All There Is with Anderson Cooper - David & Amy Sedaris

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

David and his sister Amy Sedaris have lived through the deaths of their mother, father and sister, and most recently, Amy’s pet rabbit. They join Anderson for a heartfelt, and at times irreverently funny, conversation about loss and grief.  Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. This past Sunday was January 5th, the anniversary of my dad's death. Not many people in my life remember the significance of the day for me, but I don't really expect them to. After all, it's been 47 years since my dad died. I think it's probably like that for a lot of you

listening as well. Do you have dates on your calendar that you silently dread? Dates others in your life forgot long ago or maybe never even knew? I mentioned earlier that I've been trying to spend a few minutes each day with the child I was when my dad died, talking to him, letting him know he isn't alone and that I see him.

Sunday, I imagined that child, me curled up in my dad's lap, feeling his warmth. I tried to remember the sound of his voice and the feeling of safety and love I always had when I was with him. I continue to be kind of embarrassed saying this out loud, but it was comforting. Most of Sunday I spent with my kids. And when I put my youngest, Sebastian, to bed,

I sang him the same lullaby my dad sang to me. He'd make up words to Brahms' lullaby, so I try to do the same. Lullabies, and good night to Sebastian and I I'm even worse at singing and humming than he was, but it feels so remarkable, the cycles of life and families. I can't believe that I have two boys I can now love the way that he loved me and my brother. And it was a nice way to end the day that in other years has so often ended in tears. Welcome to All There Is.

I'm Anderson Cooper. Before we begin, I've opened up the voice mailbox again and would love to hear from you if there is something you've learned in your grief that might be helpful for others. We're going to keep it open for the next two or three weeks. The number to call is 404-692-0452. You can leave a message up to three minutes long, but if you get cut off, you can always call back and continue your message. We may use all or some of your message in a future podcast or video.

Feel free to leave your name and number in case we might want to reach out to you. We obviously wouldn't include your number if we use your voicemail. Again, the number to call is 404-692-0452. I'll repeat it at the end of this podcast. My guests today are actress, author, comedian Amy Sedaris, and her brother, author David Sedaris. Early in her career, Amy starred in Strangers with Candy on Comedy Central.

She's gone on to appear in a slew of TV shows and movies and written a number of funny and irreverent books on entertaining and crafting. David has published 14 books, Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, just to name a few. They grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina with four other siblings, one of whom, Tiffany, died by suicide in 2013.

She was 49. Their mom Sharon died in 1991 when she was 62. And their father Lou died in 2021 at the age of 98. I've gotten a lot of voicemails from listeners about grief after a pet dies. And Amy's pet rabbit died recently. So I started off our conversation with that. Amy, you actually recently experienced

the death of your rabbit. My rabbit, Tina. So I've been bawling my eyes out. And I like the feeling of crying, because I'm experienced the death of your rabbit. My rabbit, Tina. So I've been bawling my eyes out, and I like the feeling of crying. Because I'm not a big crier either. But there's something about losing a rabbit. It just brings you down. I don't like losing a button.

I don't like losing anything. You know what I mean? I have such a hard time with death. But yeah, I'm still sobbing about it. When did Tina die? It doesn't feel bad to do it. Tina died on Halloween. How long had you had? We had ten great years together.

I mean, that rabbit, jackpot, spoiled rotten. Both of us, we both hit the jackpot. I adopted Tina, they said it was a girl. And then four years later I found out Tina was a boy. So I just kept the name Tina. So he's a big raving queen in my apartment. And you've had, this is your third rabbit. My third rabbit.

What is grief like for you over Tina? Well it's funny because people do give me that look like, oh, like it doesn't count. They just think it's ridiculous, crazy to be sobbing over a seven pound rabbit, you know what I mean? They just kind of roll their eyes a little bit. But it's sad because we were, you know, he's my roommate. We live together. I spent a lot of time at home with my rabbit a lot. Just two of us. He slept with me, played with him, and also it's your responsibility. My dad used to say, that damn rabbit holds you hostage. But they do kind of hold you hostage.

Most pets do, right? Or boyfriends. So I've been really grieving about that. David found an urn for Tina like five years ago. Wait, you bought an urn for Tina five years ago? Yeah, because I bought an urn for her last rabbit, too. Yep. So I'm just always on the lookout, you know, for something that could hold rabbit ashes, you know. So it's small, but... But I have my mother's ashes in just an old candle box.

How do you feel about ashes? Do you feel a connection to the ashes? No, not really, no. I bought a house on the coast of North Carolina. My mother loved it. It's where we used to go as children on vacation. So about four years ago, we were all there for Thanksgiving and we said, let's scatter mom's ashes. My mother died in 1991,

and my brother brought the can down, and we were behind the house, and we were just wrecks. And I didn't expect that, but it was like touching the ashes. And it was really a beautiful thing to do as a family, and it was really beautiful to have done it so long after she had died as well. When she died, there was so much emotion that it just would have been sort of lost in that. But it was nice to actually touch the ashes and feel connected with her. We didn't speak. We didn't, I mean, you can't shut anyone in my family up. We did not say a word.

But it was a good group thing to do together. That was what I was reacting to mostly. But the actual ashes, I just, I don't know how much they mean to me. There were six kids in the family. Your sister Tiffany, she died by suicide in May of 2013. How was that different than grief you felt in other ways? One thing I've found very interesting, and I've gotten up great many letters from people

who have had somebody in their family kill themselves. And people always want to assume that you feel guilty. And I felt no guilt over my sister's death. The tragedy wasn't her suicide. It was her mental illness. And there was nothing anyone could have done to change that. And so it's been fascinating to hear from other people who have gone through the same thing.

Because, again, people just want to project this thing, and it's already bad enough, and then they're trying to project something on top of that. The figuring must obviously feel like it was your fault. But I didn't. And it's just a sorrow. I mean, I had a dream about Tiffany a while ago, but it was a Tiffany that I wished, like, if she hadn't been mentally ill,

when she had a beautiful and successful life. And it was so nice to see that Tiffany. And then when I woke up, I was sad, and I thought, well, that's nice to see that Tiffany. And then when I woke up I was sad and I thought, well that's not the Tiffany that existed. She talked at you. So whenever you talked to Tiffany you were just like wiped out after the phone call and you were just haunted by it for days.

It was tough and it just stayed with you. My brother Carter died by suicide and he killed himself in front of my mom. The thing that I still just can't kind of get over is the violence of it, and it is so different than the person he was. So it's interesting to hear you talk about Tiffany. There isn't this level of shock

and how could this possibly have happened. You didn't have those questions. I say my prayers every night, and I used to say all the time, there's nothing we can do for Tiffany. I would add that to the end of my prayer, like she was alive and there's nothing we can do for her.

I think we all knew at one point this was gonna happen. We kind of knew that was how it was gonna end. She tried the first time and it didn't work. And then just to think about that, your sister, you know, taking all those pills in the saddest room you can imagine, in the saddest house on the saddest street. She left these notebooks behind and the chaos on those pages, like if that was your mind, I was just surprised she lasted as long as she did. You know, those were your scrambled, paranoid, desperate, furious thoughts.

I mean, I've been keeping a diary forever, and so this was her version of a diary. And I was so curious, was it she capitalized the letter B, but that was all she ever capitalized. In those diary, in those notebooks. Yeah, every B was capitalized. But for me, it was strange because she shared a house with two other people and she had been dead for five days and no one knew that she was in their debt. You went to her apartment to pack up her things? I did.

My friend, Paul Dinello, we drove to Boston and cleaned out her. She had a room in this house. And I was like, wow, this was, and she, it looked like she cleaned it up and she had a bloody handprint on the wall. Her artwork was hanging up. A lot of the family photographs were torn in half. What was it like to go back there? Well, we didn't know Tiffany.

So it was just like, this is where she was living, this is her stuff, this is the shoes that she wore. I had no clue who she was. Who she'd become. Yeah. The rest of us all bathed in our mother's love, and our mother didn't love Tiffany. Tiffany was, it looked like my mother. They were too much alike. Really?

I think so. And she never knew what it was like to be loved by my mother. And when our mother died, Tiffany said, you know what, I'm glad she's dead. And to me, that was the worst was my mother dying. Like, I don't know that life could ever be that awful again in the wake. So I couldn't hear it because I was just in too much pain. Years later, I thought, well, every child, you have the same parents, but it's a different parent for every child, really.

She didn't have the same mother that I had. And were you both aware of that as kids? And was she aware of that as a child? We knew that, yeah. She just wasn't loved. It was like there were six kids and five nipples. Do you know what I mean? And so, and one didn't have Tiffany's name written on it.

I think about it still every day. You do? I mean, don't you? Yeah. Every day, yeah, I do. Mom, dad, people who die, friends, animals. I remember when my mom died, I divided people up. Oh, both your parents are alive. You go stand on that side of the street.

Because you don't know what it's like to lose a parent. It just changes everything. And I just divided people up like that. Like you have no idea. Really, both your parents are alive and happy? You just wait. You just wait. And you're getting a what for Christmas? You're getting your mom a CD for Christmas? She's

gonna die. You know? And then you're getting her that. Thoughtless. It is interesting you say that because I sometimes feel like I'm the only one walking around thinking about them all the time. All the time. Yeah. I think of Tiffany every day. Yeah. And I say goodbye to her every day.

You do? Mm-hmm. How do you mean? I say it out loud. Absolutely not a single day that I don't think of her. But again, the tragedy was if somebody doesn't take their medication, there's nothing you can do. You know, or if somebody refuses their diagnosis or...

I wish, oh my goodness, like the Tiffany that I had a dream about, that that was Tiffany's life. Do you still dream about her? Yeah, it's always nice when you... I had a really nice dream about my mom a while ago, you know, just a visit with somebody. And that's what it feels like. And you could feel her, your mom, in the dream. Like, feel her alive. Yeah, it wasn't like I dreamt that we were cleaning fish together and watching Donahue.

It's a visit. It's an event. I have a lot of dead people visit me. They're still around in a different way. It's a hard thing to describe, but yes, they are dead. You can't call them up, but they're alive. Like, even with Tina, I still hear Tina galloping down the hallway, or, you know, with my mom, or like Tiffany, or Dad even. And I do feel them all the time. It's very comforting. Or you think you've seen from the corner of your eye, I'm always like, you did. For you, was your mom's death as David was saying, it was the worst? It was.

I cannot believe I lived through my mother's death. I can't believe it. In what way? Because I just thought I wouldn't be able to live without her. Or just without her love. Without her love, yeah. I mean, I think it may be different with other people because they'd say, well, I still have my father's, but I never had that. So when my mother died, I think it may be different with other people because they'd say, well, I still have my father's, but I never had that.

So 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. I just adored her, just adored her, and it happened really fast. She called and said she had cancer, and three months later she was dead. And I feel like my job as a writer is to get the world to love my mother as much as I did. And when I'm signing books and people come up and say, oh, I love your mother, that means the world to me.

And I don't know why it's so important to me, but I felt like she deserved the world's love. Were you able to be with her at the end? No, they took her to the hospital, my dad took her to the hospital and she died of pneumonia. She just started chemo. But I remember, and so then afterwards we all went home and I remember her chemo medication and stuff. We were so mad at it, do 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 to the drug store and get a refund on it. Wow. It was just, I had to. Now wait a minute.

I remember the priest came to the house and my mother had a jigsaw table on them. And so we were just throwing, oh, I see you're finishing that in honor of your mother. And it's like, get out of here. Who let him in here? It's just so dumb. Like, why do you have to even ruin it by saying crap? Like, oh, then we're going to frame it, you know? And then we're going to...

We laughed so hard. Like, we just laughed so hard. Our aunt came, my mother had a sister who looked just like her, and who lived in New York State, and so we didn't see Aunt Joyce that often. Man, she was Mary Poppins, and she came in and said, this is what you do, let's get this house cleaned up, and we're going to have people over, and this is what you say when they get here. And pre-crack the liquor bottles. Afterwards, I started a relationship with my aunt

that lasted until her death. We saw each other, we talked on the phone, and we wrote each other, and it was a nice little lesson that it's never too late to be in a relationship with someone in your family. And I saw so much of my mother in her. And it was a good lesson too to think, oh, I can be that person one day, you know,

for somebody else, like to just fly in and say, okay, here's what we're going to do, and just kind of guide everybody through it, because in their grief, they can't see. I'm very grateful, like with my father's death, it was more complicated. Like my mother's, even though that was awful going through it, it was pure.

Do you know what I mean? It was pure grief. And when it's complicated, then it's different. Like, I don't call what I felt about my father grief in any way. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, more of my conversation with Amy and David Sedaris. 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. I'm CNN Tech reporter Claire Duffy. This week on the podcast podcast Terms of Service. Last April, following years of concerns from lawmakers that TikTok could pose a national security risk, President Biden signed a law that would ban the app in the United States unless its owner sold it to a non-Chinese company.

TikTok challenged the law, saying it violates the First Amendment. The United States government has never banned a social media app before. Follow CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts. And now back to all there is. David and Amy's father, Lou Sedaris, died in 2021 when he was 98. David wrote an essay in the Guardian newspaper about it and I asked him to read part of it. When a mother died, my siblings and I fell head first into a dark pit. Those first few days were the blackest.

It was the same after our sister Tiffany's suicide. With our father, though, it was different. By the time the check arrived at the Island Grill that night, we were talking about other things – gas stoves versus electric ones. A funny TV show about vampires. The time Lisa ate an entire gallon of ice cream with her bare hands while driving home from the grocery store, clawing it out of the carton with her increasingly numb fingers. Perhaps we strayed so easily onto other topics because at my father's advanced age this moment was expected.

Then too, he was Lucid Eris. By the second half of his 97th year, the man was a pussycat, a delight. Unfortunately, there were all those years that preceded it. The world didn't slow down for his death, much less stop, not even for us, his family. To me, that's pretty much the worst thing that you could say could be said about you. You know what I mean? Is that the world didn't stop for people who were in your family or people who, I mean, we're talking about other things like 20 minutes later.

Do you think that was because he was 98 and it was expected or just the nature of who he was and how you felt about him? It was who he was. I mean, with our mother, that goodness, that never would have happened. Like I had my father saying, you're not a writer. You're a loser. And you know what you are, a big fat zero,

like just Constant constant maybe it was like one of those you reap what you sow kind of things now it might have been different I mean Amy wasn't there. Yeah, I had a different relationship with my dad. I was close to my dad and growing up He lived by example and he I think if we lived to be that old we're gonna be like this is what he was going Through he was still on extension ladders with electric saws, you know, at 94. He never really complained about being uncomfortable or joint pain or muscle pain. Dad didn't do that. No, he didn't.

I just wrote this essay about going through my address book. An increasing number of people in it are dead. But I can't erase their address because I'll be on tour and I'll be at a hotel, you know, in Chicago with a stack of postcards thinking, oh, I'm going to send some postcards to people. And I go through my address book and I think, oh, Melissa Bank died in 2022. And I think of her for a moment. And so it keeps them alive in a way. But when you think about someone in my dad's age, everyone in his address book was dead.

Now, he wasn't a good friend to any of them. After my mother died, this old work colleague of my dad's, he and his wife thought, well, we'll take Lou in, come over to the house for dinner, Lou, and blah, blah, blah. And then my father went over to their house for dinner one night, and he tripped on some wet leaves in their driveway, and he sued them. Oh, my God. And he said, it's not them paying, it's the insurance company.

Yes. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Was it strange to hit 63 and to realize you've lived longer than your mom? Yeah. It is weird. I'm like, this is the age she died?

Really? I thought I was going to die at 62. At the age your mom died? Yeah. But I remember when my dad turned 65, we were in the car somewhere, and he said, I'm 65, but I have the mind of a 20-year-old. And I wrote it down in my diary. And then when I turned 65, I thought, yeah, I have the mind of a 20-year-old too.

Like I guess you always thought when you heard you would have old man thoughts, you know, but you're still fantasized. You're walking down the street and you're fantasizing about the most ridiculous things and so it's a shock just how age sneaks up on you. Yeah, totally. And there comes a day and you look in the mirror of the store and you think, who's that old man? And you realize it's me.

You know how you know you're an old man is that people call you young man. There was someone at the airport security a few weeks ago, step right through young man and I turned to the people behind me and I said don't you hate her and the woman said I'm happy to be called a young woman today and she was like around my age and then I thought okay you're dead to me, you're pathetic and I just had to put my fingers in my ear, come on through young man. You know, I was thinking, you know, the world doesn't stop. You want the world to stop for a second when you lose somebody important.

But the world just goes on. And in the fast lane, and you're like, you just want to scream. You're like, my mother just died. Or, you know, my dad just died. Can't we just take a second? But no, everything just, even when some, you know, famous people die, and it's on Instagram for a second, then it's done. I remember coming back from Mom's funeral and seeing people breaking leaves and seeing

people riding bikes and it- Yeah, living their life. Didn't make any sense to me. It didn't, it seemed the biggest insult to me that the world didn't stop for her death. I ask everyone in the podcast, is there something that you've learned in grief or from the death scene of experience that would be helpful for others? You kind of have to assume everybody's grieving all the time.

When you're grieving, you kind of learn, like, just assume everybody's grieving, and treat them in that way. Like, not too many questions. Like, I remember after my sister Tiffany died, I was buying an exercise band and I had cash and but it was like, what's your phone number? What's your email?

Are you paying with credit card? And I just snapped and I was like, oh my God, I'm grieving, like enough of the questions. I'm just gonna pay cash, you know, your seven bucks, give me the band. But that's when I learned like, oh, you just assume everybody is all the time. I just finished this tour, so I went to 45 I don't know, 45 cities or something, and this

man was supposed to get me at the airport in Washington, and I'm waiting and waiting and waiting, and then 15 minutes after he's supposed to be there, I get a call and I'm outside in a black Escalade, and I go out there and I said, I don't know what cars look like, and he said, they wouldn't let me park. And I said, how was I supposed to know that? And he threw my bag in the back of the car and then we get into the car and it's just this awful feeling in the car. And then I said, can we start over again?

I said, hello, like that. Anyway, he went for it, which is good because it turned out we had to spend six hours together. And in that six hours, I learned that like 10 days ago, his son had committed suicide. And I thought, can you imagine, your son commits suicide? Where were you? You know what I mean?

I need to be at the Four Seasons. I needed to be at the Four Seasons 10 minutes ago. I'm gonna have lunch with my boyfriend. You're killing me, you're killing me. Yeah. Yeah. But that was a good reminder that you don't know. You have to give people a break.

I always say to people, and it really helps, is like, again, if you see something from the corner of your eye or a sign, just pay more attention. Like little signs that pop up that can be comforting. They're out there, and you'll see them or feel it, and you'll know that they're still with you. And it is like you and Colbert were talking about, it is kind of a gift, which is another thing that's hard to tell somebody. You do feel that?

I do feel that. It's like it just gives, and then you know what to do for somebody else or to say to somebody else or you just, the way you just see the world is different. When Stephen Colbert said that to me in like 2019 and then again on the podcast a year or so later, I did not, I just found it incomprehensible. It blew my mind. I'd never even considered that idea.

And I've certainly now come to that. It's not that you wish this happened, but. The empathy for other people to go through that and was pretty special thing to feel, I think. I'm a big one at writing everybody and say, today's mom's anniversary or today. I do that a lot just to take a second. Because I write everything down on my calendar.

Or if I have friends who mom died on a certain day, I'm like thinking of you today. I think the only thing I learned is that it's not too late. Sometimes somebody dies and you don't send a letter or you don't say anything. And then you're embarrassed. And then you almost don't want to see them because you didn't do that But it's never too late years could have passed and it's never too late Well, David said our same is ours. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you

Next week on all there is we look at how grief has changed in the last hundred or so years in America, from something that used to be experienced communally to something we now hide away and rarely speak of. My guest is Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who did something remarkable with her husband before he died. You did something which I wish I had done with my mom while she was alive, which is you went through the boxes of your husband's things while he was still alive. This was a project you did together.

What an incredible thing to do. It almost didn't happen. For 40 years of our married life, I wanted to open those boxes. I knew they were a time capsule of the 60s, diaries and letters and memorabilia. He was a speechwriter and an advisor. He was with Robert F. Kennedy when he died. He had become his best friend.

Martin Luther King had died. He'd been close to him, but he didn't want to open them because the 60s had ended so sadly. And then finally, finally, when he turned 80, he said, all right, it's going to happen. It's now or never. I was so happy. But I had no idea what it was going to mean. I don't think I thought about the emotions of it. It was the last great adventure of our life. It changed him and it made him feel better about his whole life. And it changed me. And I'm so glad it happened.

That's next week on All There Is. And a reminder, the voicemail box is once again up and running. If there's something you learned in your grief that would help others, please call and leave a message. The number is 404-692-0452. You can leave a message up to three minutes long, but if you get cut off, you can always call back. We may use all or some of your message in a future podcast episode or a video or posted at our online grief community Feel free to leave your name and number so we can contact you

But we wouldn't include your number if we use your voicemail again the number to call is 404-692-0452 Join me next week for all there is remember you're not alone in your grief Join me next week for All There Is. Remember, you're not alone in your grief. All There Is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan DeZula is our technical director and Steve Ligtai is our executive producer. Support from Nick Godsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Haddad, Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Kerry Pritcher, Shemri Chitrete, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manessere, Robert Mathers, John Deonora, Lainey Steinhart, Jamis Andrest, Nicole Pesserou, and Lisa Namerow.

Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.