Ken Burns' History With Grief

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 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 anything 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 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 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 equit and Mississippi where he grew up. The cycles of history in the world and in families play out across generations and 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. He probably seen some of his award-winning series on public television baseball jazz the Civil War. What you don't know about Ken what I didn't know is how early laws and grief has shaped his entire life. 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. 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 page at cnn.com/allthere is every Thursday night at 9.15 p.m. 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 Lahite Kainan her son Ian died of Golioblastoma. Something that morning the last morning of hospice. I needed to hold him and I got in behind him and had him against my chest and I told him I said it's okay Ian I've got you I love you I could feel his heart beating and then it stopped 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. What a gift. That's all there is live Thursday night's 9.15 p.m. 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 my pleasure. 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 elder antibiotics it's stunning and it's it's haunting to me but it history has given me solace to know that grief is a is a landscape generations of people have found themselves in and found a way to to walk through. From 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 the equivalent of a gated community in every aspect of one's life emotionally as well. Most definitely it's 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. You think you would have had the career of the life path that you've had? Definitely not there was never a moment Anderson when I wasn't aware that there was a sort of damacles hanging over our family our life there's 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 the time you were just conscious memories my earliest memory so she was ill they told us when I was seven years old that she was going to die within six months. Somebody told you when you were seven years old 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 I will see you to to junior high she said and that met seventh grade that was like I was in second grade that was like so far away I got it almost go you know I've got some time and she missed it by a few months but she she would just face all this stuff we brought a hospital bed into the living room she'd want to be in her bedroom did we 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 and she would take a 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 and how old was she when she died 42 she died on April 28th 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 28th the date would be up ahead and then all of a sudden I'd be receding I would never present from 1965 on it just didn't happen and it was part of the keeping her alive of not 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 and agonistic phrases never say die you know I try not to use pass away because yeah I try to if somebody I try to use the verb is somebody uses but in my own life I say somebody died 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 and you feel it every day the loss yeah so I love baseball for example and people say yeah I loved it when my dad and I could get together my mom I did baseball 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 I'm exactly the same way and so you've got the social aspects of whatever the professional life is but there's also you know you come man and you take off your coat and you're just, you just want to talk to your dog and that's it. Does that kid, I mean, I was hoping that would go away. 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 3940, I'm in the middle of a real life crisis and 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 of 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 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 that 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? 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. 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 endeavor to go back and try to find the funeral home had grown out of business. We tracked the widow down to Florida who said that when we had unclaimed the widow of the owner of the funeral. 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. And I said, I made it remain, and could we pull them out and he goes, no, they've all dissolved. People could we put a plaque and so we go out there and find the place and we're able to put it. It's not one of these things with a 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 and her church, the man she knew had died and now this was the place and sobbed 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 and my young, 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 all, I said, I don't have to go there every year, but the date is never lost and it's, it's okay. I don't always feel the immense pain of the loss, but I'm sorry, it's not going to go away. 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. And 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, 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 in the 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 in this Sarah Botsign 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, 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 their, of the whatever internal sadness you're supposed to have or just the sense of loss or whatever it is, but I know I have at times glimpsed and gone, wow, this is great, you know? And most of the time it's, okay, what's the next thing? Yeah, I started working to earn money when I was like 12 because I was very concerned about, I mean, it may sound weird to some people given my mom's last name, but financial stability and safety and I wanted, I knew I was on a financially shaky ship because my mom was amazing, but not a business person and I needed, I knew I would end up supporting her one day and supporting everybody one day and that was very much my mom 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 and me, but nanny, if I loved, incarnate my brother. I also started working and I've 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. I don't feel like I can stop, like 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. Yeah and nothing is big enough by the way. Right, it will never be, it will never, it makes no's and I'm actually doing damn it. I mean, I'm taking time away from my kids because I have on this treadmill that I cannot allow myself to go on. It is 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 some place, 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 can look at them like, retire. What do you mean? I've got a thousand more stories to tell. 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. I know how to do this. Yeah grief actually as painful as it is as isolating as it can be for some people in the manifestations and it seems that both you and I have is also a gift that can't be squattered 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, they could help other people. I keep saying myself like my dad, my nanny who I was very close to 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 go of this, then you're betraying them and somebody. Yeah. They disappear altogether. 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 aesthetic, right? And like, do you do something and it receives awards or it gets recognized. I immediately discounted it and think, okay, it would be weakness if I allow this in. I need to just be on the next thing. 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'd 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 is this old movie called Odd Man Out with James Mason about the Irish troubles and he's crying. And I said, I'm going to be a filmmaker. So that was the moment. That was it because I understood that it had provided him in all the complexity of his own life and mental illness, probably bipolar, don't know. I save Haven. And it was the movies. And we love that. So by the time I'm 12, I know what I'm going to do it by 18. I'm a documentary filmmaker. And by 22, I also know it's going to be an 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 it. 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? I was talking to my because I just woke up to feeling that little kid. And it's been incredibly important. 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 haven't experienced where I'm 72 years old and I take the subway all the time. And I bound up the stairs. And I realized that I there was a kid who was 8 or 9 or 10 years old, pre-death kid. Still worried about it. And knew something was bad was going to happen. But I could feel that. And I still feel that same person. But the thing of, well, I'm not going to take this in. I got to 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 going to drag you down. It's going to suck you down. And so if you don't celebrate your birthday and have never celebrated my birthday since, don't take the good end because it's going to weaken you. That's right. It's going to drag you down. 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 tape. You would say that when you were? I would say deceased when I was 12, 13 years old. And then the outer life was pretty calm. I mean, if you said, what was the greatest grade you were? And 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, you know, 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 and 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% antibiotic. 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, then this is really important, I think, to you and me. One day, Amy, my first wife said, she just appeared at the doorway. Well, 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 Malatis about cancer, this thing that had taken my mom and I had a hard time even saying the word cancer let alone death and then spent many years working with colleagues to make a film a series about cancer, The Emperor of All Malatis, 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 change 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 three-year-old that knew or maybe it's the five-year-old that knew it was coming or maybe it's the 12-year-old who'd had to absorb it to just make room for that boy. 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. 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, that 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 and just sob and read a letter we'd written to our mother that was filled with all of the pain of loss and 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 cut a muddled through, but she was amazing. I think she willed herself to stay alive for Rick and me. I've found letters of my dad recently and he's writing the same thing, which is I've got a stay alive for these boys. This is it. How different is that from your prayer? 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 Son of P. 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 and had been through a lot of health stuff and misdiagnosis and finally this and then this happened and then this 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, you know, which is trying to figure out not to react to the loss of broad, 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 you hear them say those things, I just see daylight and I just want to run towards it. And I go, God bless them that they're not, they don't have this. But do you? But do you? But do you? But do you? But do you? But do you? I think you would make me realize, here's that wall again. Why am I not saying this? Here's that wall again. It's better than the way the wall was for so many years unaware. The wall's there. Yeah. That's what I guess human beings do. I guess this is something that we do. But yeah, the wall's still there. 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 feel it. 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 Lewis Armstrong dies. And I cry. I'm watching the film and I cry 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 Reed. A really great, great film that he cried at and that's that's the thing we're also doing that is okay, there's there's some there's a 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. 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 page at cnn.com/allthereis, so where you can also watch our new weekly companion show All There Is Live Thursday nights at 9.15 p.m. Eastern and catch past episodes of it as well. We'll be right back with more from Ken Burns. 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. B.J. Miller, he's a hospice and palliative care physician. We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging in there for 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 an 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. My five-year-old Wyatt, who's named after my dad, asked me lately about death all the time. I've talked to him about it, like my grandmother died 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 then my dad is smiling. I would have never said those things before, because I don't think I believed them before, but I actually do believe them. I think I do. That's a walking in Memphis. Are you a Christian man? I am tonight. There's something really powerful about what it releases and what it. We know the pain that has caused, but there's a great thing. I mean, I've got one of the happiest endings of all, which is my oldest daughter, Sarah, who never met her grandmother. Of course, none of my four daughters have met their grandmother. The name "Lyla" 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 oldest daughter had my first grandchild, a daughter whom she named "Lyla." And so all of a sudden, the black crepe has disappeared. We say the word "Lyla" all the time, with excitement and glee. She's old enough the same age as my youngest, so they're best friends, not and at least. And she gave me the greatest gift, which was taking the paw off the name at least. And we say "Lyla" 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 resided one Christmas morning to Getty's Brigadresse as her present day, flawlessly standing. I mean, that's night-out at 12 years. She knows her audience. 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 resetted 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, got it all perfectly, and I'm sitting here and just drowning it in, and then, you know, so. I just wrote my son's name, 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, and the small town of Mississippi, and they're all dressed to Buddy. And I did not remember, or realized, that was my dad's nickname, Buddy, and everybody called him Buddy Cooper. So these cycles that repeat in families is fascinating to me. And they ought to be telling us something, and we keep forgetting, you know, that maybe we're practicing here, right? And maybe the next time we do it differently or better, or I don't know. We've set up a voicemail for people calling 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. I live in New Hampshire, and we're a 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, 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 just, we need each other, you know. 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, or we no matter how many people around us are part of that us, we 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. Either 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's daily life. Everybody's life. And the widow wore black for a 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. Did you know much about why that privatization took place? 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. How much the idea of the pursuit of 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. I agree. So I think we have to go back and rearrange the molecules of what we've assumed 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, man, who were going to run the thing. But in order to win the war, he had to let teenagers and narrative wells and recent immigrants who had nothing to fight this war for you, you're going to 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 keyword is pursuit. It's process. You're just going to 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. You had a saying of three things that were very important to you. What were the three things? 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'll get worse but more than likely you'll get a little bit better. This won't last. Get help from others. Be kind to yourself. Who's are all things in grief as well that are important to remember? I apply to grief. 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 my mother's death and me and let's just say, "Lilah, Smith, Tupper Burt." Ken Burns, thank you so much. Thank you. Next week on all there is comedian and cancer survivor Tignotaro. 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. 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. 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 so confusing that Andrea has gone. Join me on Thursdays at 9.15 pm from my new weekly companion show called All There Is Live. It'll be live streamed on our grief community page at Cenan.com/AllThereIs every Thursday night at 9.15 pm. We can come together there, talk grief and not be alone. You can also follow us on our new Instagram account, All There Is, and the number again for a new voicemail box 404-827-1805. Wherever you are in your grief, thanks for listening. Plus, get exclusive content and interactive Q&As with CNN's journalists. Subscribe now, visit Cenan.com/AllAxis.