All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Ken Burns' History With Grief

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has been called “America’s biographer,” but in this moving conversation, he reveals how his own history has been shaped by early loss - the death of his mother Lyla when Ken was eleven years old. Join the community to share your story and watch Anderson's weekly streaming show All There Is Live at cnn.com/allthereis      Host: Anderson Cooper, Showrunner: Haley Thomas, Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski, Technical Director: Dan Dzula. Booker: Kerry Rubin.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The last couple days I've been sifting through old photographs of my dad. He worked as an actor and screenwriter in Los Angeles the 1950s, long before he met my mom. It's a bit like looking at a stranger. There's so much about him I still don't know, and so much I've forgotten over time. I've never had any videos of my dad, as he was when I was a kid, and I've struggled to remember how he moved, the look in his eyes when he talked. still photos don't give you that. A few weeks ago, I got an email.

An archivist found a TV interview my dad gave on Mississippi Public Television, and she sent me the link to watch. I waited a few minutes. I was nervous. And then I clicked on the link. And suddenly, there he was, alive. And I want to show it to you. I want you to meet my dad, Wyatt Cooper.

I'm at home anywhere I am. I really am because whether I'm in a big city or in the country, I am the same person. And in the city, in New York City, for instance, my kids and I go into the park, and Central Park in New York is a marvelous place. We have a spring that belongs to us. It belongs to us because only we know about it. We go there and we clean leaves out of the mouth of the spring. And when the water gurgles gratefully out and goes to anything, we have affected us. So we have had something to do with the soil and with growing things.

And that exists in the city as it does in the country. I watched him, how he moved his hands, the way he listened and connected with the person he was speaking to. And I remembered the feel of those hands and the way he connected to me when we spoke. I remember those eyes looking into mine, not just the brightness of the blue, but the delight and wonder and love.

and love I saw in them. That spring he was talking about in Central Park, I'd forgotten we used to go there. Let me see. Here, let me do you. But about six months ago, I found a spring in the forest near my house, and every weekend my kids and I

had been going there to clear out leaves. And I now delight in seeing my Wyatt and Sebastian help the water gurgle gratefully out as my dad once did with me and my brother. I see my kids with the same eyes he once saw me. One more thing. Several months ago, I started occasionally calling my son Wyatt Buddy. Now, I don't really know why.

It's not a name I've ever used for anyone ever. But a few days ago, I found a bunch of letters my dad's mom and his sister sent him over the years. Each began the same way. Dear Buddy, I'd forgotten that was the nickname he was called. in the small town of Quentin, Mississippi, where he grew up. The cycles of history in the world and in families play out across generations in patterns we only sometimes see. My guest on the podcast today has made history come alive for millions of Americans. Ken Burns is the most well-known documentary filmmaker of our time. You've probably seen some

of his award-winning series on public television, baseball, jazz, the Civil War. What you don't know about Ken, what I didn't know is how early loss and grief has shaped his entire life. We forget that these losses are often the most important and animating aspects of who we are, that we are not just defined by it, but sometimes our accomplishments are issuing out of that. We'll have more with Ken Burns in a moment. welcome back i've started a weekly companion show to this podcast it's called all there is live it's live streamed on our grief community page at c nan dot com forward slash all there is every thursday night at nine 15 p m if you can't catch it live it'll still be available there to watch for days after

the first episode was last week and i spoke to a podcast listener who's become a friend her name is mary Alahi Kynet. Her son, Ian, died of glioblastoma. Something that morning, the last morning of hospice, I needed to hold him, and I got in behind him and had him against my chest. And I told him, I said, it's okay, Ian, I've got you. I love you. I could feel his heart beating. And then it stopped. And just to have been able to hold him at that moment how lucky am I to have been holding Ian

how lucky am I and to have had him what a gift that's all there is live Thursday night's 915 p.m. My guest is Ken Burns one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time. His new series

The Revolutionary War will be seen on public television starting November 16th Thank you so much for doing this. My pleasure. I found in my dad's things two self-published books from two people in the 1800s about the children they lost. These are grief books that these families put out. The losses that previous generations had before penicillin, before other antibiotics, it's stunning. And it's haunting to me, but history has given me solace.

to know that grief is a landscape, generations of people have found themselves in and found a way to walk through. From the beginning of time, and we spend a good deal of our time, particularly in a modern age, trying to avoid it, trying to design the most sort of perfect circumstances, the equivalent of a gated community in every aspect of one's life. Emotionally as well. Emotionally, most definitely. And certainly in my experience too, watching myself and trying to come out of that or break out of those gates. But what we do is we forget that these losses are often the most important and animating aspects of who we are, that we are not just defined by it, but sometimes our accomplishments are issuing out of that. I don't think I'd be sitting here talking to you, Anderson,

If my mother hadn't developed cancer when I was a little boy and died when I was 11 years old, a few months short of my 12th birthday. You don't think you would have had the career, the life path that you've had? Definitely not. There was never a moment, Anderson, when I wasn't aware that there was a sort of Damocles hanging over our family, our life. There was something wrong with my mother. She would go away for a long time. She'd be in the hospital. She would come back.

She had a radical mastectomy. There was all of the disfiguration of that. From the time you were, your earliest memories. My earliest memories. She was ill. They told us when I was seven years old that she was going to die within six months. Somebody told you when you were seven years old. My parents set us down.

And it was, in retrospect, not a good thing to do. We knew she was sick. But they basically said that this had metastasized and that it was terminal, and they thought it would be six months. And my mom is so heroic and so strong. She just came and said, I will see you to junior high, she said. that meant seventh grade. That was like, I was in second grade. That was like so far away.

I kind of almost go, whew, you know, I've got some time. And she missed it by a few months. But she would just face all this stuff. We brought a hospital bed into the living room. She'd want to be in her bedroom. She would hold the court there. I can remember her a climbing up a set of stairs. You know the way you know your mother, the pleats of her skirts,

and you're following her up. And she would take this flask out to get a shot of brandy to give her more oxygen for her lungs because she'd lost one lung and was now basically on a half. And how old was she when she died? Forty-two. She died on April 28th, 1965.

In the days after, I was immensely sort of relaxed, I was aware that she was gone. I would dream that she was not gone. I would blow the candles out at my birthday wishing she'd come back. So that was the secret I held with the universe. In fact, many years, April 28th, the date would be up ahead.

and then all of a sudden it would be receding. I'm never present from 1965 on. It just didn't happen. And it was part of the keeping her alive of not dealing with the fact that she was gone. And after she passed away, and I would say passed away, I would say deceased in these awkward and acornistic phrases, never say die, you know. I try not to use pass away because I mean, I try to, if somebody, I try to, if somebody, I try, to use the verbage somebody uses, but in my own life, I say somebody died. I had to learn how to do that. We're now 60 and a half years since she's been gone,

which is way too long to be without a mother. And I feel it every day. Her name was Lila, by the way, L-Y-L-A, L-Y-L-A, L-L-A-L-A-Smith-Tupper Burns. And you feel it every day, the loss. Yeah. So I love baseball, for example. And people would say, yeah, I loved it when my dad and I could get together and my mom. I did baseball as this thing because nobody ever came to my games. It was this stuff I did alone and a good deal of my life right now is like that too, kind of isolated. I'm in touch with people all the time, but also completely, you know, alone. I'm exactly the same way. And so you've got the social aspects of whatever the professional life is, but there's

also, you know, you come in and you take off your coat and you're just, you just want to talk to your dog and and and that's it does that kid I mean I was hoping that would go away so the half-life of grief is endless and that's okay because it is an engine of accomplishment and of I mean it took me so I'm almost well 11 years old, by the time I'm 3940, I'm in the middle of a real-life crisis. Anxiety came in and there was doubt and worry and all of these crushing things. And I remember speaking to a therapist about the divorce I was going through, and she looked at me and said, you really think she's coming back.

And I knew she didn't mean my wife. and I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. It was that conversation that led me to my father-in-law. A fairly eminent psychologist, and I told him just off the top of my head, I said, I seemed to be keeping my mother alive. And he looked at me as if he knew all of this all along, and he says, I bet you you blew out your candles on your birthday gate growing up,

wishing she'd come back. And I go, yeah, how did you know? And then he listed two or three other intimate things that only I knew that I was doing, superstitious things, stuff that was avoiding dealing with it. And then he said to me, but look what you do for a living. I said, what? He said, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And then from that moment on, I realized that I needed to go back and re-possess the loss and reclaim what actually happened, no matter how painful, to figure out

how to heal myself. My mother died. My father had mental illness, and so we had a funeral, but nobody ever picked up the ashes. And here I am now, almost 40 years old, and there's no there there. There's not a grave. There's not anything. And I went, this is not repress memory. This is just set aside.

I mean, how could I have gone that long and not know? where she was, or whatever was left of her. And then me and my younger brother, Rick, who's also a documentary filmmaker, we endeavored to go back and try to find. The funeral home had grown out of business. We tracked the widow down to Florida who said that when we had unclaimed...

The widow of the owner of the funeral home. Yeah, that when we had unclaimed ashes, that we sent them to this cemetery way outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we had lived and where she had died. died. And we went out there and the guy with the little filing cabinet goes, yes, she's with 28 other cremains, the euphemism for this. And I said, oh, cremains. And could we pull them out? He goes, no, they've all dissolved. Well, could we put a plaque? And so we go out there and find

the place and we're able to put. It's not one of these things with above ground markers, but you can put something that lies flat and then brought my dad out who had been the sort of agent of the forgetting because he had not dealt with it and just had not bothered to do it we went to the minister at her church the man she knew had died and now this was the replacement and sobbed to him and then ever i've never lost april 28th in fact i probably once a day see it on a clock or on a sports countdown thing you see for like the numbers for 428 and my young I've got four daughters, and I would take them, the older daughters, to Ann Arbor every April 28th. And we would have an elaborate feast.

And then after all, I said, I don't have to go there every year. But the date is never lost. And it's okay. I don't always feel the immense pain of the loss. But I'm sorry, it's not going to go away. But what I was asking, well, it's twofold. I was hoping it would go away the pain of it, although I'm really just allowing. myself to feel the pain of it for the first time in my life after my dad died when I was 10 years old

and my brother 10 years later. But I think the loneliness and that sense of isolation, I mean, it's an effort to engage with people. I can do it for work, but I've been in my head this entire time and I was hoping by feeling the losses finally in my life all that would dissipate and I would somehow be engaged more with other human beings and that hasn't happened with you you say it's happened a little bit there is the work that we've done the work that you're doing is all good and it all is connecting but it doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to be some ideal of happiness that doesn't really exist for anybody gregarious and whatever sometimes you'll find the people that are the life of the party are themselves

beset. This is where they lose themselves and that we lose ourselves in other ways and in the interior dialogue that no one could possibly understand and just sitting here talking to you. I mean, it's clear we've had very similar circumstances and very similar completely understandable reactions to those circumstances and the way you button them down and then the way you try to bring air into this miasma and just let it breathe a little bit. It's not going to change overnight. And then maybe the work we do is the compensation for, I mean, if I wake the dead, if my job is to make Abraham Lincoln come alive, or now George Washington with this

or some ordinary foot soldier from the revolution come alive, maybe that's the compensation. The question is, and I have a really close friend and my co-director on this, Sarah Botstein, And she always will say to me all the time, take it in. There'll be something really great that happens. A great award, a great wonderful thing. Yeah, I can't do that. And I can't do that. And she says, take it in.

And every once in a while, you get a glimpse. It's almost in a way, and I don't know if this is your experience. And I'm not sure it's actually accurately a mental thought process that does this, but you're disrespecting if you let go of the whatever internal sadness you're supposed to have or just the sense of loss or whatever it is. But I know I have at times glimpsed and gone, wow, this is great, you know? And most of the time it's, okay, what's the next thing?

Yeah. I started working to earn money when I was like 12 because I was very concerned about, I mean, it may sound weird to some people, given my mom's last name, but financial stability and safety. And I wanted, I knew I was on a, financially shaky ship because my mom was amazing but not a business person and I needed,

I knew I would end up supporting her one day and supporting everybody one day. And that was very much in my mom when I was 12. And I used to say a prayer every night, which was, God, please keep me healthy so I can continue to work and earn enough money to take care of Mommy Mae, a nanny who I loved and Carter, my brother. I also started working and I've never stopped working um it's almost like the red shoes about i mean like i put on the red shoes and it's you you can't take them off because there's too many people that need that support i don't feel like i can stop like it like everything will fall apart and i believe everything will be taken away and so i need to build up as big a cushion as possible yeah and and nothing is big enough by the way right

it will never be it will never it makes no and i'm actually doing damage i'm i mean i'm taking time away from my kid because I have on this treadmill that I cannot allow myself to get off. It's very interesting. I've been a single dad twice in my life now and it's been one of the saving graces, not that I would ever recommend divorce or the pain of that, but it has necessitated that at least half the time I am there and cannot have that excuse to go off someplace, you know. But I do think this idea of working and just having to keep doing it,

doing. I've watched, I'm now at an age where I have friends who are retired or are contemplating or making plans for retirement and what about you? And you kind of look at them like, retire? What do you mean? I've got a thousand more stories to tell. Also, people work their whole lives to get mastery and you know how to do what you do better than anybody and you create things which are magical and important. God knows we need to understand our history and we need to understand and look at ourselves and you help us do that. You're so good at what you do. There is a satisfaction in that, even if you don't take it in, just knowing, oh, you know what, I know how to do this. Yeah. Grief actually as painful as it is, as isolating as it can be for some people

in the manifestations that it seems that both you and I have is also a gift that can't be squandered either. We can't not try to transform it at least into something that if it doesn't ultimately help us or we don't think it helps us that could help other people. I keep saying myself like my dad, my nanny who I was very close to who really raised me after my dad died, they would not want me to be unhappy. They would not want me to feel disconnected. And yet I do think there is that element of like if I let go of this. Right. Then you're betraying them in some way. Yeah, they disappear altogether.

Yeah. I don't think that happens. I think there must be a right way to put it, but I haven't found it. I just think that there's a kind of, you know, it's almost like this samurai ethic. You keep this kind of ascetic discipline. Right. And like you do something and it receives awards or it gets recognized. I immediately discount it and think, okay, it would be weakness if I allow this in,

I need to just be on the next thing. Like, your shark needs to keep moving. And it's not imposter syndrome either. You know you're where you're supposed to be and you're doing the work and you know it's good work. And I feel the same thing about my thing. I feel so lucky. I knew a couple months after I turned 12, my dad would let me stay up late on a school night and watch movies and I watched him cry. He never cried when my mom was sick.

He never cried when she died. And I wondered why. And he never cried at this impossibly sad funeral. and then, of course, never picked up the stuff. But here was this old movie called Odd Man Out with James Mason about the Irish Troubles, and he's crying. And I said, I'm going to be a filmmaker. That was the moment you decided to be a film.

Because I understood that it had provided him in all the complexity of his own life and mental illness, probably bipolar, don't know, a safe haven. And it was the movies. And we love that. So by the time I'm 12, I know what I'm going to do. By 18, I'm a documentary filmmaker.

And by 22, I also know it's going to. be in American history, I'm so lucky to know what I'm supposed to do. And yet I sit there also absent from the real experience of what I think I see other people having. God, I feel that's so much absent from the experience other people are having. But do you feel the 12-year-old boy that you were still? I was talking to my... Because I just woke up to feeling that little kid, and it's been incredibly important. It's really important, and you have to love him in a way for all the grief and the pain and all the confusion. I have an experience where I'm 72 years old, and I take the subway all the time, and I bound up the stairs.

And I realized that I, there was a kid who was an eight or nine or ten years old pre-death kid, still worried about it, knew something was bad, was going to happen. But I could feel that, and I still feel that same person. But the thing of, well, I'm not going to take this in. I got to keep moving forward. To me, that is the mental trick I developed when I was 9, 10, 11 years old, which was don't feel any of this stuff, just keep moving forward. If you feel it, it's going to drag you down, it's going to suck you down. And so don't celebrate your birthday and have never celebrated my birthday since.

Don't take the good in because it's going to, it's going to weaken you. That's right. It's going to drag you down. Yeah, I have so many of that things. I can remember being the back of a station wagon of a new friend, and the mother very innocently says, hi, what's your dad do? My dad's an anthropologist at the University of Michigan.

And what does your mom do? And I would say, she's deceased. Like I was some accountant, 45 years old, with an actuarial table. You would say that when you were. I would say deceased when I was. 12, 13 years old. And then the outer life was pretty common. I mean, if you said, what was the greatest grade you were?

And I'd say eighth grade, which was a couple years later. And everything was good. I was popular. But inside, inside was just roiling sense of loss. And I think that, as you said at the very beginning of this conversation, this is the inevitability of all human beings. None of us are getting out of here alive. None of us.

We are more defined by these losses than we are by the Nobel Prize or the Oscar domination or the Emmy or whatever the thing is that our group tells us is the most important thing. None of those things matter. And in fact, you know, how you free yourself of the needless suffering without losing the connection to these spirits of these people who are central to who we are, fathers and brothers and mothers. It's not just history that makes me realize

how much suffering others have had. Early on, I started going to Somalia and the famine and Bosnia and all over and touching other people's pain. The incomprehensible suffering that exists, in the world. And in comparison, my little suffering seems minimal compared to a mother who's lost eight of 12 children because they don't have a 25 cent antibiotic. My second daughter, Lily, she was as a baby just terrified of the vacuum cleaner. And her mom would have to make sure she was

asleep or outside or at a neighbor's to vacuum. And one day, and this is really important to think to you and me. One day, Amy, my first wife said, she just appeared at the doorway. Well, she was vacuuming and walked over and sat on the vacuum cleaner. Sat on this monster, just sat on it. So in our family, we say to sit on the vacuum cleaner is to face your fears. And we do this all the time. And you try to remind yourself that that's what you need to do to move into this. So I took sit Harta Mukherjee's book, The Emperor of All Malities, about cancer, this thing that had taken my mom. And I had a hard time even saying the word cancer, let alone death, and then spent many years working with colleagues to make a film a series about cancer, the emperor of all

maladies, which was a way of sort of sitting on the vacuum cleaner, which you're going into Somalia or Rwanda or all of these places is about. It's confronting the human experience and the human experience is loss, but I can't say Anderson that even sitting on that particular vacuum cleaner change my relationship to that loss. And I think as I get older, that maybe it's not supposed to. I just have to have some new understanding to make room for it and to tolerate that 11-year-old, or maybe it's the 3-year-old that knew, or maybe it's the 5-year-old that knew it was coming or maybe it's the 12 year old who had to absorb it to just make room for that boy it it has been a revelation for me that it is only once you turn to the grief the pain which i ran from

always that you actually get the reward which is feeling again or feeling your loved one again I couldn't feel my dad because I couldn't allow myself to feel the pain of his loss. I cannot describe to you how extraordinary after years of anxiety, which is the avoidance of pain. I mean, anxiety is a kind of friend, right? It's keeping you from the thing that really hurts, to pierce through it and to be able to sob in a therapist's office or to be able to sit in this Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan with a man I'd never met before, my brother and just sob and read a letter we'd written to our mother that was filled with all of the pain of laws and the anger at leaving and all of the mess that we inherited and finding

notes that she would leave to her mother-in-law, my father's mother, who was a wonderful woman saying, I'm dying, Bobby can't take care of them, who will take care of my little boys, and understanding how fragile Rick and I were in the world, and we made it. You know, we kind of muddled to him, but she was amazing. I think she willed herself to stay alive for Rick and me. I found letters of my dad recently, and he's writing the same thing, which is I've got to stay alive for these boys. Yeah, this is it.

And this is, how different is that from your prayer? You know, let me stay healthy so that I can support this person and this person and my nanny and this person and all the people I love. My dad died way too young, too, of mental illness and other things in his all too short life. My dad was not great, but not bad either, and the ability to have these cathartic things. But I'll tell you, Anderson, I lost one of my best friends two days ago. And, I mean, why is that not on the tip of my tongue right now? Why is it taking it this long to tell you?

Ron Sullivan was his name from Sonopin, New Hampshire, and I've known him for 30. years and he left me an anguish call from the hospital that he had maybe a year to live. And I called him right back when I got the message and left him all the, not the bromides, but all of the compassion that I could summon. I love this man. He's a big bear of a lovely human being and had been through a lot of health stuff and misdiagnosis and finally this and then this happened and then this is a new thing. And his wife had called back and said, we're going home to hospice and he got home barely a day or so and left. And my youngest daughters think of Ron as their godfather and he remembered every birthday

and when we saw him, he would give them way too much money for ice cream and stuff like that. And I have spent the better part of the last 48, however long it's been, doing what I have always done, you know, which is trying to figure out not to react to the loss of Ron. You know, and my 20-year-old, who's taking a junior semester abroad, calls in the middle of the night, sobbing that she misses him. And my youngest away at school calls and every day says, and I really miss Ron. And can you send me a picture? Right. So there are people around me that seem to know how to process.

When you hear them say those things, I just see daylight and I just want to run towards it. God bless them, that they're not, they don't have this. But does it make you, I think it would make me realize, here's that wall again, like, why am I not saying this? Here's that wall again. It's better than the way the wall was for so many years, unaware. The wall's there, yeah. That's what I guess human beings do.

It's certainly what this human being does. And I've now met another human being that does the same thing. So I guess that this is something that we do, but yeah, the wall's still there. I see your films and they're drenched in grief and they're drenched in connection and emotion and it's not dry history. You're an emotional archaeologist.

And I get that. And a lot of the stuff that I think I do best is going someplace and being able to touch people in the middle of the worst thing that's ever happen to them. And you help other people feel things. And yet, we don't allow ourselves to feel things. Or we don't permit the full expression of it or the unconscious expression of it. Like, I'll be working on a film and Abraham Lincoln dies or Jackie Robinson dies or Lewis Armstrong dies. And I cry. I'm watching the film. And I cry. And I'm grateful for that release,

just like my dad. Maybe that's why I'm making movies to have a death scene where James Mason essentially commit suicide by cop at the end of this odd man out by sir carroll reed a really great great film that he cried at and that's that's the thing we're also doing that is um okay there's there's some there's a pathologies and some toxicities to the way we behave we both know something's wrong with the way we've conducted our lives and at the same time these spirits are still there we'll have more of my conversation with ken burns in just a moment but first if you want to listen or watch past episodes of the podcast you can do that at our community page at c nan dot com forward slash all there is it's where you can also watch our new weekly companion show all there is live

Thursday nights at 9.15 p.m. Eastern and catch past episodes of it as well we'll be right back with more from ken burns my five-year-old Wyatt who's named after my dad um asked me lately about death all the time because i've i've talked to him about it like did my grandmother die before i was born and i've said i believe they are watching over us and i believe my mom would be so happy to see you and then my dad is smiling and i would have never said those things before because i don't think i believed them before but i actually do believe i i think i do it's um you know that's i'm walking in memphis are you a christian man I am tonight, you know, there's a kind of, there's something really powerful about what it releases and what it, I mean, we know the pain that it's caused, but there's a great thing. I mean, I've got one of the happiest endings of all, which is my oldest daughter, Sarah, who never met her grandmother. Of course, none of my four daughters have met their grandmother. The name Lila was never said, but the name was it.

itself draped in black crepe because your mom's name my mom's name um we said mommy and still do but in January of 2011 my oldest daughter had my first grandchild a daughter whom she named lila and so all of a sudden the black crape has disappeared we say the word lila all the time with excitement and glee uh she's old enough the same age as my youngest so they're best for friends, not Aunt and a niece, and she gave me the greatest gift, which was taking the Paul off the name at least, and we say Lila all the time, and the name doesn't have the associations it did. It's just a wonderful, wonderful gift. I can't begin. I mean, this gal has given me many, many gifts. She recited one Christmas morning, the Gettysburg Address as her present to me.

flawlessly standing in her nightgown at 12 years. She knows her audience. She knows her audience. And there was an awkwardness. I was a single dad. And I thought, oh, I'd forgotten something. And Lily was looking up my second daughters. And I went, oh, did I forget something?

And she said, no, dad. Sarah has one more gift. And she stood in the early Christmas morning light and resented flawlessly. I mean, not a single thing. And no emphasis on the prepositions. It's people not of by and for it. people, people, people, got it all perfectly. And I'm sitting there, just drowning it.

And then, you know, so I just wrote my son that's named Wyatt after my dad. And I started calling him buddy for some reason, not something I have ever called anybody in my life. I'm not like, hey, buddy. And then I've been going through all these boxes and my dad's things, which have never been gone through. And I'm reading all these letters to him from his mom. small town of Mississippi, and they're all addressed to Buddy. And I did not remember or realize that was my dad's nickname, Buddy. And everybody called him Buddy Cooper. So these cycles that repeat in families is fascinating. And they ought to be telling us something and we keep forgetting,

you know, that maybe we're practicing here, right? And maybe the next time we do it differently or better or I don't know. We've set up a voicemail for people. Call in if there's something they've learned in their grief, that would be helpful for others. And we've received about 7,000 messages. And it is the most incredible repository of human emotion. And just the ocean of loss and feeling and love out there is extraordinary. I live in New Hampshire and we're a political state.

And I have one political sign up that isn't political. It just says love multiplies. And I think it's the only equation in the universe that I know to be absolutely thing. And that I think in the work that we do and the way that this thing for you works so well with the response is this manifestation of that. We need each other.

I make films about the U.S., but I also make films about us. And the intimacy of that is where all of the stuff happens. Certainly there's the majesty and the complexity and the contradiction and even the controversy of the U.S., but all of the intimacy of us and we and our and the need to replicate that where we, no matter how many people around us are part of that us, we, the singularity, the aloneness, the solitude of grief is so, at times oppressive.

But also, it's sometimes those connections that make me feel so alive, even in the suffering, that there's something that is very much alive about having to keep front and center these things. You talked about the pursuit of happiness. I'm very interested in the history of grief in America and the privatization of it. Loss and grief was part of everybody's daily life. Everybody's life. And the widow wore black for a year. And black bunting was hung.

People's bodies were displayed. That became privatized in America as people stopped dying at home and started dying in hospitals. Do you know much about why that privatization took place? No, it did. And I think it has to do with consumerism, which means you focus on what's happening now, what I'm doing. Well, I wonder how much the idea of the pursuit of happiness, how to reach happiness, grief doesn't really fit into that equation. If everybody's pursuing happiness in what they think it means, grief is not welcome in that conversation.

I agree. So I think we have to go back and rearrange the molecules of what we've assumed the pursuit of happy men. I mean, he could have followed John Locke, Jefferson, and said life, liberty and property. Because that's really what was about. Remember, it's only going to be an aristocracy of landed property men who were going to run the thing. But in order to win the war, you had to let teenagers and near-do-wells and recent immigrants who had nothing to fight this war for you. You're going to have to give them something. So democracy is not the object of the American Revolution.

It's a consequence. And pursuit of happiness is the inscrutable phrase at the heart. It's even not just happiness. You can define it as material stuff and miss the point. It's about the responsibilities of citizenship and lifelong learning. But the key word is pursuit. It's process. You're just going to have to work with this and work through the grief and work through the stuff

and all the walls that we've created for ourselves. I think there have been so many things that we've done that have separated us from this. We've separated ourselves and we don't want to know about it. And when I said consumerism, I meant the focus on youth and everything is pretending that there's going to be an exception made in your case and you're going to live forever. And it just isn't going to happen. Everybody within the sound of my voice, we're not getting out of here alive. That is the true fact of everything. And somebody asked Plato, what was his fault?

philosophy of life, and he said, preparing for death. So I think we've done ourselves an extraordinary disservice at a social political level, but at an intimate level, if we can't let loss and grief be part of our common language, then the stuff that we did as little boys to ourselves happens. You had a saying of three things that were very important to you. What were the three things. This will pass. Get help from others. And the hardest, be kind to yourself. And there's a yes but for every problem that every person has. And there are no real yes buts to that. It will change. Maybe it'll get worse, but more than likely it'll get a little bit better. This won't last. Get help from others. Be kind to yourself. Those are all things in grief as well that are important

to remember. They apply to grief. My acquiring of those three things. One of my daughters calls them the truths. And I said, let's just call them things. They are a product of trying to work through and negotiate this complicated dynamic between my mother's death and me. And let's just say Lila Smith, Tupper Burns. You know. Ken Burns, thank you so much. Thank you. Next week on all there is, comedian and cancer survivor Tignotaro. It's a funny and moving conversation about loss. TIG's close friend poet Andrea Gibson recently died, and TIG was at Andrea's bedside. I have to say it's really the first time I've experienced a death in the way that I have where I really feel Andrea, and I don't know what that is. But the grief leading up and the grief

I feel, you know how tricky it is. You go about your day and you're doing all right, and then all of a sudden the truck parks itself on your chest and you can't do anything because it's like it's so confusing that Andrea's gone. Join me on Thursdays at 9.15 p.m. for my new weekly companion show called All There Is Live. It'll be live streamed on our grief community page at CNN.com forward slash all there is every Thursday night at 915 p.m. We can come together there, talk grief and not be alone. You can also follow us on our new Instagram account all there is and the number again for our new voicemail box 404 827 1805 wherever you are in your grief thanks for listening