

We forget that these losses are often the most important and animating aspects of who we are, that we are not just defined by it, but sometimes our accomplishments are issuing out of that.

[Anderson Cooper]

We'll have more with Ken Burns in a moment. Welcome back. I've started a weekly companion show to this podcast. It's called All There Is Live. It's live streamed on our Grief community [e-mail] allthereis every Thursday night at 9:15pm if you can't catch it live, it'll still be available there to watch for days after. The first episode was last week and I spoke to a podcast listener who's become a friend. Her name is Mary Lahikainen. Her son Ian died of glioblastoma something.

[Ken Burns]

That morning, the last morning of hospice.

[Anderson Cooper]

I needed to hold him and I.

[Ken Burns]

Got in behind him and had him.

[Anderson Cooper]

Against my chest and I told him, I said, it's okay Ian, I've got you. I love you.

[Ken Burns]

I could feel his heart beating and then it stopped.

[Anderson Cooper]

And just to have been able to hold him at that moment. How lucky am I to have been holding Ian? How lucky am I and to have had him.

[Ken Burns]

What a gift.

[Anderson Cooper]

That's all there is live Thursday nights, 9.15pm My guest is Ken Burns, one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time. His new series, the Revolutionary War will be seen on public television starting November 16th. Thank you so much for doing this.

[Ken Burns]

My pleasure.

[Anderson Cooper]

I found in my dad's things two self published books from two people in the 1800s about the children they lost. These are grief books that these families put out the losses that previous generations had before penicillin, before other antibiotics. It's stunning and it's haunting to me. But history has given me solace to know that grief is a landscape generations of people have found themselves in and found A way to walk through from.

[Ken Burns]

The beginning of time. And we spend a good deal of our time, particularly in a modern age, trying to avoid it, trying to design the most sort of perfect circumstances, the equivalent of a gated community in every aspect of one's life.

[Anderson Cooper]

Emotionally as well.

[Ken Burns]

Emotionally, most definitely. And certainly in my experience, too, watching myself and trying to come out of that or break out of those gates. But what we do is we forget that these losses are often the most important and animating aspects of who we are, that we are not just defined by it, but sometimes our accomplishments are issuing out of that. I don't think I'd be sitting here talking to you, Anderson, if my mother hadn't developed cancer when I was a little boy and died when I was 11 years old, a few months short of my 12th birthday.

[Anderson Cooper]

You don't think you would have had the career, the life path that you've had?

[Ken Burns]

Definitely not. There was never a moment, Anderson, when I wasn't aware that there was a sort of Damocles hanging over our family, our life. There was something wrong with my mother. She would go away for a long time. She'd be in the hospital, she would come back. She had a radical mastectomy. There was all of the disfiguration from.

[Anderson Cooper]

The time you were just memories. She was ill.

[Ken Burns]

They told us when I was seven years old that she was going to die within six months.

[Anderson Cooper]

Wait, somebody told you when you were seven years old?

[Ken Burns]

My parents set us down, and it was, in retrospect, not a good thing to do. We knew she was sick, but they basically said that this had metastasized and that it was terminal, and they thought it would be six months. And my mom is so heroic and so strong. She just came and said, I will see you to junior high. She said, and that meant seventh grade. That was like. I was in second grade. That was, like, so far away. I kind of almost go, whew. You know, I've got some time. And she missed it by a few months, but she would just face all this stuff. We brought a hospital bed into the living room. She didn't want to be in her bedroom. She would hold court there. I can remember her climbing up a set of stairs, you know, the way you know your mother. The pleats of her skirts, and you're following her up. And she would take this flask out to get a shot of brandy to give her more oxygen for her lungs, because she'd lost one lung and was now basically on a half.

[Anderson Cooper]

And how old was she when she died.

[Ken Burns]

She died on April 28, 1965. In the days after, I was immensely sort of relaxed. I was aware that she was gone. I would dream that she was not gone. I would blow the candles out at my birthday, wishing she'd come back. So that was the secret I held with the universe. In fact, many years, April 28, the date would be up ahead, and then all of a sudden it would be receding. I'm never present. From 1965 on. It just didn't happen. And it was part of the keeping her alive, of not dealing with the fact that she was gone. And after she passed away. And I would say passed away, I would say deceased in these awkward, anachronistic phrases. Never say die.

[Anderson Cooper]

You know, I try not to use pass away. Cause I mean, I try to. If somebody. I try to use the verbiage somebody uses. But in my own life, I. I say somebody died.

[Ken Burns]

I had to learn how to do that. We're now 60 and a half years since she's been gone, which is way too long to be without a mother. And I feel it every day. Her name was Lila, by the way. L Y L A Lila Smith Tupper Burns.

[Anderson Cooper]

And you feel it every day, the loss.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. So I love baseball, for example. And people would say, yeah, I loved it when my dad and I could get together and my mom and I did baseball as this thing because nobody ever came to my games. It was this stuff I did alone. And a good deal of my life right now is like that, too kind of isolated. I'm in touch with people all the time, but also completely, you know, alone.

[Anderson Cooper]

I'm exactly the same way.

[Ken Burns]

And so you've got the social aspects of whatever the professional life is, but there's also, you know, you come in and you take off your coat and you're just. You just want to talk to your dog and.

[Anderson Cooper]

And that's it does that. I mean. Sorry. I was hoping that would go away.

[Ken Burns]

So the half life of grief is endless. And that's okay because it is an engine of accomplishment and of. I mean, it took me. So I'm almost 12, 11 years old by the time I'm 39, 40, I'm in the middle of a real life crisis. Anxiety came in and there was doubt and worry and all of these crushing things. And I remember speaking to a therapist about the divorce I was going through. And she looked at me and said, you really think she's coming back? And I knew she didn't mean my wife. And I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. It was that conversation that led me to my father in law, a fairly eminent psychologist. And I told him, just off the top of my head, I said, I seem to be keeping my mother alive. And he looked at me as if he knew all of this all along. And he says, I bet you you blew out your candles on your birthday cake growing up wishing she'd come back. And I go, yeah, how did you know? And then he listed two or three other intimate things only I knew that I was doing superstitious things, stuff that was avoiding dealing with it. And then he said to me, but look what you do for a living. I said, what? He said, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And then from that moment on, I realized that I needed to go back and repossess the loss and reclaim what actually happened, no matter how painful, to figure out how to heal myself. My mother died, my father had mental illness. And so we had a funeral, but nobody ever picked up the ashes. And here I am now, almost 40 years old, and there's no there there. There's not a grave, there's not anything. And I went, this is not repressed memory. This is just set aside. I mean, how could I have gone that long and not known where she was or whatever was left of her? And then me and my younger brother Rick, who's also a documentary filmmaker, we indebted to go back and try to find the funeral home had gone out of business. We tracked the widow down to Florida who said that when we had unclaimed.

[Anderson Cooper]

The widow of the owner of the funeral home.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, that when we had unclaimed ashes, that we sent them to this cemetery way outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we had lived and where she had died. And we went out there and the guy with the little filing cabinet goes, yes, she's with 28 other cremains, the euphemism for this.

[Anderson Cooper]

And I said, cremated remains, cremaines.

[Ken Burns]

And could we pull them out? And he goes, no, they've all dissolved. Well, could we put a plaque? And so we go out there and find the place and we're able to put. It's not one of these things with above ground markers, but you can put something that lies flat. And then brought my dad out, who had been the sort of agent of the forgetting because he had not dealt with it and just had not bothered to do it. We went to the minister at her church, the man she knew had died, and now this was the replacement and sob to him. And then I've never lost April 28th. In fact, I probably once a day see it on a clock or on a sports countdown thing.

[Anderson Cooper]

You see like the numbers 428, 428.

[Ken Burns]

And I've got four daughters and I would take them, the older daughters, to Ann Arbor every April 28th and we would have an elaborate feast. And then after a while I said, I don't have to go there every year, but the date is never lost. And it's. I don't always feel the immense pain of the loss, but I'm sorry, it's not going to go away.

[Anderson Cooper]

But what I was asking. Well, it's twofold. I was hoping it would go away, the pain of it. Although I'm really just allowing myself to feel the pain of it for the first time in my life after my dad died when I was 10 years old and my brother 10 years later. But I think the loneliness and that sense of isolation, I mean, it's an effort to engage with people. I can do it for work. But I've been in my head this entire time and I was hoping by feeling the losses finally in my life, all that would dissipate and I would somehow be engaged more with other human beings. And that hasn't happened with you.

[Ken Burns]

You say it's happened a little bit. There is the work that we've done, the work that you're doing is all good and it all is connecting. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to be some ideal of happiness that doesn't really exist for anybody gregarious and whatever. Sometimes you'll find the people that are the life of the party are themselves beset. This is where they lose themselves and that we lose ourselves in other ways and interior dialogue that no one could possibly understand. And just sitting here talking to you, I mean, it's clear we've had very similar circumstances and very similar, completely understandable reactions to those circumstances. And the way you button them down and then the way you try to bring air into this miasma and just let it breathe a little bit, it's not going to change overnight. And then maybe the work we do is the compensation for. I mean, if I wake the dead, if my job is to make Abraham Lincoln come alive, or now George Washington with this, or some ordinary foot soldier from the revolution come alive, maybe that's the compensation. The question is, and I have a really close friend and my co director on this, Sarah Botstein, and she always will say to me all the time. Take it in. There'll be something really great that happens, a great award, a great, wonderful thing.

[Anderson Cooper]

Yeah, I can't do that.

[Ken Burns]

And I can't do that. And she says, take it in. And every once in a while you get a glimpse. It's almost, in a way. And I don't know if this is your experience, and I'm not sure it's actually accurately a mental thought process that does this, but you're disrespecting if you let go of whatever internal sadness you're supposed to have or just the sense of loss or whatever it is. But I. But I know I have at times glimpsed and gone, wow, this is great. And most of the time, it's okay. What's the next thing?

[Anderson Cooper]

Yeah, I started working to earn money when I was like, 12 because I was very concerned about. I mean, may sound weird to some people, given my mom's last name, but financial stability and safety. And I knew I was on a financially shaky ship because my mom was amazing but not a business person. And I knew I would end up supporting her one day and supporting everybody one day. And that was very much in my mind when I was 12. And I used to say a prayer every night, which was, God, please keep me healthy so I can continue to work and earn enough money to take care of Mommy May, a nanny who I love, and Carter, my brother.

[Ken Burns]

I also started working and have never stopped working. It's almost like the red shoes. I mean, like, I put on the red shoes and it's. You can't take them off because there are too many people that need that support.

[Anderson Cooper]

I don't feel like I can stop. Everything will fall apart, and I believe everything will be taken away. And so I need to build up as big a cushion as possible.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. And nothing is big enough, by the way.

[Anderson Cooper]

Right? It will never be. No. And I'm actually doing damage. I mean, I'm taking time away from my kids because I have them on this treadmill that I cannot allow myself to get along.

[Ken Burns]

It's very interesting. I've been a single dad twice in my life now, and it's been one of the saving graces. Not that I would ever recommend divorce or the pain of that, but it has necessitated that at least half the time I am there and cannot have that excuse to go off someplace, you know? But I do think this idea of working and just having to keep doing, I've watched. I'm now at an age where I have friends who are retired or are Contemplating or making plans for retirement. And what about you? And you kind of look at them like, retire? What do you mean? I've got a thousand more stories to tell.

[Anderson Cooper]

Also, people work their whole lives to get mastery. And you know how to do what you do better than anybody. And you create things which are magical and important. God knows we need to understand our history, and we need to understand and look at ourselves. And you help us do that. You're so good at what you do. There is a satisfaction in that, even if you don't take it, in just knowing, oh, you know what? I know how to do this.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. Grief, actually, as painful as it is, as isolating as it can be for some people and the manifestations that it seems that both you and I have is also a gift that can't be squandered either. We can't not try to transform it at least into something that if it doesn't ultimately help us or we don't think it helps us, that could help other people.

[Anderson Cooper]

I keep saying to myself, like my dad, my nanny, who I was very close to, who really raised me after my dad died, they would not want me to be unhappy. They would not want me to feel disconnected. And yet I do think there is that element of, like, if I let.

[Ken Burns]

Go of this, then you're betraying them in some way.

[Anderson Cooper]

Yeah. They disappear altogether.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah. I don't think that happens. I think there must be a right way to put it, but I haven't found it. I just think that there's a kind of, you know, it's almost like this samurai ethic. You keep this kind of ascetic, right?

[Anderson Cooper]

And, like, you do something and it receives awards or it gets recognized, I immediately discount it and think, okay, it would be weakness if I allow this in. I need to just be on the next thing, like a shark who needs to keep moving.

[Ken Burns]

And it's not imposter syndrome either. You know, you're where you're supposed to be and you're doing the work, and, you know, it's good work. And I feel the same thing about my thing. I feel so lucky. I knew a couple months after I turned 12, my dad would let me stay up late on a school night and watch movies. And I watched him cry. He never cried when my mom was sick. He never cried when she died. And I wondered why. And he never cried at this impossibly sad funeral. And then, of course, never picked up the stuff. But here was this old movie called Odd man out with James Mason about the Irish Troubles. And he's crying and I said, I'm gonna be a filmmaker. So I'm.

[Anderson Cooper]

That was the moment you chose to be a filmmaker?

[Ken Burns]

Because I understood that it had provided him in all the complexity of his own life and mental illness, probably bipolar, don't know, a safe haven. And it was the movies and we love that. So by the time I'm 12, I know what I'm gonna do. By 18, I'm a documentary filmmaker. And by 22, I also know it's going to be in American history. I'm so lucky to know what I'm supposed to do. And yet I sit there also absent from the real experience of what I think I see other people having.

[Anderson Cooper]

God, I feel that so much absent from the experience other people are having. But do you feel the 12 year old boy that you were still okay?

[Ken Burns]

I was talking to my.

[Anderson Cooper]

Because I just woke up to feeling that little kid and it's been incredibly important.

[Ken Burns]

It's really important. And you have to love him in a way for all the grief and the pain and all the confusion. I have an experience where I'm 72 years old and I take the subway all the time and I bound up the stairs and I realized that there was a kid who was 8 or 9 or 10 years old, pre death kid, still worried about it, knew something was bad was going to happen, but I could feel that and I still feel that same person.

[Anderson Cooper]

But the thing of, well, I'm not gonna take this in, I gotta keep moving forward. To me that is the mental trick I developed when I was 9, 10, 11 years old, which was don't feel any of this stuff, just keep moving forward. If you feel it, it's gonna drag you down, it's gonna suck you down. And so don't celebrate your birthday and have never celebrated my birthday since. Don't take the good in because it's going to weaken you.

[Ken Burns]

That's right.

[Anderson Cooper]

It's going to drag you down.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, I have so many of that things. I can remember being the back of a station wagon of a new friend and the mother very innocently says, hi, what's your dad do? My dad's an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. And what does your mom do? And I would say she's deceased. Like I was some accountant, 45 years old with an actuarial table.

[Anderson Cooper]

You would say that when you were.

[Ken Burns]

I would say deceased when I was 12, 13 years old. And then the outer life was pretty common. I mean, if you said what was the greatest grade you were in? I'D say eighth grade, which was a couple years later. And everything was good. I was popular, but inside, inside was just roiling sense of loss. And I think that, as you said at the very beginning of this conversation, this is the inevitability of all human beings. None of us are getting out of here alive. None of us. We are more defined by these losses than we are by the Nobel Prize or the Oscar nomination or the Emmy or whatever. The thing is that our group tells us is the most important thing. None of those things matter. And in fact, how you free yourself of the needless suffering without losing the connection to these spirits of these people who are central to who we are, fathers and brothers and mothers.

[Anderson Cooper]

It's not just history that makes me realize how much suffering others have had. Early on, I started going to Somalia and the famine and Bosnia and all over and touching other people's pain, the incomprehensible suffering that exists in the world. And in comparison, my little suffering seems minimal compared to a mother who's lost eight of 12 children because they don't have a 25 cent antibiotic.

[Ken Burns]

My second daughter, Lily, she was as a baby just terrified of the vacuum cleaner. And her mom would have to make sure she was asleep or outside or at a neighbor's to vacuum. And one day, and this is really important, I think, to you and me, one day, Amy, my first wife, said she just appeared at the doorway while she was vacuuming and walked over and sat on the vacuum cleaner, sat on this monster, just sat on it. So in our family we say to sit on the vacuum cleaner is to face your fears. And we do this all the time. And you try to remind yourself that that's what you need to do to move into this. So I took Siddhartha Mukherjee's book, the Emperor of All Maladies, about cancer. This thing that had taken my mom and I had a hard even saying the word cancer, let alone that, and then spent many years working with colleagues to make a film, a series about cancer. The Emperor of All Maladies, which was a way of sort of sitting on the vacuum cleaner, which you're going into Somalia or Rwanda or all of these places is about. It's confronting the human experience. And the human experience is lost. But I can't say, Anderson, that even sitting on that particular vacuum cleaner changed my relationship to that loss. And I think as I get older that maybe it's not supposed to. I just have to have some new understanding to make room for it and to tolerate that 11 year old or maybe it's the 3 year old that knew. Or maybe it's the 5 year old that knew it was coming. Or Maybe it's the 12 year old who had had to absorb it to just make room for that boy.

[Anderson Cooper]

It has been a revelation for me that it is only once you turn to the grief, the pain which I ran from always that you actually get the reward which is feeling again or feeling your loved one again. Yeah, I couldn't feel my dad because I couldn't allow myself to feel the pain of his loss.

[Ken Burns]

I cannot describe to you how extraordinary after years of anxiety, which is the avoidance of pain. I mean, anxiety is a kind of friend, right? It's keeping you from the thing that really hurts, to pierce through it and to be able to sob in a therapist's office or to be able to sit in this Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan with a man I'd never met before, with my brother angel, just sob. And read a letter we'd written to our mother that was filled with all of the pain of loss and the anger at leaving and all of the mess that we inherited and finding notes that she would leave to her mother in law, my father's mother, who was a wonderful woman saying, I'm dying, Bobby, can't take care of them. Who will take care of my little boys. And understanding how fragile Rick and I were in the world and we made it, you know, we kind of muddled through him. But she was amazing. I think she willed herself to stay alive for Rick and me.

[Anderson Cooper]

I found letters of my dad recently and he's writing the same thing which is I've got to stay alive for these boys.

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, this is it. And this is. How different is that from your prayer? You know, let me stay healthy so that I can support this person and this person and my nanny and this person and all the people I love. My dad died way too young too, of mental illness and other things in his all too short life. My dad was not great, but not bad either. And the ability to have these cathartic things. But I'll tell you, Anderson, I lost one of my best friends two days ago. And I mean, why is that not on the tip of my tongue right now? Why is it taking it this long to tell you Ron Sullivan was his name from Centiped, New Hampshire, and I've known him for 30 years and he left me an anguish call from the hospital that he had maybe a year to live. And I called him right back when I got the message and left him all the. Not the Bromides, but all of the compassion that I could summon. I love this man. He's a big bear of a lovely human being and had been through a lot of health stuff and misdiagnosis and finally needs this. And then this happened, and then there's a new thing. And his wife had called back and said, we're going home to hospice. And he got home barely a day or so and left. And my youngest daughters think of Ron as their godfather. And he remembered every birthday and when we saw him, he would give them way too much money for ice cream and stuff like that. And I have spent the better part of the last 48, however long it's been, doing what I have always done, which is trying to figure out not to react to the loss of Ron, you know, and my 20 year old, who's taking a junior semester abroad, calls in the middle of the night sobbing that she misses him. And my youngest away at school calls and every day says, and I really miss Ron, and can you send me a picture? Right. So there are people around me that seem to know how to process when.

[Anderson Cooper]

You hear them say those things.

[Ken Burns]

I just see daylight and I just want to run towards it. And I go, oh, God bless them that they're not. They don't have this.

[Anderson Cooper]

But does it make you. I think it would make me realize, here's that wall again. Like, why am I not saying this?

[Ken Burns]

Here's that wall again. It's better than the way the wall was for so many years. Unknown, unaware. The wall's there. Yeah, that's what I guess human beings do. It's certainly what this human being does. And I've now met another human being that does the same thing. So I guess this is something that we do. But, yeah, the wall's still there.

[Anderson Cooper]

I see your films and they're drenched in grief and they're drenched in connection and emotion. And it's not dry history. You're an emotional archaeologist, and I get that. And a lot of the stuff that I think I do best is going someplace and being able to touch people in the middle of the worst thing that's ever happened to them. And you help other people feel things, and yet we don't allow ourselves to.

[Ken Burns]

Feel things or we don't permit the full expression of it or the unconscious expression of it. Like, I'll be working on a film and Abraham Lincoln dies, or Jackie Robinson dies, or Louis Armstrong dies, and I cry. I'm watching the film and I cr. And I'm grateful for that release, just like my dad, maybe that's why I'm making movies, to have a death scene where James Mason essentially commits suicide by cop at the end of this Odd man out by Sir Carol Reid, a really great, great film that he cried at. And that's the thing we're also doing that is okay. There's pathologies and some toxicities to the way we behave. We both know something's wrong with the way we've conducted our lives. And at the same time, these spirits are still there.

[Anderson Cooper]

We'll have more of my conversation with Ken Burns in just a moment. But first, if you want to listen or watch past episodes of the podcast, you can do that at our community [e-mail] allthereis it's where you can also watch our new weekly companion show, All There Is live Thursday nights at 9:15pm Eastern and catch past episodes of it as well. We'll be right back with more from Ken Burns. My five year old, Wyatt, who's named after my dad, asked me lately about death all the time because I've talked to him about it. Like, did my grandmother die before I was born? And I've said I believe they are watching over us and I believe my mom would be so happy to see you and that my dad is smiling. And I would have never said those things before because I don't think I believed them before. But I actually do believe them.

[Ken Burns]

I think I do. It's, you know, that's walking in Memphis. Are you a Christian, ma'? Am? I am tonight. You know, there's a kind of, there's something really powerful about what it releases and what it, I mean, we know the pain that it's caused, but there's a great thing. I mean, I've got one of the happiest endings of all, which is my ultimate oldest daughter, Sarah, who never met her grandmother. Of course, none of my four daughters have met their grandmother. The name Lila was never said, but the name was itself draped in black crepe because your mom's name, my mom's name, we said mommy and still do. But In January of 2011, my, my oldest daughter had my first grandchild, a daughter whom she named Lila. And so all of a sudden the black crepe has disappeared. We say the word Lila all the time with excitement and glee. She's old enough, the same age as my youngest, so they're best friends, not aunt and niece. And she gave me the greatest gift, which was taking the Paul off the name at least. And we say Lila all the time and the name doesn't have the associations it did. It's just a wonderful, wonderful gift. I can't begin. I mean, this gal has given me many, many gifts. She recited one Christmas morning, the Gettysburg Address as her present to me, flawlessly, standing in her nightgown twice.

[Anderson Cooper]

She knows her audience.

[Ken Burns]

She knows her audience. And there was an awkwardness. I was a single dad, and I thought, oh, I'd forgotten something. And Lily was looking up my second daughter's. And I went, oh, did I forget something? And she said, no, dad. Sarah has one more gift. And she stood in the early Christmas morning light and recited flawlessly. I mean, not a single thing. And no emphasis on the prepositions. It's people, not of, by, and for. It's people, people, people, people. Got it all perfectly. And I'm sitting there just drowning in it.

[Anderson Cooper]

I just wrote my son that's named Wyatt after my dad. And I started calling him Buddy for some reason, not something I have ever called anybody in my life. I'm not like, hey, Buddy. And then I've been going through all these boxes of my dad's things, which have never been gone through, and I'm reading all these letters to him from his mom in a small town in Mississippi, and they're all addressed to Buddy. And I did not remember or realize that was my dad's nickname, Buddy. And everybody called him Buddy Cooper. So these cycles that repeat in families is fascinating to me.

[Ken Burns]

And they ought to be telling us something. And we keep forgetting that maybe we're practicing here, right? And maybe the next time we do it differently or better or I don't.

[Anderson Cooper]

Know, we've set up a voicemail for people to call in if there's something they've learned in their grief that would be helpful for others. And we've received about 7,000 messages. And it is the most incredible repository of human emotion. And just the ocean of loss and feeling and love out there is extraordinary.

[Ken Burns]

I live in New Hampshire, and we're a part of political state. And I have one political sign up that isn't political. It just says, love multiplies. And I think it's the only equation in the universe that I know to be absolutely thing. And that I think in the work that we do, in the way that this thing for you works so well with the response is this manifestation of that we need each other. I make films about the us, but I also make films about us. And the intimacy of that is where all of the stuff happens. Certainly there's the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and Even the controversy of the US but all of the intimacy of us and we and our. And the need to replicate that, where we, no matter how many people around us, are part of that us, the singularity, the aloneness, the solitude of grief is so, at times oppressive. But also it's sometimes those connections that make me feel so alive, even in the suffering, that there's something that is very much alive about having to keep front and center these things.

[Anderson Cooper]

You talked about the pursuit of happiness. I'm very interested in the history of grief in America and the privatization of it. Loss and grief was part of everybody. Everybody's daily life, everybody's life.

[Ken Burns]

And the widow wore black for a.

[Anderson Cooper]

Year and black bunting was hung. People's bodies were displayed. That became privatized in America as people stopped dying at home and started dying in hospitals. Do you know much about why that privatization took place?

[Ken Burns]

No. It did, and I think it has to do with consumerism, which means you focus on what's happening now, what I'm doing.

[Anderson Cooper]

Well, I wonder how much the idea of the pursuit of happiness, Happiness, how to reach happiness, grief doesn't really fit into that equation. If everybody's pursuing happiness in what they think it means, grief is not welcome in that conversation.

[Ken Burns]

I agree. So I think we have to go back and rearrange the molecules of what we assume the pursuit of happiness. I mean, he could have followed John Locke, Jefferson and said life, liberty and property, because that's really what it was about. Remember, it was only going to be an aristocracy of landed property men who were going to raise, run the thing. But in order to win the war, you had to let teenagers and ne' er do wells and recent immigrants who had nothing to fight this war for you. You're gonna have to give them something. So democracy is not the object of the American Revolution. It's a consequence. And pursuit of happiness is the inscrutable phrase at the heart. It's even not just happiness. You can define it as material stuff and miss the point. It's about the responsibilities of citizenship and lifelong learning. But the key word is pursuit. It's process. You're just gonna have to work with this and work through the grief and work through the stuff and all the walls that we've created for ourselves. I think there have been so many things that we've done that have separated us from this. We've separated ourselves, and we don't want to know about it. And when I said consumerism, I meant the focus on youth. And everything is pretending that there's going to be an exception made in your case and you're going to live forever. And it just isn't going to happen. Everybody within the sound of my voice, we're not getting out of here alive. That is the true fact of everything. And somebody asked Plato what was his philosophy of life. And he said, preparing for death. So I think we've done ourselves an extraordinary disservice at a social, political level, but at an intimate level, if we can't let loss and grief be part of our common language, then the stuff that we did as little boys to ourselves happens.

[Anderson Cooper]

You had a saying of three things that were very important to you. What were the three things?

[Ken Burns]

This will pass. Get help from others. And the hardest, be kind to yourself. And there's a yes, but for every problem that every person has and there are no real yes buts to that. It will change. Maybe it will get worse, but more than likely it'll get a little bit better.

[Anderson Cooper]

This won't last. Get help from others. Be kind to yourself. Those are all things in grief as well that are important to remember. They apply to grief.

[Ken Burns]

My acquiring of those three things, one of my daughters calls them the truths. And I said, let's just call them things. They are a product of trying to work through and negotiate this complicated dynamic between, between my mother's death and me. And let's just say. Lila Smith Tupper Burns.

[Anderson Cooper]

Ken Burns, thank you so much.

[Ken Burns]

Thank you.

[Anderson Cooper]

Next week on All There is comedian and cancer survivor Tig Notaro. It's a funny and moving conversation about loss. Tig's close friend, poet Andrea Gibson recently died and Tig was at Andrea's bedside.

[Ken Burns]

I have to say it's really the first time I've experienced a death in the way that I have where I really feel Andrea, and I don't know what that is, but the grief leading up and the grief I feel, you know how tricky it is. You go about your day and you're doing all right and then all of a sudden a truck parks itself on your chest and you can't do anything because it's like it's so confusing that Andrea's gone.

[Anderson Cooper]

Join me on Thursdays at 9:15pm for my new weekly companion show called All There Is Live. It'll be live streamed on our grief community [e-mail] allthereis every Thursday night at 9:15pm we can come together there, talk grief and not be alone. You can also follow us on our new Instagram account, AllThereIs. And the number again for our new voicemail box 404-827-1805. Live wherever you are in your grief. Thanks for listening.