All There Is with Anderson Cooper - A President’s Grief

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

“You gotta come home, there's been an accident.” It was 1972 when Joe Biden heard the news that changed his life forever: his wife Neilia and 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. Decades later his beloved son Beau died of cancer. In this deeply personal interview President Biden reveals how he has found solace in his grief and learned to search for purpose beyond his pain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of Junior Chicken, McDouble, or Chicken Snack Wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Joan Didion wrote that in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. And boy, was she right. It's nothing we expect it to be, and it's different for everybody.

So wherever you are in your grief, I hope you find something in this podcast today that's helpful. In a few minutes, I'll sit down with President Joe Biden in the White House for a conversation about the losses in his life and how he lives with them. It is, I think, the first time any sitting U.S. president has agreed to do an entire interview solely focused on grief. A couple days before the interview, I was going through a box of stuff in my basement that belonged to my brother Carter. He died by suicide in 1988. I don't have a lot of photos of Carter visible in my house. I still find it too painful. In the box, there were a bunch of pictures of him, but two in particular stood out. A Polaroid I'd seen before and a framed black and white photo, which was one of my mom's favorites. It was taken by a friend of his, Winky Lewis,

shortly before he graduated Princeton. He's smiling, and he looks so young and so handsome and so happy. Fifteen months later, he killed himself in front of our mom. He was 23. Sitting on the basement floor studying his face in these pictures, I found myself weeping. I wasn't sure why at first, but later it hit me. I don't recognize the person in these photos. I don't recognize my own brother. He looks nothing like I remember him. And it's not just that I've forgotten what he looked like 35 years ago. I don't recognize him because I never really knew him. I never knew my own brother. I never allowed myself to, and I never allowed him to know me.

After our dad died, we each retreated into ourselves. We had 10 years to talk about it. We never did. I want to tell the boy in these photos that I see the sadness he's hiding and I see his fear and I want to tell him I'm sorry. I am so sorry. Why is it so hard to talk about loss and the grief that follows? We keep it hidden away, cry in private,

speak the names of our dead in hushed whispers only we can hear. That's what I've done my entire life, and I see now the price I've paid. I think back to what Francis Weller said in last week's episode. When we're asked to carry it alone, privately, we end up carrying it around in U-Hauls, dragging this weight behind us. And in that privatization,

in that sense of having to sequester my grief within my own being. I feel like I'm all alone in this, and that's one of the most intolerable places for the soul to be. I think he's absolutely right, and it does feel intolerable. That's one reason I wanted to talk with President Biden. He's been so public about the pain of loss he's experienced, and he's managed to stay engaged in the world. He isn't the only president, of course, to have experienced terrible tragedy, but none have been willing to share so much about it publicly, particularly when they were in office. More than 15 U.S. presidents have lost children.

John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all lost four of their kids. Jefferson was said to have carried a lock of hair belonging to one of his deceased daughters all his life. Abraham Lincoln watched two sons die. His 11-year-old, Willie, died in the White House, likely of typhoid. His funeral was held in the East Room. John F. Kennedy also lost a son while serving as president,

a newborn named Patrick who only lived about 39 hours. Both Roosevelts experienced the deaths of children, as did Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. His three-year-old daughter Robin died of leukemia in 1953. President Biden's first wife, Nelia, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash in 1972. His young sons, Beau and Hunter, were badly injured. Bo died of cancer in 2015. The White House had set up two chairs for the president and I to sit in, facing each other at some distance in the library of his residence. It was a standard setup for a standard interview with the president, but it seemed too formal to me. So I asked if they'd

bring a table we could sit around, something we could lean forward on, and if the president, but it seemed too formal to me. So I asked if they'd bring a table we could sit around, something we could lean forward on, and if the president was so inclined, talk more intimately, face to face. They brought a table in, we arranged the microphones, and then the president appeared. We shook hands, he sat down, and we began to speak. I know you're reluctant to talk about your grief publicly because people have suffered worse, you've said, and you've gotten support that other people haven't gotten. And I know that given all that's happening in the world

and all the suffering that we're seeing, it may seem trivial to talk about one person's suffering, but I do think it helps people to hear from others who have survived grief and lived with grief as you have. And I know it's the only thing that's really helped me. So thank you for doing this. No, I'm happy to do it. Look, one of the first things I learned after I got that phone call when I was down here. 1972. 1972. And I got that phone call when I was down here. 1972. 1972.

And I got a phone call from the fire department at home in Delaware. And they put a young woman on the phone, one of the first responders, and said, you've got to come home, there's been an accident. And I said, what's the accident? And they said, well, your wife and three kids were hit by a tractor trailer, and you should come home. And the poor kid, she was a young woman, said, your wife's dead. Your daughter's dead. And your boys are really hurt.

Your daughter was 13 months old. Yeah, 13 months old. My boys were not quite three, not quite four four a year and a day apart and uh i just remember like a lot of people feel i think i remember walking out through the capitol and looking up at the heaven saying why'd you do you know i was angry like i was talking to god i know it sounds strange but it was i was really angry you were just 30 You had just been elected to the Senate. You'd fallen in love with this woman on a beach in the Bahamas. Nelia was her name, and Naomi was your daughter.

Yep. Did you know how to grieve at that time? Well, I won the gene pool. I was raised by a mom and a dad who were, my mom was a person of faith. My dad was a guy who'd been through some tough times and just got up. The saying in the family was, just get up, just get up. And when you get knocked down, just get up. And I had the great advantage because when it happened to me, I had

a whole family. My deceased wife and I had purchased a home. It had a barn. My brother moved in and turned the barn into a little apartment. My sister and her husband left their place and moved in with me to help me raise the kids. And we have an expression in our family. If you have to ask, it's too late. I mean, for real. And they were there and my mom lived and my dad lived. You wrote about that time. You said you felt trapped in a constant twilight of vertigo, like in the dream where you're suddenly falling. Only I was constantly falling. And you went on to say, I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in, how suicide wasn't just an option, but a rational option.

Did you actually feel that? Did you actually think about that? Well, I thought about, I could understand how people could do it. I didn't contemplate it per se because I had two boys that needed me. You wrote that you looked at them when they were sleeping and you said, who would explain to my sons my being gone? That's true. Look, you could see how people, when they've sleeping and you said, who would explain to my sons my being gone? That's true. Look, you could see how people, when they've been to the top of the mountain, had everything, their life was like wonderful and everything gets crushed.

How they could say, I'm never going to be there again, so I don't want to do this anymore. But, you know, one thing I did do, I'm the only Irishman ever met that never had a drink. And I had actually gone downstairs in the house we were still living in, the boys and I. And I take out a bottle of liquor and put it on the table and say, I'm going to drink it. I'm going to get drunk. I never took a drop, but I stared at it. And, you know, just how do you escape? There was a Senator McClellan was his name who had lost a number of his own kids. And he advised you to bury yourself in work.

Yep. He said to you, work, work, work, work. Yep. I buried myself in work much of my life for this reason. Well. But you, did you do that or did you not i i did that in the sense that uh i didn't want to stay in the senate i was going to leave and i had my brother talking to the governor about a replacement for me you were criticized at the time for not spending more

time in washington for going home every night to be with your boys but i did every single night i got a train to go home because I wanted to kiss them goodnight. And every night, no matter what time I got home, sometimes it was late, they'd be in bed. I'd climb in bed with each of them individually. That was 51 years ago. And my dad died when I was 10 years old and my brother when I was 21.

And I still have a hard time talking about it. And I wondered 51 years later on, is it something that still, do you think about it every day still? I got really lucky. No man deserves one great love, let alone two. My youngest brother set me up on a blind date five years after I lost Amelia and Jill and had to ask her five times to marry me but I literally but my boys were in good shape they were coming along and again I had just an incredible family I told you the expression the family was just get up.

You're getting knocked down, get up. And I read one of your, I heard one of your podcasts about how you started on packing boxes and how difficult it was. Yeah, I've been going through my mom's boxes still. They're all in my basement still. Well, I get that one because I purchased this home that we loved and it was a neat house. We loved it. But every time, I couldn't take anymore open in the closet and smell the fragrance or walking through a room and having a memory or packing up the clothing.

I mean, that was really, really hard. And so I decided that we're just going to sell the house, we're going to move. And we did. But it was a really difficult time because it was all still so raw. Fast forward about 10 years later, I built a home. And I built it on a pond, and across the pond was a woods. I remember if we had a fundraiser for my campaigns, we'd do it at my home.

And my dad would come and we're standing out in this back porch looking over this pond and I didn't think I was being maudlin. I said, you know I wish Nelia could have seen this because she lived up in the Finger Lakes and like Skane Atlas loves

the lakes. And my dad went up to the Finger Lakes, and Lake Skaneateles loves the lakes. And my dad went up to the local Hallmark store and came back with a framed version of Hagar the Horrible. The old comic book. The old comic book. And the Viking with his ship, and there's two frames in it. One where his ship gets struck by lightning, and he's standing looking up at God and saying, why me?

And the next frame is a voice from heaven says, why not? My dad handed it to me. And said, don't forget it, honey. Don't forget it. My mom always used to, my mom had experienced a lot of tragedies in her life and witnessing the death of my brother in front of her

never said, she would never ask why me. She would always say, why not me? Why should I be exempt from the suffering? Your mother was ahead of me because it was, I mean, I was my dad though. You know, you can't feel sorry for yourself. So many other people go through so much more than you've gone through. He never said it that way, but it was like, you know, why, why would you be exempt?

You and I had both spoken to Stephen Colbert about grief. He was on the podcast. And one of the things he said to me, he said, people are afraid to talk about grief because they think it's a trap of depression. He says grief is a doorway to another you because you're going to be a different person on the other side of it. Do you feel like you're a better person because of the grief you've experienced? Well, that would be presumptuous for me to say I'm better or worse, but I'm slightly

different. I find myself focusing on the things, probably the best things that ever happened to me was one of the worst things. When I was a kid, I stuttered badly, like that. And I was the run of the litter, too. I was always a little guy. And I used to hate the fact I stuttered. It was, it was tightening me up so much having to read aloud in school or those kinds of things were really hard. But I realized it was a great lesson I learned because everybody

has something they can't fully control. Everybody. And so it turned out to be a great gift for me that I stuttered. I think the upside of going through what I went through is making me realize that there's so many people out there who've gone through so damn much, and they have none of the kind of help I had. I mean, I really think, Anson, I think there's a lot of heroes get up every morning, put one foot in front of the other, and don't know how the hell they do it. Don't know how they do it.

We're going to take a short break. We'll have more of my conversation with President Biden in a moment. This episode is brought to you by Canon Canada. From street interviews to vlogging or filmmaking, more of my conversation with President Biden in a moment. you need for that shot or scene you've been dreaming of for less. Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots, Canon's got you covered. Shop the level up sales event today at canon.ca. This episode is brought to you by RBC Student Banking. Here's an RBC student offer that turns a feel good moment into a feel great moment. Students get $100 when you open a no monthly fee RBC Advantage Banking account and we'll give another $100 to a charity-great moment. Students, get $100 when you open a no-monthly-fee RBC Advantage banking account, and we'll give another $100 to a charity of your choice. This great perk and more, only at RBC.

Visit rbc.com slash get 100, give 100. Conditions apply. Ends January 31st, 2025. Complete offer eligibility criteria by March 31st, 2025. Choose one of five eligible charities, up to $500,000 in total contributions. Welcome back to All There Is. Now, more of my conversation with President Joe Biden.

You talked about the stuttering as a gift. It's interesting because Stephen Colbert also, one of the things he once said to me, which really struck me, he talked about a realization that he had had, that he was grateful for his grief. And he quoted a line that J.R. Tolkien, the writer, wrote saying, what punishments of God are not gifts? And when I asked Stephen if he really believed that, he said that yes. And he explained that he had gratitude for the pain of grief. It doesn't take the pain away. It doesn't make the grief less profound. In some ways it makes it more profound because it allows you to look at it.

It allows you to examine your knowledge of what other people might be going through. Do you feel grateful for your grief? No, I don't feel grateful for it, but I feel that it's given me an insight. Look, I was raised... An insight into other people. Yeah, and I was raised in a family where you were expected to reach out to people. It wasn't something you had to go through something horrible. I remember my, you know, I joke that, you know, I learned my values at my grandpa Finnegan's kitchen table up in Scranton when he used to say,

Joe, remember, you're a man of your word. Without your word, you're not a man. He'd talk about how he lost his son, Ambrose Finnegan, in the war. And he'd talk about all the good pieces of him and why he was so special and how the family stuck together. And my dad went through some tough times,

but my dad just got back up. And so... That was the ethos in the family. Yeah, no, it really was. I mean, it was throughout the family. Just this past year, I've kind of had what I consider kind of an awakening to this grief that I buried very long ago when I was very young, when I wasn't able to deal with it as a little boy. I still feel overwhelmed, almost on the verge of being overwhelmed by it.

And I'm wondering, do you ever still feel overwhelmed by grief? I do as it relates to my son, Bo. Bo. He died in 2015. Yeah. He was,

he was, he had been in Iraq, unfortunately for a year next to one of those burn pits. And he got glioblastoma, brain disease. He was 46 when he died. Yep. But when he came home, it was clear that it was a death sentence. It wasn't a question of if, but when he was going to die, how long it would take. But I think you have to find purpose.

Purpose beyond your pain. And for me... You have to find some meaning to get you through. Something to keep you completely engaged. And I had two things. For example, every single day, I talked to every one of my children and grandchildren who are alive. I mean, literally, I text them every single day I talk to them.

The thing that saved me and Jill with Bo was the fact that we have these kids. You just keep reaching out. You keep touching them. I know you have two children now, but, I mean, they were my salvation. They were, you know, they'd— And even when Nelia died, you've said that it was Bo and Hunter, little kids at the time that saved you. Oh, absolutely. I remember riding. We were in the car. Hunter was, I guess, five years old, six years old.

And we're riding along and the top was down. In those days, you could put a kid in your lap. I remember those days. It was crazy. And and all of we stopped at the stop sign and we were in the country and he looked up he looked out and all these cows around crazy he looked he said daddy i love you more than the whole sky the whole sky and you know i'd get home and and and they could tell too when I was down. And they'd just be there. In your book, your last book, on the back page was a beautiful photo of Beau when he was eight or nine. And he's turning and he's waving to the camera.

And you said somewhere that that's the age you always see him in your mind's eye. And I'm wondering, is that still true? Yeah, it is. He had a smile on his face, just waving. He's walking into the garden. And look, Bo and Hunt, they finish each other's sentences. They were the closest they could possibly be. And I think the loss of Bo was a profound, profound impact on Hunter. But when Jill and I got married, she was just totally embraced by them.

Everything we've done, we've always done as a really close knit family. We were talking about, we were talking about being overwhelmed at times and you, you brought up Bo and I'm wondering, um, I read a book by Evan Osnos who wrote a book about you and he talked to a couple of people who knew you and some of them said that after Bo's death, that they saw a change in you. And one person said it was almost physical. You could see it in how he stood. He wasn't the old college football player anymore. He emerged as the sort of humbled, purposeful man.

And I'm wondering, how do you think Bo's death altered your sense of yourself? Well, I think it made me a little more fatalistic. It also caused me enormous pain because he should be the one sitting there talking to you, Bo. He was a better man than I am, and so was Hunter. Both boys were always looking out for me, taking care of me. If they thought I was getting down, they'd, hey, Dad, come here, we're going to do boom, boom, boom.

You've talked about how Bo made you promise you weren't going to turn inward and that you weren't going to step back from all the things that you devoted your life to. And I'm wondering, how do you do that when you feel like your heart is taken away from you? How do you not turn inward? Because I turned inward when I was a little kid, and I'm not sure I've ever emerged from that. Well, I'll tell you exactly what happened. Jill and I went home on a Friday night to see Bo.

He didn't have much time left. He wasn't in the hospital bed, but he was clear with the diagnosis of Reed. Anyway, he said to his wife, would you put the kids to bed? I want to talk to dad. He said, dad, he said, look at me, dad. And there's this tradition in Ohio that came from our family. He said, if you want someone to look at me, Dad, and he pointed to us, look at me, Dad. I said, I'm looking at you, honey. He said, I want your word as a Biden.

Promise me, promise me you'll be okay when I go. I said, boy, I don't want to talk about it. I said, Dad, promise me. I know you, Dad, you're going to want to quit. You're going to want to go in. You're not going to want to do it anymore. Dad, promise me you will not quit. Give me your word, dad. I said, Bo, I said, dad, give me your word, dad. And I made a promise. He knew me better than I know me. And he knew my instinct would be just turn inward.

Do you still feel him with you oh i do all the time i ask myself i i i promise you i promise you i ask myself all the time what would beau do a difficult decision but do you do you literally feel him yes i mean in good days i feel people i've lost with me but um there's a loneliness to grief i find there is but look what i i had an advantage i still had ashley i still have hunt and i'll get calls from my daughter and my son saying dad how you doing today everything okay good doing I mean, it's constant contact. Do you feel alone in your grief still, at all? No, because I think that Bo's death was even more profound for Hunter and for Ashley. They were like one person.

You're wearing Bo's rosary right now. I am. The Sir Lady of Guadalupe. It's interesting. I talked to a palliative care doctor named bj miller and he said to me that the loneliness so many people feel in grief is itself a bond and that maybe people can come to see it as a communal experience there's a communal experience in that loneliness, ironically. Well, there is, at least in my family, and people who are really close to Bo.

I mean, we'll be sitting there sometimes and not having talked about anything, and all of a sudden, you know, my daughter will say, you know, remember when Bo did that? We were at the beach. Remember that time Bo did boom, boom, boom? And you were able to tell those stories. Yeah, I think because we forced ourselves to do it.

And now it's kind of like a glue that holds us together. It's beautiful. Well, it really is. I mean, Bo's two children. I'm with them. We're with them all the time. I mean, Natalie's turned out to be such an incredible kid she's happy she's doing really well her son's a handsome young boy every

single Thanksgiving since before Bo passed away we go to Nantucket because that's where Bo liked to go as a family and all of us together because it's just the memories. That's his place. Yeah. I spoke to a woman named Rachel Goldberg a couple of weeks ago in Israel. Her son, Hirsch, had part of his left arm blown off in a bomb shelter when he was hiding from Hamas gunmen. And he's been taken hostage.

And she was on a call with you, she told me, with about 10 other Americans whose loved ones are probably being held hostage she said that there was another mother on the zoom call two of her children were missing she'd already been informed that one of her children was dead and during the call she got up and she came back in and unmuted the zoom she said i'm sorry to break in, but I've just been told my other child has been found dead. And she was screaming. And Rachel said that you cried and everybody cried. And then after some time, according to Rachel, you said, I know loss. I've lost two children.

I lost my wife. And I'm telling you that you need to go through this. But you also need to remember that you will be strong again for your family. And Rachel said to me that it wasn't platitudes, that it was a real moment of a father who's lost two children talking to a mother who's also lost two children. There's not a lot of people who are able to step into other people's pain the way you are willing to. Look, I mean, you know, I just, I can remember the worst of all feelings I've ever had in my life. Where I didn't know whether my two boys were alive when I was going home after I heard that accident call. And I'm told that my wife was dead on top of my one son, my daughter was dead on top of my other son. And it took several hours of the jaws of life to get them out.

And what I've never been able to do, some people can't, I never wanted to know the detail. I didn't want to know any of the detail. I was on a committee on transportation in the United States Senate, and the issue was about trucks and brakes. I couldn't hold hearings. I didn't want about trucks and brakes. I couldn't hold hearings.

I didn't want any part of that. I couldn't do it. And I remember when we, I told you we sold the house that we had bought. And the house we moved into, I had moved all those boxes you talk about. Well, I moved on the third floor a bunch of boxes I had never opened.

And I opened one of the, opened one of the boxes that had never been opened. I decided what I was going to throw out and not. There were about 15 boxes in that third floor attic room. And there was a scrapbook and someone thinking they were doing me a favor kept a scrapbook of the accident and everything. And I opened it up, and there was a picture of the car. I closed it. I took it downstairs, and I burned it. I could not, could not. I don't want to know the detail. I don't want to know the detail.

I'd like to pray God that that car hit and they were gone and the boys don't remember anything. But you know, well, I just think it's really, really, really difficult for that woman to get that news. The hardest part was going home because I wasn't sure that the message I got, they're not sure the boys are going to make it. I know they were dead or alive going home. Just finally, because I know we're out of time. There's a psychotherapist named Francis Weller who's on the podcast. And one of the things he writes, he said,

our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive. I very much want to get to that place. I'm not sure I can. But do you feel like you're in that place?

It's one thing to welcome it. Another thing to deal with it. I don't know anybody who welcomes grief. I didn't welcome it, but you got to confront it. Got to deal with it, look at it, understand it, and decide I'm moving on because I have another purpose in life. My two children are alive. My grandchildren, my wife, my, whatever it is. It's not welcoming grief. It's facing it. And one of the things I tell people, the moment will come when the memory of the one you lost that you're dealing, fighting through, where you're going to open one of those boxes and you're going to smile before you cry. That's when you know you're going to make it. Time will come, but you got to face it. But it's hard as hell. And like I said, the thing I mean is from the bottom of my heart,

my word is abiding. I think it's critical that people understand that they're always going to be with you. Your mother's in your heart every single day. Your brother, as horrible as that was for your mother and for you, your brother, but in your heart, you're there every single day. And there'll come a time as you face up to this, and I'm no psychiatrist, state the obvious, but when you can sort of welcome that that you have that you had that that it was there i think the hardest thing must be to deal with

your brother's circumstance yeah i get stuck in the way his life ended as opposed to how he lived his life. Bingo. That's what I mean. Look, you know, it's really hard as hell to figure out. I found myself spending a lot of time. What could I have done? Was it my fault this all happened? What could I have done differently? I think about that a lot. What could I have done differently? Maybe I shouldn't have been, you know, commuting.

Maybe I, for example, right after this happened, you know, it was a Ford station wagon. I thought, well, maybe I had the wrong car. If there'd been another car, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Maybe they, you know, or if... You can endlessly go through those. And eventually, what you get to is, like, I go, I'm going to reveal myself here.

I shouldn't do this, probably. The president is reaching into his pants pocket and pulls out a small silver object. It's another kind of rosary, and he's holding it in his hand. I find solace in my faith. And all the stories about how the Irish were persecuted, and we scrammed all that stuff to talk about Irish. And this is called a prisoner's rosary.

They weren't allowed to have rosaries like a lady of Guadalupe in Irish prisons during the famine. But they had these. And I find myself, you know, going to bed and just saying a decade, just holding on. And it's almost rote. But it just, I feel connected to Bo, to Naomi, to Nelia. But again, I have... It's beautiful to have that faith.

Well, again, it's almost more of a feeling than it is able to articulate the detail of it. But I just think that the time's going to come when, God willing, I'm going to see him again. And I know that sounds probably... No, I think about that all the time, too. Because, look, she's in your heart, he's in your heart. I mean, you can't look in the mirror and not see her.

You can't... I'm presumptuous of me to say that. No, the amazing thing is my kids look like my mom and look like my father. It's amazing. Well, by the way, Bo's son looks like him. Hunter's son looks like Bo. Bo named his son Hunter and Hunter named his son Bo.

I mean, it's like, i know it sounds stupid to people haven't been through this but but no it's beautiful there's this thing and i even find that that i'll find like one of my grandchildren doing what beau would have done i mean i mean literally what beau would have done you see that the cycles repeat in families. You see the... Yes. I mean, you see in the eyes of your grandchildren, the eyes of your son. I do.

Mr. President, thank you for your time. Well, thank you, and I appreciate you sharing. I think your sharing your situation with so many people gives them hope, because a lot of people think I must be the only one that's happened to me. Yeah. When they know other people are there, and it's the strangest thing about grief is i mean it's this universal human experience and yet it feels so lonely and oh it wouldn't feel so

alone no and it is and people are and a lot of people aren't inclined to talk about it either they don't know how to or want to but Anyway, I've never known anybody who hasn't benefited from Illinois, talking about it. I agree. Thank you, sir. As my mother said, God love you, dear. That was President Joe Biden at the White House on November 7th. I hope hearing the president, one of the most powerful people on the planet,

talk about his grief will help you talk about yours. As hard as it is, it helps to talk. Next week on All There Is, Katie Talman, a podcast listener who left me a voicemail about the death of her daughter, Everly. It's a conversation about the pain of losing a child and the crushing isolation she felt in her grief. I was at a grocery store and I remember feeling like nobody could see me and I was just screaming inside. And really, I just wanted to talk about her. I wanted to have permission to speak about her because I felt like I wasn't allowed to.

I was supposed to sweep that under the rug like it never happened. And it was all of me. That's next week on All There Is. Thanks for listening. All There Is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producers are Haley Thomas and Felicia Patinkin. Dan DeZula is our technical director,

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