Anderson Cooper Says 40-Year-Old Essay by His Father Helped Him Realize He'd 'Buried My Ability to Feel Joy'

"I don't want to do that any longer. I can't. I want to feel all there is,” Cooper wrote in a new essay published by CNN

Anderson Cooper’s father taught him an important lesson about grief.

Family patriarch Wyatt Cooper died of surgical complications in 1978 when Anderson was just 10 years old. A decade later, older brother Carter Cooper died by suicide, and mother Gloria Vanderbilt died in 2019 at age 95. As such, the broadcaster focused an entire season of his All There Is podcast on grief while going through boxes of his late family’s things.

In an essay published by CNN on Wednesday, the 56-year-old journalist said he recently realized that while he has experienced loss in his lifetime, he “never really grieved before” — that is, until a 40-year-old essay penned by his Wyatt shifted his perspective.

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During the season 1 finale of All There Is last November, Anderson asked listeners to share their insights about grief. Though he was able to get through only about 200 of the thousand messages that poured in at time time, he returned to them a few months ago to listen to all 46 hours.

“It turned out to be one of the most moving experiences of my life,” wrote the Anderson Cooper 360° host, adding that it “awakened something in me that I had buried long ago.”

Inspired to return to the work he started in the first season of All There Is, he began going through his family’s boxes again — which led him to an essay that changed his outlook on grief entirely.

“I decided to start going through the boxes of my parents’ and brother’s things once again, and the first one I opened was full of my dad’s papers. He was a writer,” Cooper wrote. “On top of the pile was an essay he wrote more than 40 years ago. I’d never seen it before.”

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In the decades-old paper, “The Importance of Grieving,” Wyatt “wrote about what happens to children when they aren’t able to properly grieve.”

Anderson said that one titbit from the essay by Wyatt — who has a 3-year-old namesake grandson that Anderson and former partner Benjamin Maisani welcomed in April 2023 — especially struck a chord with him.

“He quoted a psychologist who said, ‘When a person is unable to complete a mourning task in childhood, he either has to surrender his emotions in order that they do not suddenly overwhelm him, or else he may be haunted constantly throughout his life, with a sadness for which he can never find an appropriate explanation,’” shared Anderson, who is also father to son Sebastian Luke, 21 months. “When I read that, I realized, for the first time: That’s me. That’s exactly what I did.”

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The CNN anchor said that he “dug a deep hole” to push his emotions into when his dad died (“I barely even cried”) and continued to dig it deeper when his brother took his own life.

“I thought I could keep all that grief buried forever, but it turns out grief doesn’t work that way,” Cooper wrote. “As one podcast listener said to me, ‘It has to go somewhere.’”

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Now, with the help of more than a thousand voice messages and Wyatt's wisdom from his late father, Anderson has realized that he is ready to grieve.

"I see now that in burying my grief, I’ve also buried my ability to feel joy, and I don’t want to do that any longer,” he wrote. “I can’t. I want to feel all there is.”

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