Kelsey Grammer: A Brother’s Love and Loss

Last night, I sat on the anchor desk and read the news about Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, murdered in their home. There is no shortage of sadness tonight, not to mention almost unimaginable shock and horror. I didn't know Rob personally, but his work touched me. Are you okay? When I first saw Stand By Me, I remember crying in the theater. It was a coming-of-age film about childhood friendships, and it made me reflect on my own painful coming-of-age after my dad died. Why don't you just make 10 louder, and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder? These go to 11. I also loved his mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap. It remains one of my favorite movies of all time. In September, I interviewed Rob about a Spinal Tap sequel he had made, and I'm so glad. When we started talking, I think he was surprised and definitely amused at how much I love Spinal Tap and how many of the lines I knew by heart. When we first did it, people came up to me and they said, I don't understand this. Why would you make a movie about a band nobody's ever heard of? And one, you know, why wouldn't you make it about the Beatles? They thought it was a real band. They thought it was a real documentary. Anybody in the world who does this hand gesture, I mean, you know it's from Spinal Tap. Like, you know, it's like the puppet show in Spinal Tap, and someone's just sitting there like this. You know it. You know everything. You know every line from the film, more than I do. I'm so glad I got to have that conversation with him, not just because he seemed to have a good time, but because at the end of it, I got to tell him directly just how much his work had meant to me. You have brought me so much joy through this and so much work that you've done. And also, I mean, you are also a very committed patriot and citizen of this country and concerned about this country. Yeah. Yeah. I just think you're awesome. Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for talking with me. Wow. It's my pleasure. Yeah. I hope I didn't just fall into the traffic just riffing, giving you Spinal Tap lines. Like a fanboy? It's all right. I don't mind it. Okay. Rob Reiner, thank you so much. Thank you. I realize I don't say those kind of things to people enough. It's something my mom used to do, and I can see the impact it can have on someone. So now it's something I'm trying to do more. I've been listening to your voice. You can always call and leave one at 1-404-827-1805. Many of you have called in to talk about your loved ones who were murdered or died violent deaths. My name is Barbara, and my older son, Nicholas, was murdered at 17. The one thing I have learned is to keep your memory alive, to remember my beautiful son, who will forever be young. So with grief also comes. Some kind of comfort there always in my heart, and be able to enjoy my son that's still here, my grandchildren. Oh, I see so much of the ones that I've lost in them. There is no day that magically it goes away, but there are days that you can see the brightness in life. My name is Masuda Lutfi, and I just wanted to remind everyone that grief hits and waves, and sometimes it's on a random Monday afternoon. Sitting here in front of the roundtable, picking up our Monday night pizza, we just have to sit with it and remind ourselves that grief and love go hand in hand. I lost my brother, Saeed Nauid Lutfi. He tried to stop a man with a gun on the freeway. He got shot five times in the head as he was giving the 911 operator. The man's license plate. My brother was an Air Force veteran of 14 years, a California boy that served his country. Over a year later in the courtroom, I used 11 minutes to look my brother's murderer in the eye and tell him what a beautiful human being my brother was. And I see signs every single day. I see little messages from my brother. Our connection with the afterlife is just a thinly veiled curtain, and he's there. And he's helping us become better human beings on the other side. And I'll continue to ride this wave, even in a roundtable parking lot on a random Monday night while I'm picking up my kid's pizza. My name is Kim. I wanted to tell you, Anderson, that, um, something is not today so profound. It's about your dad. You said that you can feel him now, and you feel like you knew him better than when he was alive. I lost my dad when I was 18. He was murdered. And that's how I feel about him, that I know him now. I didn't know him then, because he had spent my entire life in and out of jail, and then came home and was murdered within a year. And I want to get to a place where you said you could feel him. I don't. I don't. I don't feel him, and I haven't in a very long time. Now I realize now that I have to let this all pour out of me so that I can be happy. Because I think for so long I was afraid to be happy, because it would mean that I didn't feel the true sadness of the weight of him being gone. My guest today has experienced that same kind of violent loss. Kelsey Grammer was 20. When his sister, Karen, was murdered, she was 18. We'll be right back with my conversation with Kelsey. My guest today is Kelsey Grammer. His sister, Karen, was murdered in 1975 when she was 18 years old. Kelsey was 20. And though he went on to star in hugely successful series like Cheers and Frasier, his sister's kidnapping and brutal slaying and the unresolved questions and emotions he's had surrounding it were never far from his mind. He finally set out to answer those questions, which he writes about in a recently published memoir, Karen, A Brother Remembers. Kelsey, thank you so much for doing this. I don't think a lot of people knew the extent to which loss was such an early part of your life. Your grandfather, who you deeply loved, Gordon, died of cancer when you were 12 years old. Your dad was shot and killed when you were 13. Your sister was murdered. When she was 18, you were 20. Five years later, your two half-brothers, Stephen and Billy, were killed in a shark attack. Did you know the impact that loss and grief had on your life? Or did you realize it early on? I don't know if I actually ever let it become a presence in my life. I think it was always sort of sneaking around in the background a little bit. There were decisions I had made as a young man, probably as a result of it. One was always that. I think. I was going to die young. And I thought that I should live as though I might die the next day. There's so many things you write in the book which I think are so powerful and I relate to. You write, No event in my lifetime since Karen's death has gone untouched by some measure of grief. Filtered. Every joy filtered by a touch of grief. Yeah. A lot of my living had been attenuated, diminished just a little bit by the fact that this grief was sort of just an abiding presence in my life. That always just took a little bit away from it, from the present. And I did try to apologize to all the people that maybe they felt there was some distance, a sense of a gulf maybe that couldn't be breached. But I live in life now in a way that I had never allowed myself. It is something you said toward the ends of the book. You write, Grief kept me from living. I apologize with the regret of a half century lived part way. I've always described it to myself as I've lived half a life that. By not allowing me to really acknowledge grief, to never have grieved, I've sort of lived never fully present. And I actually think the process you've undergone is one I'm sort of trying to undergo, which is accepting grief to some degree in my life. And so that I can experience full joy because I don't think you can have joy without having felt loss. I agree with that. I do agree. I'm. I applaud your courage. It is a courageous step to try to live that way, to get into the mix of your own life and find that way out, that doorway to joy. I live in amazing joy now. I mean, I sit in the room with my kids. We're sitting in the screening room right now. At night, this is where we'll all gather. And we watched the awful last installment of Jaws last night as a family. Even a bad installment is fun with family. More fun for the family, right? So we're all just sitting here just talking. And, you know, the movie was kind of just down in the background. And there's just this joy surrounding me. And I can kind of feel this. I'm lifted. I'm lighter than I used to be. Much lighter. And what was fascinating, when I finally finished the book, I was writing in upstate New York. And I typed out the last line of it. And I suddenly thought, wow, that's it. I turned to Kate and I said, I'm finished. I'm finished. I'm finished. And she said, I've missed you. It was just, just. an amazing thing so she spent really two and a half years with me i was kind of disappearing a lot you know i'd be i'd be down a hole but her remark at that point i mean to think of that kind of patience and love being where you know where i uh where i ended up i ended up with the right person which is kind of fascinating and uh but not until i was ready to uh allow that you know when you were younger and had kids you didn't talk about your sister i would mention that yeah karen had died when she was you know 18 or had it was a tragic death but i didn't i didn't discuss it much it was honestly it was after uh the last two alive started to come up for parole that i had to re-engage the loss of my sister and i had to relive it every time i went in going to parole hearings and begging for my sister's life to be honored still at parole hearings do you actually see the killers a couple of times i have yeah i sat right next to one of them at one point you know he had loomed large as a sort of a figure of the enormous power and hate in my life and then he seemed kind of feeble and weak but the last of them is still alive and tries to get out every year you know so i got more used to it i'm more used to the fact that i have to be in that moment still even though it's it's 50 years ago this last july it was 50 years ago but it's still an active part of my life do you feel her yeah i do i do and that's what's it's been remarkable i guess i always have sometimes i didn't really want to pay attention but always had her there in my head in my heart i think sometimes you know bringing me a warning saying you don't need to go down this road or this one you don't need to go out with her she was giving you i didn't give you dating advice a little dating advice from time to time i don't think you need that for too much longer i told you so uh sometimes yeah exactly there were there have been a couple of moments like that because i didn't grieve i have not felt the people i've lost for much of my life and it's only in the last year or two that i've you know felt my dad and i've actually feel like i have a closer relationship with my dad and i've actually felt like i have a closer relationship with him now than certainly that i have most of my life and and i've come to know him in a different way because i'm a dad now and i the way i look at my kids i realize i remember is the way he must have looked at me yeah that's the gift of it isn't it we're living in our in our ancestors footsteps as well as our own as we sort of carve through the life we've been given and the one we make and our children will be visited with us you've really noticed in your life the cycles that repeat in family and through the generations i think there's something beautiful and there's something comforting about that to realize like we are not the first to suffer whatever it is we are suffering to go through what we are going through yeah we are doing what's been done throughout history we carry it with us and we always will it is part of the human thing it's part of being here in this this strange plane that we're on and whatever it's meant to do it's it's meant to teach us grief it was important for you to actually go back yeah to colorado and and walk through her final day that was something i'd always thought was important i didn't know a lot of the the intricacies of her of her last year of life and i really wanted to become familiar with that we weren't communicating so well back then of course we didn't have cell phones we didn't have all sorts of stuff but we were discovering a lot of the same things at the same time but weren't aware of it we weren't communicating about it and so my desire to go for this trip to be with her in her final days and in her final final steps um was just to be intimate with her again to know her again like i knew her once before this this love that i had for my sister was some of the greatest um meaningful connection with another human being that i've ever had i mean we lived and breathed like at the same pace you know rise and swell we we lived everything together and that last year we didn't and she she was off on her own i was off on my own but she was coming home i was going to see her in like four or five days and uh we were really looking forward to being together again you did something which i thought about a lot you got the police report yeah for your sister um i thought about getting the police report my brother jumped off at the balcony of her apartment building in front of my mom and i thought about getting the police report for a while even though there's nothing really certainly in my case to learn from it but you requested the the police file and they sent it to you and they were not able to get the police report and they were not able to get the police report at the beginning of it about whether or not you should read it and whether you really wanted to read it yeah it was important for me it was just to to be with karen to be with her in that last moment how were you able to do that it's just it just seemed like i had to do it it just seemed like i had to go kate came with me and that was really helpful and i also i also wanted to know what she was doing there did she have a nice life there and and she did she had started to construct a life for herself there with this young man that she'd met and i think that's something that she's been doing for a long time and i think that's something that she's been doing for a long time john i got to know john only through the police report did i find out john's name so that was helpful and so it was almost like i was sort of taking the trip with them and it was it was heartbreaking at the same time and hard to read because you know for a long time kate karen was just a jane doe you know a girl whose body had been desecrated and who was left to die somewhere some of the things you you discover in in the police report were different than you had initially thought she had managed to get to some of the things that you discovered in the police report you got a little bit more information about what happened and you got a little bit more information about what happened and you got a little bit more information about what happened and you said in my imaginings the man who found karen at his doorstep was a good samaritan of sorts i stand correct and disappointed that that man did not attempt to help her but simply called the police after leaving her body as it lay eyes vacant staring at the sky her legs still on the steps her head on the ground and a clenched fist above her head with an outstretched arm smeared blood along a wall a path of suffering an enormous pool of blood and from there and then she was the uneasy steps of a hundred yards her last steps then the final crawl of her life it's really heartbreaking yeah it was that broke my heart when i read it when i first realized that the the trail of her blood her hands was at crawl level rather than standing height the people that heard her scream and just went to bed didn't even look out the window yeah and that that house is right there still right where it was the same place where karen was stabbed just across the street and uh then she made her way you know another hundred yards or so um extraordinary that there was such such callousness non-caring i don't know i hesitate to even bring up but you write about the last words that karen heard which you hadn't known until you read this police report yeah tilt your head back that was uh tilt your head back that's what the killer said yeah it's the last thing she heard uh extraordinary malevolence evil that discovery it was beyond any horror i could have imagined it did actually go beyond my imagination to a place that was real and that she had to deal with it made me incredibly sad that um that in her final seconds there was not kindness yeah yeah yeah me too thank you anderson you know i've had sort of um diminishing resolve at times you know or at least in and out to keep this guy in jail and i actually read that part of the police report the day before he was up for parole again and i was calling in to testify at that point from a job i was doing in the caribbean and um i realized that this is what she heard from this man who says he didn't do anything yeah so it ended it ended up being ammunition which was helpful we're going to take a short break we'll have more with kelsey in a moment and a reminder i'll be discussing this podcast and others on our new live interactive show all there is live on thursday night on our grief community page cnn.com slash all there is you can watch the show live at 9 15 p.m thursday in the days that follow along with past episodes of the podcast we'll be right back with more from kelsey grammar i'm dr sanjay gupta host of the chasing life podcast we're going to talk about rethinking how we die how we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live our guest is dr bj miller he's a hospice and palliative care physician we are aging as a people this is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group it's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interest services and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject and makes us cling to life listen to chasing life streaming now wherever you get your podcasts welcome back to my conversation with kelsey grammar kelsey writes in his book karen a brother remembers that he has on several occasions done what he calls ceremonial meditations at home using plant medicine or psychedelics he also writes about consulting with mediums throughout his life. I have some very, very devoted Christian friends who aren't on the, you know, you don't consult with mediums. You know, that's sort of dangerous territory. And I accept that you should be very cautious, but there are those who are good. And I do think it's a gift from God, mediumship. I think it's meant to help people resolve grief. I think it is meant to help people release some things. And it is a continuing gift of God that we can access our loved ones, especially for those of us who've had loss that has been so violent and so devastating and premature in many ways. There's some grief you'll never let go of, but there is an obligation to get on with your life. And if one is disrupting the other for too long a time, I think the gift of mediumship maybe helps people resolve that. You mentioned that you and your wife do ceremonial meditations at home. You also talked about meditating on hearing Karen, focus on hearing her, seek a dialogue with her. What is that? Meditating on hearing Karen, focus on hearing her. Plant medicine is being, you know, experimented with to access whatever your issue might be. So you focus on a certain thing. And I've, we've done a few of them and I find it sort of comical and yet discovered some things deeply troubling within me that I thought, well, I'm glad I did this. I'm glad I, I had this experience where I got to release some things that I didn't know were still sort of stirring around in there. I think all these things are possible even through things are possible even through prayer honestly whatever meditative state you get into i got close the night when i was just sort of recouping from the surgeries i had you know four or five hours of just kind of just being wiped out from the anesthesia um in a moment of just deep reflection and quiet um there was this discovery of oh i didn't get the chance to hold you i didn't get a chance to really say goodbye to you and that was a that was a big thing that last moment when she took her final breath that her brother wasn't there to hold her that i couldn't be there to just you know send her off to love her and karen where she came and told me you were a good brother forgive yourself you know you just stood up for other kids said you gotta just you know knock it off get get back to your life and love it and love the fact that we had a life together that was an amazing moment for me just amazing seems like you're still a pretty good brother yeah yeah yeah thank you weeks after your grandfather gordon died who was really your your dad he was the person you deeply deeply loved you said i finally dissolved in tears unable to speak i was convulsed with grief and lost in it sob after sob shook my body until finally it stopped i sat with my head and my hands silent after a time a voice came my voice it said you will always be alone and the oddest thing happened it gave me comfort do you remember the little boy you were it sounds cheesy but i've sort of woken up recently to how i stunted myself very early on after my dad died and it's so terrified me at age 10 that i didn't grieve and that little boy i've sort of woken up recently to sort of woken up to the idea that he is still very much alive in me do you feel that little boy yeah i think so yeah i feel him all the time it's interesting uh he's a he's the one that actually had so much fun in life you know and he's the one that actually still sort of preserved my ability to have fun even through the grief sometimes uh but i was a really good kid i wanted to please my parents i wanted to please my granddad more than anything in the world uh i i loved my grandmother you know the places that i didn't know i didn't know i didn't know i didn't sense my my loss was when i was acting when i was at when i had the mask of acting on i could just be honest and open in that moment and sort of lend my own life to whatever character i was trying to play those those moments who have been free completely free of any sense of guilt or shame or anything else until then of course maybe if there's a moment when i'm playing a guy who's grieving a loved one or a sister even or whatever then they then it comes flooding in and my own story kind of comes along for the ride and that's what i find rewarding about the work still find rewarding about the work but so it's been a refuge for for the little boy in a lot of places in my imagination but also in in my life's work my my career i chose a place where my little boy was safe and that was he's been fully at the helm and many many sort of that's fascinating parts of my life yeah that's an incredible thing to have figured out an outlet for i don't know i feel like a lot of this but i've come to kind of believe in it so i've always been skeptical my entire life but it hasn't really served me that well and suddenly here i am at 58 like weeping so uh maybe there's something to this little child thing um but i do think this voice i developed in my head which is the voice that has gotten me through everything is this protector of this little child and i've kept him buried and and sequestered and i i think having kids my own i want that child to get out there and you know live and stuff and i love the idea that you were able to do that through acting yeah that's what a great circumstance it was that i fell into the acting thing i never wanted to be an actor i just i was just a kid who was surfing i used to love that and then the guy comes along and says can you smoke a cigar i said yeah he says well then you should play ben hubbard and the little foxes and i did it and thought this is great i can do this the rest of my life and i'm like yeah i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do this and i'm gonna do my life so that's where it where it all sort of started and that's the one that keeps it alive you said that boy was soul sick and felt unwanted later on you write about memories that you have to come back to you say to find them now has been a pure delight well some are painful of course but so many others are joys i'd forgotten or had remained hidden because of trauma they were peeking their heads out now hoping it is safe to come out into the open and shine as they once did i did not realize how many there were people speak of the inner child i don't really know much about i presume we all have one and most of them are in hiding i would say that that's been true for me and probably true for karen after we were hurt by life and nothing hurts in life more than the death of someone precious when we are children we do a voicemail at the end of every season of this podcast and i i think it's amazing to me the amount of people who experienced childhood loss and the impact it's had on them their entire life i mean it's extraordinary and so few people are able to talk about it and give voice to it i don't know if it's repressed grief or unrecognized grief or childhood grief out there well what you're doing here with this with this show with this podcast and what i was trying to do with the book was say you know you've got company you've got company in your it's uh and whatever yours is is yours all yours and but it's something with you you write about rage rage of the people who murdered your your sister do you still feel that rage yeah yeah that's uh so i'm glad you pointed that out because it's uh i think there's a part of me that for a while was was quite happy to let it take over and uh just just to be angry and and not settled on anything and and to kind of the only the only target in sight but it was myself so i i took some time to you know beat myself down for a while but uh that rage is righteous it comes from the fact that i couldn't stop them that i couldn't help her that i couldn't save my sister's life so i raged it myself raged to god raged at them but uh the circumstances of it all led me to a a kind of peace in the end but that that guy's still in there he's still around has retracing karen's last hours and last day has that ameliorated some of the rage has it lessened yeah it has yeah that's uh for a long time and there's a lot of people that have been there for a long time and they've been there for a long time and they've been there for a long time and they've been there for a long time and they've been there for a long time and they've been there for a long time and they've been there for a long time place where i couldn't forgive myself for what had happened to karen and of course that probably made no real sense it just had emotional sense and it had emotional weight that felt true and i think yeah maybe that has helped save me quite a bit i certainly i certainly don't blame myself anymore and i did for a while you say in the book i'm sorry karen that has been so hard for me this last image of you was impossible to shake for years and years it haunted me in quiet moments and down dark streets ambushing the joy of a cherry blossom day you say in the book i'm sorry karen that has been so hard for me this last image of you was crushing it without warning and today even to this very day it has the power to make me shake with grief but it will not be as i remember you i promise that was a big healing thing the lingering image of karen was always her corpse and uh she didn't deserve that that's why i apologized to her because she's such a glorious girl such a wonderful girl and uh to have allowed myself to remember her in any other way than that was uh i did myself a disservice and i didn't really honor her life that way i honored them more and they didn't deserve it so we got there and we get we did get there in the end i mean karen is with me and so how do you get there we're both happy uh you just gotta go through the process uh find out what the truth is the truth is her life is what identified her not her death is there something you've learned in your grief that would help others in theirs because there's a lot of people listening right now who are grieving yeah and in all sorts of different ways the only real gift i would hope My experience could offer would be to allow yourself to spend more time in the life they lived, in the good that you knew from them, in the joy that they brought you, in the smiles that you knew from them, in the happy accidents you shared, and to let them be remembered, to let them live again, to breathe again, to be in that life again. Instead of the horror of their taking off. Thank you so much. I really appreciated you taking the time to do this. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time and for all you've known and lost and loved, obviously, and congratulations on your family and your children. Thanks. They're wonderful. Thanks. I wish you the best. Thanks, Anderson. Kelsey Grammer's new memoir is titled Karen, A Brother Remembers. This conversation is our final podcast episode of this year. We're going to take a break for the holidays and we'll be back with all new episodes in January. Starting with a conversation with singer and songwriter Patti Smith. There's no rules. And there shouldn't be any rules. I mean, people can, in all of these phrases, like time heals all wounds. It doesn't. Don't look to be healed. You know, it's like you have a sacred wound. Just, you know, take care of it. Don't let it get infected. But it's not necessarily going to heal. You just learn to live with it. There's no rules in grief. No, I don't think there should be. This week is also the final episode of the year for our new weekly companion show, All There Is Live. It'll be back in the new year. The last episode is this Thursday night, 9.15 p.m. You can watch it live at cnen.com slash all there is. And you can join in the conversation by sending us voicemails and comments in our comments section. Also, you can record a video for us on whatever topic you'd like and just email it to us at all there is at cnen.com. I hope you join us Thursday for the live show. 9.15. p.m. at cnen.com slash all there is wherever you are in the world and in your grief. Thanks for being here. I'm glad we're together. Get ready for election night. CNN is available to stream live now with an all access subscription. Plus, get exclusive content and interactive Q&A's with CNN's journalists. Subscribe now. Visit cnen.com slash all access. I'm Adi Cornish. I'm Ari Shapiro. And it's engagement party. And we get to talk about. What we're obsessed with, what we're engaged with, what we need to process with a friend. Rick Steves, what a legend. Rick, as somebody who has traveled the world for many years, do you notice cities looking more and more similar? Yeah, it's becoming more homogenized, especially in cities. If you want diversity, you go to small towns and it's disappointing. But in a way, it's reality. Everything is mass consumption. Everything is efficiency. And when you have a chain, it's hard to compete if you're an individual mom and pop. And more and more people are traveling and people are driving that. So, yeah, it's an interesting issue. Follow engagement party wherever you get your podcasts.