Tyler Perry: Letting Go

I was rereading Joan Didian's book The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, she recounts a condolence letter she received from a marinal priest who wrote, "Despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, the death of a parent dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call morning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean bed, aware of the depth charges now near and now far buffeting us with recollections. Whether you're in that submarine sitting silently on the ocean's bed, feeling the reverberations of grief's depth charges, or caught in the throes of its swirling rip tide, or on a shore examining it from a safe distance, I'm glad you're here. You're not alone. This is all there is. I'm Anderson Cooper." I was decorating the Christmas tree with my sons, Wyatt, and Sebastian this weekend. I brought off from the basement boxes of ornaments from when I was a kid. One of them is an ornament my mom must have made. It has a photo of her and my dad, and me and my brother in front of a Christmas tree. My brother and I are about the same ages that Wyatt and Sebastian are now. I showed Wyatt the picture and he asked me who the other little boy and it was. "It's my brother," I told him. "Is he dead," Wyatt asked. "He is," I said. "Well, how did he die?" he asked. "He got sick," I said, a long time ago. I miss him a lot. Wyatt moved on to another ornament and we moved on to talking about other things, but it got me thinking about what I'll have to tell him one day. I don't know how I'll explain it all to a child. I still don't know how to explain it all to myself. I guess today is Tyler Perry. He's a writer, director, producer, actor, entertainment mogul. His list of accomplishments is long and it's made all the more extraordinary given the very difficult childhood he had growing up in New Orleans. His mother Maxine, who he was devoted to, was married to a man who beat Tyler brutally throughout his childhood. I recently watched a documentary about Tyler called Maxine's Baby, the Tyler Perry Story, and I found the arc of his life just incredible. I spoke with him last week. A couple months ago, something popped up on my Instagram feed. It was something you said to a woman in an audience when you were sitting with Oprah. "Dianne is here with her sister Liz. Diane, where are you? Diane has a question about letting go." Thank you. So my mom recently died. Sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. grief is a very living thing. It visits at random. You can't schedule it. I tried to work it away. I tried to drink it away. I tried to book myself like crazy and all it did was wait for me to finish. So when it shows up, however it shows up, let it show up. We were just a couple of days from the anniversary of your mom's death. How has grief shown up for you? Or how is it showing up right now? How is it showing up right now? I usually book out this time of year because she died December 8, 2009 and this time of year is hard for me because she loved Thanksgiving. She loved Christmas and then her birthdays in February. So it's really a difficult time. I woke up yesterday early in the morning just feeling my mother really strong. Sometimes I wake up with tears in my ears or just the pillows wet because I was grieving in my sleep and didn't know it. So yesterday was really, really hard. I'm carrying her and I have to spend that it's shoes, baby shoes and I bought it for her and put all of our issues on the backs of the shoes. My brothers, my sisters and she had it. So when she passed, I had it separated and gave it to all the kids so we can all carry this with us. That's on the nightstand. I'm waking up in the grief and I'm thinking, okay, it's okay. And I started going back to 15 years ago and you think 15 years, come on, man, 15 years you should be okay, right? I thought I was fine this year and I thought I could get through this. I can push through it until I'm at the Paley Center and I'm smiling, taking photos and I walk up to the press line and guys doing an interview and he's asking me questions and I'm present I'm there and then he holds up a photo of me at five years old and I didn't hear anything else because the photo he showed me, I immediately saw my mother behind the Polaroid taking it, smiling at me as I was sitting on the blanket in the backyard. That was it. The rest of the night I was gone. I was gone. It was too. It was it was powerful and her letting me know she was there, but also it's hard to miss people. It's hard to want one more hug or one more you're okay, you know, you're okay because she and I were, even my brothers and sisters will tell you that I was her favorite. So she and I were like lock step and we went through a lot of traumas together and I would do everything I can to make her laugh and happy. So that was challenging. So grief shows up when it wants to. You can't, no matter what you think, no matter how much time has passed, it'll show up. You have recently been facing things from your past. How has that been for you? Because I have been doing the same thing and have it has changed my life dramatically just in the last year and so much of it is trying to develop a companionship with grief and recognizing the little boy that I was and how much that little boy is still so present and trying to turn that little boy and bring him back from the place he was hiding. Bring him back from the place where he was hiding but also you get arrested in those moments especially as a child. You get arrested in that memory and you hold it even though you think, oh, I'm fine. I'm okay. When it's not processed, when it's not worked through, when nothing's done with it, it is just held. And what happens is it becomes this weight inside of you and you're holding it and holding it and holding it and then you hit a certain age where everything comes home and it's like, well, wait a minute, what is that? And I think that's what happened for me. I was doing really well. People would say, oh, you're so prolific. You're doing so many things. But the truth of the matter is it wasn't about being prolific as much as it was about not dealing with the abuse, not dealing with the pain and the year my mother died, it was probably the busiest I'd ever been because I booked myself crazy to try to work my way through all of it. And that works for a while. I think that that worked all through my 20s and 30s and 40s but come 50. There was something inside of me that started to break and it was all of those traumas that were ripping the scenes because what I found in these intensive therapy sessions that I'm for some of my life ever doing therapy, I went to Arizona in this intensive that you do for seven days and I ended up saying three weeks because it was so powerful for me. But what I found is I'm sitting there. I'm talking to this incredible therapist and Christine. And she said, tell me what's going on. And I said to her, I said, I just feel like something's breaking and I can't hold it all together anymore. I feel like, and I don't know what it is because everything's okay. And I started describing a lot of what I was dealing with. And she said, turn around. I turned around in our office and there is a painting of a child that's in the rain. That's just sobbing. And then there's a not the painting of a man holding an umbrella, holding back the rain. And she started explaining to me about the parts of us how we're born as these beautiful innocent children. And then this moment comes along where we have traumas and pains and life and we become this sobbing child. And then you grow up into an adult and you become this controlling child. That's the guy with the umbrella. You know, he's holding off the rain and he's he's trying to hold it all together. But then that comes a point where he can't do it anymore. And when I saw the painting, I lost it because I'm like, that's exactly what I'm doing. And she said to me, do you believe that all of this can be healed? And I said, I don't know. And she said, the can, I promise you. By the time we got through the first week, I felt like a different person. Yeah. So it was really, really powerful. This past year, I felt like the tears are just on the brink and they come at times I cannot control. And it is lovely because I'm feeling for the first time. And I'm trying to kind of turn to that little child and say that I see him and I talk to him now. I try to talk to him a little bit every day. And I realize this voice I've had in my head, it's been keeping me distant from everybody because I've been telling myself to be wary and to be on guard my entire life. And it served me well for a long time, but it's not serving me well anymore. That's exactly right. And what happens with age, what happens with age is that the sobbing child begins to scream and yell. And then when age, the controlling child, the adult that you are. Because that's what we all are. We're all just big children trying to survive. That breaking point is different for many people. Some people can push past it. Some people can ignore it. But for me, and it sounds like for you, it had to be addressed. And to hold on to grief and sadness and pain and trauma at this part of my life, for whatever time I have left on this planet is not something I want to do anymore. I want to be pure, free, authentic, and all of it. So that's what I'm leaning into. I don't know how many people know about your childhood. I did not know much about it until I watched the documentary. Your mom was 13, I believe, when her mom died, gets married at 17 to this man. Emmett is his first name. You are born when she's 24. And this man brutalized you. Be tortured you. Yeah. Throughout your childhood. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't understand it. I didn't know why. I didn't, but I, I innately felt that this man hated me because I wasn't his kid. I just knew it from a child. I would ask my mother all the time. Is this my father? Is this my father? And she, her answer was always the same. I hate to tell you that, but yes, he is your father. And all the way up until the day she died on her death bed, I asked her, I said, is this man my father? She said, I hate to tell you this, but yes, he is. Yeah. After her death, though, you learned something else. Yeah. I did a DNA test, and that test came back. And he's my father. And you've been public about it. There was sexual abuse by multiple people of you as a child. If I could, I'd like to play something that's in the documentary in which you are talking about a memory you have of being this little boy holding on to a chain link fence. It's originally, I think, from a, you were talking to Oprah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember holding on to a chain link fence. And I'm holding so tight, my hands are bloody as he's hitting me. And I'm holding. Wow. Just trying to hold on for my life. I was so enraged about it in my mind. I see myself running from me. Wow. And I couldn't get the little boy. I couldn't get the little boy to come back to me. That was, if I'm not mistaken, it's 2010. That's after my mother died. And it was the first time I was able to say a lot of the things that I hadn't been able to say before. Because as long as she was alive, the thought of me bringing pain to her or hurting her was how'd rather not even talk about the things that I endured because she would internalize it as what she didn't do. And I couldn't bear that. Did that boy ever come back to you? Or was that a moment where that little boy died and you became something else? I think I have said that in the past that I feel like that part of me died. But what I found in these sessions was that sobbing child, that's there's this separation of the two. Now I know that in life and going through life and going through grief, going through trauma, you separate into different individuals. And part of the work that I was doing was fusing that child that never came back to me to the adult that I am. And as you were saying earlier, how you talk to your younger self, you encourage a younger self. That's I often do that now. Talk to them, I encourage them, thank him. So I'm going to take you with me. You're safe now. We're safe. We're together just reminding myself that I'm a whole person. And I don't have to be in these parts. It makes a difference. Honestly, when this was proposed to me, it sounded cheesy to me. Like, talk to this little child. I was like, oh, really? Do I have to? I got to say it is deeply healing and deeply powerful. What I found with having my son, it was five years after my mother passed, because when she died, I felt the most alone in my life, so unloved, I didn't feel like anyone loved me because, which is because I knew she was the only person on the planet that really loved me the way that she did. So when she died, I felt like that went with her. And I felt just this incredible isolation until my son was born. My mom used to quote a Scottish philosopher named, I think, McLaren, who said, be kind because everybody in me is fighting a great battle. And my mom actually painted it on a mantelpiece on her fireplace. My mom would paint her fireplace as different, like actually painted herself. She had that saying on a fireplace for a while. And you said something about Emmett, the man who was so terrible to you, that at a certain point in your mid-twenties, you learned his story. You learned who he had been as a child. And what had happened to him as a child. And that allowed you, if not too forgive, to at least understand some of his story. And that made a difference. And I think that's such an important thing. Everybody we pass on the street has grief. Or if they don't, they will. And we don't know the battles that they are facing. Exactly. Yeah. This is what allowed me to forgive him, which I did. I really did. And it also allowed me to give him grace. Because we were talking one day. And he was in tears. And he said, you don't know what I've been through. I was like, no, I don't. What do you want? But he couldn't talk. He wasn't the person that couldn't, he had a third grade education. So he couldn't express himself through talking. That's not what he did. He could express himself through building and working and beating and fighting and being angry. But he was, when he was two years old, this is what I've got from other, gotten from other relatives. When he was two years old, he was found in the drainage canal. He and his brother and sister. A white man found them on a horse. He found them there. This is in rural Louisiana. And they brought them to a 14 year old girl named May to raise. And May's father, Papa Rod, was a former slave. And he beat his children. And May, the 14 year old that was raising Emmett would beat him too. The time and potato sack and beat him if he did anything wrong. So there was this cycle of abuse from slavery. So what he knew to do is beat his children, not hug, not love, but beat them. And understanding that didn't make it right. I don't want people to know that. It doesn't make it right. But for me to get the understanding allowed me the pathway to be able to forgive him and give him grace. More of my conversation with Tyler Perry in a moment. 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 in 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. We're back with Tyler Perry. What have you learned in your grief that would be helpful to somebody listening to this? Oh gosh, that's really good. What I've learned is that it is what it is. I would try and suppress it or not cry when it came or just push it to the side. You have to let it visit it will. You have to let it be what it's going to be so that you can move through it. I really do feel like it's a living thing. It is a visitor that will knock at the strangest moment at the worst time. I'm like, "What is this moving through me?" I would just tell anybody what I've learned about it is you can't fight it. Let it be because in order for it to get better eventually, it's got to move through you. I have this friend of name is Cassie. Her father had died and she really struggled big time with it. He had died many years before. I was having a moment one year around this time and I'm talking to her on the phone trying to find comfort in anything and she says, "You're going to be okay. You're going to be okay." I'm like, "When? When?" She says in about nine years and I thought, "That's not comforting. Why would you tell me that nine years?" But she was right. It took her about nine years to just be okay when the day happened. For me, it was about nine years that I was beginning to turn the corner. It wouldn't show up in a way that it would take my breath away because when my mother first passed, it would literally take my breath away. I'd find myself gasping for air when I would think about her or I'd fall asleep and she'd be in my dreams and I would feel myself waking up and I'm fighting to stay asleep so I can just talk to her one more time. You've said that after your mom died, you weren't sure you would survive. I mean, that you were drinking. You'd said at one point that if you hadn't had so many work commitments, you might not have stuck around. No, no. That wasn't. what was the point? What was the point? What was the reason? Again, feeling that level of love leave me. But also because so much of the drive that you had and have was about her, was about her, was about providing for her and making sure that she had everything she could ever possibly imagine that she wanted. Yeah, that was the goal and the purpose and then when she was gone, so was that desire and that drive to keep pushing and working hard. You know, the strangest thing was because there was so much trauma, because there was so much poverty, I never thought I had enough for her. I always thought this is not going to be enough to make sure she's okay and she never asked me for a thing. But yeah, losing her was losing the love that I felt, but also losing the purpose to keep working and grinding that hard. Yeah. Your mom got to see everything. There's a moment in the documentary where you've opened up your studio and your mom is there with amazing stars and you look at her and you say, you see what your baby boy did. Yeah. She saw it. She got to see it all. Yeah. Yeah. That was a good moment that night. She she was having the irony in that she was having trouble seeing because the diabetes and the thing she was dealing with, she was having a lot of trouble being able to see. So she was holding my hand and we were out, out going through the stages and she, she said, everything is so beautiful and it said, how do you know? Can you see it? She said, I can feel it, you know. See, so she was wonderful, man. She was wonderful. Anderson, I'm angry, man. I'm so angry. I'm so angry. That's a part of the grief too. I'm angry. That's another part that you have to be careful with when you're grieving. And this is why around this time of year, I go away because I don't know how it'll show up. But the anger is, is, oh god, I remember the first mother's day when people are saying happy mother's day and I'm like, I don't even want to hear it, you know. And then to see friends who won't even call their mother or talk to their mother, they get the business from me. I'm just like, what is wrong with you? And I would get angry because I wish I had her. So I'm just, I working my way through the stages of grief was hard. I think the anger was the hardest one. I have felt this rage, the, is the hard-hearted rage of a child. And I remember feeling it as a little kid just terrified with my dad died and stunned, but just filled with rage that has continued throughout my entire life. And I think there's, it's been fuel in so many things I've done. But it's, yeah, I wasn't allowed the rage. I wasn't allowed to have that because culturally, just being six foot six and black. There was this from the time I was in school. It was like, you're big. Get to the back of the line. You're, you're too big. So I, I wasn't allowed to have that kind of freedom to just be enraged about something. So anger, my anger was quiet and slow, slow to, to build. But I felt it more with her than anything. I remember being in some of these sessions. And, and I felt this anger coming up out of me. And I just, and, and the therapist is, she said, little white woman, she's saying, let it go, let it go. And all I could think of and here was this, you're going to destroy this room. Don't, you can't do that. You're too big. And by the end of the sessions, we were getting to a point, one therapist said to me, because you see multiple therapists, but one said to me, you deserve to take up as much space on this planet as anyone else because you're here. You don't have to be smaller. You don't have to make yourself smaller. And I was able to just let it all go. Do you, do you cry? I mean, I've never been really a cryer. I have been this last year. And I don't know. Yeah, I feel awkward about it and weird about it. And, but it bubbles up a lot for me now. Since, since I started this program, it, I have rung myself dry. I just, I constantly go to water thinking about my mother, my life, my son, how hard I've worked to be here, the cost, the price to be here, but all of those things. So, but it feels good to be able to cleanse. And of course, growing up, boys don't cry. You're a man, you're taught to push down every feeling, not really be able to express it. So to have a 10-year-old who is clear in his expressions of what he feels. When he feels joy, when he's upset, we've given him this great brain of room to be able to come to us in any of those states. So, and, and when I'm looking at him or hugging him or saying, I love you to him or giving him that space or having a conversation with him where he gets to state an opinion or, or he gets to have some sort of say in what's going on, all of those moments are helping the little boy that I was healed. I don't know that I would have been as whatever success I've had, however you define that. I don't know that I would have had the career that I've had if I had been healed earlier on. I don't know if I was not filled with rage and driven by pain. I don't know that I would have worked the level that I've worked at constantly. Or the courage to do it. Yeah. And the same for me, the same for me. So, I understand that fully. Open, I talk about this all the time. She said to me one day, God, I don't know who we would be had we grown up in a house full of love. Because when I cut into this trauma session, the first thing she said to me is, and this I'll never forget. She said, your success is equal to your trauma. And I thought, I've had some enormous successes in my life. And I thought, yeah, the traumas are pretty, pretty bad too. You also connect the trauma and your ability as a child to go into kind of other rooms in your head during it with your ability to dream up comedies and dramas and write scripts and work at the level that you have. Things you developed in your mind as a child to cope have served you in your career. Yeah. When I started these sessions, when we talked about my childhood, she was clear about what happened to you is you had to be hyper vigilant. You had to look at 10 things at once to survive. You had to walk in a room and calculate every moment in the room in order to know that you were safe. And that ability is in you as a man. It's still as strong as it was then. And also my ability to disassociate. It was during those horrible moments that I could leave, like not literally, but in my mind be somewhere else. And then when the moment was over, I was come back to myself. But as I'm coming back to myself, I had no memory of what had happened. Like there'd be a hole in the moments of the memory. So as I got older, it wasn't just happening for bad things. It was happening for good things too. Anything that was heightened in me, I believe, wouldn't be there. Wouldn't remember the moment. So when I write a script or story or movie, I get quiet and I can be in that world for hours and see everything that's happening. And I can use that disassociation as now used it as a gift. So for you right now, just circling back to really how we began, for you right now, grief is what? What does grief look like? For me right now, grief is a wave. It's a wave. And my prayer for anyone who's going through grief is that it comes in waves. And how do you stand on that wave? Do you let it drown you or do you have a surfboard where you can try and get on it? Sometimes there are gentle ones where it's just like, wow, that is a wonderful memory. Gosh, that's a wonderful memory. Then it's like, well, last night I was in a tsunami. It was a tsunami. Do you feel your mom for the first time since I was a little kid, I now feel I can feel my dad, I can feel my brother inside me in a way that I've never experienced before. Yeah. And I dare say that's because you made room for it because maybe when it was when it was blocked before and you were putting everything away, there was no room for it. But now that you've made room for the grief, you can feel them getting closer. I understand that so well. I've been cradled by my mother since she's gone cradled. And it just felt like what is this feeling when she first passed, I could smell her. I could she was, you know, my senses were actually with that close to me. And I'll never forget because she died at 64 December 8th right around Christmas. And I had a dream about I got, did she give me a gift, this red air, red by wing airplane that she'd given me. And I'm saying, well, I was so happy as she'd given it to me. I woke up, of course, said, go downstairs to the Christmas tree. My sister gives me a gift. She said, I bought this for you. I opened it up and it is the exact airplane that was in my dream. And I hadn't told anybody about my aunt. My aunt and I looked at each other. I had to leave the room. They're like, what happened? What happened? What happened? What I do wrong? And I just didn't do anything. I just drained about this plane. So I do believe that they are with us. I do believe that they're close. I really, really do believe that. - And you feel that? - Oh, yeah. I feel it, I feel it, I know it, there's a knowing in it for me. - To me, the irony is I pushed all this stuff down so that I wouldn't feel sadness and it left me feeling alone and disconnected from my dad and my brother. But now at 57, I allow myself to feel sadness and that pain, which I've been running from, and yet it actually makes me feel better. It doesn't make sense on paper, but it's absolutely the case. But also, I think at the time of life where you are, with a father and children and older, I think you were ready for it now, because there are many times when people aren't ready to face it, or what would you have been now, had you been able to get in touch with it earlier? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Does somebody who's grieving out there, is there anything else you would say? - It's gonna be about nine years. Again, my hope is we're talking about this. My mother was only 64 when she died. And the last seven years of her life were really difficult through illness, but also her whole life was just hard, and I don't wanna reduce her life, and I would say this to anyone who's going to grief, don't reduce the person's life to the moment or how they died, lean into the good, and it, because the grief is gonna be hard, lean to the good times and the good moments and the smiles and the laughs, and that's when grief really overwhelms me, that's what I try to do. That's what I was doing all day to day. All day to day, I didn't leave the room after last night, I stayed in the bed, I've got photos of her, and I was just trying to think myself happy inside of the grief, and I was just thinking about the good times we had, and with me and my mother at church, oh gosh, we love to go to church together, and I love to see her singing in the choir, and she could not sing, she could not carry it, you know, in a bucket, but she would just try to sing in her heart out, after all the hell, she just went through the house, she would just be happy and smiling. This is when I really, really started to lean into God and faith, and Jesus is when it's like, "God, I need to know this God that makes her feel like that." So I'm trying to surf it so that I can allow myself to be in the pain of it and the heartbreak of it, but also remember some of the good times and the good moments. - Tyler Perry, thank you so much. - Anderson, thank you brother, I appreciate it very much. - The day after we recorded this interview, a colleague of Tyler's, Steve Mench, who ran his movie studio, died in a plane crash. Tyler wrote a tribute to him on his Instagram page, saying in part, "Life is but a moment. We are like vapors. Hold strong to the people you love and tell them." You can watch the video version of this podcast on CNN's YouTube channel or at our online grief community, CNN.com/AllThereIsOnline. You can also listen there to voicemails from podcast listeners about their own experiences with loss and grief, and you can leave comments of your own, and hear all three seasons of our podcast. Next week, two very special guests, writer David Sidaris and his sister, actress and writer Amy Sidaris. - I cannot believe I live through my mother's death. I can't believe it. - In what way? - 'Cause I just thought I wouldn't be able to live without her. - Why would we just without her love? - Without her love, yeah. - Why'd it just adored her? Just adored her? And when my mother died, it was like, - He was mama's boy. - I'm alone. I don't have anybody in my corner that way. Or it happened really fast, she called and said she had cancer, and then three months later, she was dead. And I remember there was her chemo medication and stuff, and we were so mad at it. You know what I mean? And just throwing it into a trash can, and my father's pulling it out because he wants to get a refund. He wants to take it into the drugstore and get a refund on it. (laughing) - Wow. - Wait a minute. - I remember the priest came to the house and my mother had a jigsaw table on them, and said we were just throwing, "Oh, I see, you're finishing that "an honor of your mother." And it's like, "Get out of here." Who led him in here, and just some dumb like, what do you have to even ruin it by saying? - Rock-a-rock. - Rock-a-rock, like don't think we're gonna frame it, or we're gonna, and we laugh so hard, like. - Yeah. - We just laugh so hard. - Because that's how we dealt with it. - That's next week on All There Is. All There Is is a production of scene and audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dizzula is our technical director, and Steve Lick-Tie is our executive producer. Support from Nick Godsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Hadad, Charlie Moore, Kerry Ruben, Kerry Pritchard, Shimmery Cheetreet, Ronald Betis, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, John DeAnora, Laney Steinhart, James Andrest, Nicole Pessarou, and Lisa Namero. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage. (soft music) - Get ready for election night. CNN is available to stream live now with an all-access subscription. Plus, get exclusive content and interactive Q&As with CNN's journalists. Subscribe now, visit CNN.com/allaccess.