All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Mikaela Shiffrin On the ‘Maze’ of Grief For Her Dad

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Mikaela Shiffrin is considered the greatest alpine skier of all time. Her dad, Jeff, was one of her biggest champions. When he died in 2020, she wasn't sure she would ever ski again. She talks with Anderson about her loss and grief. For more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Emily Williams and Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is a special Father's Day edition of all there is, which is weird for me to say because Father's Day is something I've ignored for nearly 50 years ever since I was 10 and my dad died. I was recently sent a bunch of letters. My father, Wyatt Cooper, wrote to a friend of his. The man he sent them to, Jack McClardy, died years ago, but he'd asked someone to make sure the letters got to me, and a couple months ago they finally did. I just read them today. I have lots of photos of my dad from his childhood in Mississippi, his life in Hollywood as an actor and screenwriter and his life in New York with my mom and brother and me. But in these letters, he feels alive to me in a way he doesn't in the photos.

Reading his words, I can hear his inner voice, his humor, his insecurities, his humanness. This is the last letter he sent to Jack postmarked December 22nd, 1977. He sent it from the hospital a few weeks after he'd had several heart attacks. It had her family Christmas card in it and a brief note confirming he'd meet Jack and his wife for a coffee in a month's time. He wrote, it's nice to have a date that far ahead. It makes one feel one couldn't possibly die and leave an unfulfilled engagement. I think he was only half joking. On the back of the envelope, after he'd sealed it, he wrote three more words, I'm holding on.

Fourteen days later, my dad was dead. I'm still learning new things about him, discovering him in new ways. And when I hold my two little boy's hands and I hear their laughter and see them look at me the way I once looked at him, I feel my dad once again alive in a way inside me. So on this Father's Day, that is what I'm celebrating for the first time, that feeling, that love passed from a father to his son. over and over, generation after generation, through time and space and through love, always and forever. Welcome to All There Is. My guest today on the podcast lost her dad six years ago.

Her name is Michaela Schifrin. She's 31 and is considered the greatest alpine skier of all time. She's a three-time Olympic gold medalist and eight-time world champion. She won her first gold medal in Slalom at the Sochi Olympics when she was just a year. 18, the youngest American in history to do so. Four years later, she won another goal to the Olympics, and in 2026, she did it again. Michaela grew up in Colorado. Her mom, Eileen, is an integral part of her team, and her dad, Jeff Schifrin, was too. He was an anesthesiologist who first put Michaela on skis when she was three. Jeff Schifrin died in 2020, the age of 65. He accidentally fell off the roof of their Colorado home and had a severe head injury.

Michaela made this video for his celebration of life service and recorded the words to this song, Perhaps Love by John Denver and Placito Domingo. Michaela. Perhaps love is like a resting place. A shelter from the storm. It exists to give you comfort. It's there to keep you warm. And in those times of trouble, when you are most alone,

The memory of love will bring you home. Perhaps love is like a window. Perhaps an open door. It invites you to come closer. It wants to show you more. And even if you lose yourself, and don't know what to do, the memory of love will see you through.

Love to some is like a cloud. To some as strong as steel. There's some a way of living, for some a way to feel. And some say love is holding on, and some say letting go. And some say love is everything. And some say they don't know. Perhaps love is like the ocean, full of conflict, full of pain, like a fire when it's cold outside, or thunder when it rains.

if I should live forever and all my dreams come true my memories of love will be with you it's lovely that was like 2 a.m. and I couldn't sleep and so I was just recording this to my phone

so I could edit it with the video for my dad's celebration of life what was he like this may be kind of weird but he was really handsome And I see that now because I love to go through pictures of him when he was younger. Ever since I knew him, he had a mustache, this like big, big mustache that sort of reminds you of the Lorax.

Yeah, I read you, used to call him the Lorax. I used to call him the Lorax. I also called him the Schedulizer. He was Command Central back home when my mom and I were traveling. I started racing World Cup at 16 years old full time. And at that period of time, I was not thinking about how to keep. keep life in order. He would do all of the planning, all the scheduleizing, and I would make fun of him for because I'd be like, just take a load off. Like, just watch a movie with us. Don't worry about it,

dad. And yeah, since he passed away, I've actually become him. I've totally become the scheduling person in our family. I just have such a greater understanding of everything that he did and why. I realize how much he had to take on that I just wasn't really aware of. It does make me wish that I could just go back and be a little bit more understanding at that time. Your dad died in February of 2020. Yeah. My dad passed away February 2020, and then COVID.

We all got shut down in March 2020. Your mom said that in the days after your dad died, that you couldn't get out of bed and that she didn't think you would ever ski again. Did you think you would? Did you want, did you care at all at that point? I didn't care. I experienced this overwhelming sense of apathy. I almost dreaded that there would come a point in time where my team and my family and the people around me would ask, like, okay, so when do you want to get back on snow?

And I just was like wishing everything would come to a standstill. Because for you, everything had come to a standstill. Yeah. I've never struggled with wanting to be alive. but there were so many points and I just don't really know the proper wording here but I think a lot of people feel it is like what is the point of my existence

and that's just been an ongoing question in my head for probably at least the first two years but especially the immediate few weeks sleep is hard I don't think I ate I just felt like it was hard to feel the will to live not that I didn't want to be alive but just that I really was searching for a reason

to get out of bed and didn't really have that. I didn't feel like ski racing was nearly a good enough reason to want to exist. And I didn't feel like wanting to win ski races had any place in my life anymore. So it was more like maybe this guilt that you have things that inspire you, the things that drive you in life that feel very meaningless when something like this happens. He had been in Europe visiting my mom and me. It's very rare that I'll take more than two days off at any point in time during the racing season. But I was just exhausted.

And we went to Lake Garda and we just got a nice hotel and just hung out. And then he flew home. And then two days later, I was getting ready for my first day back on snow. And I got a call from my brother. And he's like, dad had an accident and you guys have to get home. It's 9 p.m. and we're in Italy. We're not in a place that's close to any major airports either. We got on the phone with one of my dad's closest friends.

He basically explained that he was in a vegetative state. He was never going to wake up again. 16 hours or 20 hours later, we got to Denver and went to the hospital, and the last images I have of him are pretty gruesome. And somehow I feel like he, I still feel like, he's beautiful. I don't know if you felt that. I know that those you have lost, some have been really quite traumatic. And I don't know if you have like that image that recurs in your mind. Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah, my brother died by suicide and that's an image. Yeah, I still, it gives me like a

literally like a vertigo nausea and the visual of it. I didn't witness him. My mom did, but I imagine it over and over again, even though it's been, I mean, that was 1988. When we found out that he had this accident at home, we have some cameras around the outside of our house. He fell off a roof. Yeah, and I went into our camera footage and tried to look up the history to see just, I think my goal was to see how much time was he laying there with his. brain bleeding until somebody actually found him. If this was under a minute, then maybe he has a chance of recovering. I think it was about eight and a half minutes, but I went through this whole footage and I kind of saw the whole thing happen, which I don't know, like, if I would suggest

people to do that. That's got to be incredibly hard. Yeah, and there was a point in time where I could see him on the video, like, he would do this when we would travel, right? It was all about like blood flow through your body. And being a doctor, he was a stickler for like, you know, we don't want any blood clotting and we want to make sure that we're keeping our bodies moving. So he would do squats in the airport. And I'd be like, oh my gosh, dad, don't do that. Of the many reasons to be embarrassed by one's dad, that's a pretty good one. Yeah, he'd do squats and like, you know, not cool squat. I don't even know what a cool squat is. But like, I do this now. I do this in airports. So it's ridiculous that I ever, anyway.

We all become our parents. So the fact that you're doing squats in the airport now does not surprise me. No, not at all. He would do this thing after traveling. He'd like lay down on the floor, lay down on bed, and he'd hold his leg. And he'd just like extend his foot up into the air and down, just bend and straighten his leg. And when he was laying there, I could see him doing that. And I was like, oh, he knows that he needs to like somehow move his body, but he couldn't get up.

And then he was unconscious again when our neighbor found him. I think it was 12 minutes when the ambulance arrived. He was a really well-respected anesthesiologist. So it was like the entire medical world of Colorado just like mobilized to try to fix Jeff Schifrin, which is what we arrived to. But I mean at that point it was like the only thing keeping him alive is, you know, life support. And he's not really alive. It's just keeping his heart beating.

a really beautiful essay that you wrote about being in the hospital room with your dad. You said that night everyone cleared out of the room and I climbed into the bed with him and I just put his arm around me, just letting him know that I was there. I put my head on his chest and I could still feel his heart beating. Do you think he felt you there? I would like to think so, but really that was more for me. There's pros and cons to growing up in a medical household. My mom is a nurse, my dad is a doctor. So, you know, they're very rational scientific humans. And they're both very emotional as well, very sensitive. And my dad, my dad was incredibly emotional. But he would talk about death. Like, this is the circle of life. And when you pass away, you are meant to be in

the ground nurturing the earth. And essentially when you die, you don't feel you don't exist. That was his belief, I suppose, but I don't really think that he felt me. I just really appreciate that I could feel him. I could hold his hand and I could still feel him when there was warmth to his body. And I'm so thankful for modern medicine

that you can keep people warm and in this state long enough so that somebody's daughter, can give him a hug and say goodbye. How much time did you have with him? I laid in bed with him for about nine hours, and that's about when everybody around us just said, like, you kind of need to pull the plug. You were able to hold him?

Yeah. So I heard his heart stopped, which my brother then said, leader. There's sort of this whole metaphysical side of the universe that I don't necessarily understand and I don't necessarily believe in, but there's certain things that maybe make sense. And my brother said, you know, scientifically, energy cannot be created or destroyed. And you were the closest living thing to him. So his energy went into you. You talk about feeling your people with you and feeling your dad with you. And that's something that, I don't feel.

I was just wondering, like, if there's a trick to be able to. Same. I don't know how you do this. I actually look forward to these conversations because they're the most real conversations and 90% of the conversations I have with people or about ridiculous things. I also am desperate to learn from others because, as you know, it's different for everybody. And, yeah, I think it's the only thing that helps is talking about it. and I haven't talked about it for my entire life,

so I've had a lot of stuff stored up. But I really only kind of feel my dad, and I've only recently begun to feel him. And it's taken me a long, long time because I ran from it for so long. It was just too painful. I don't know how it started, but I know it started by talking about it more.

You said that after your dad died, The first thing you did when you got home is you went into his closet. You put your face into his clothes. And you said there's a certain smell that everyone has. It's not clone or anything like that. It's something indescribable. It's what you smell when they give you a big hug. It's in their favorite sweatshirts.

Embedded in the fibers forever. Do you remember his smell? Because I don't remember my dad's smell. I have to think pretty hard. It doesn't come very naturally. to remember, but there are some scents that helped to trigger it. So I saved some of his deodorant, which sort of became like intertwined. And he had a couple used. I just have them saved in my cabinet and sometimes I'll sniff them. And it helps to bring up the scent. And it is,

it's like, I don't even know if you can call it a smell. It's more of an essence, really, and something that's like embedded in your skin. Smells, visuals, those things are so, so powerful. I've been so afraid that I would lose those things. And to be honest, like forgetting has been one of my biggest fears. And I have forgotten a lot. Some memories I can bring up if I try to think about it. You know, I've lived 25 years.

And at least 20 of those years, I remember things that have happened. And I only have a handful of memories to really pick from with my dad in them. I'm like, how can that be, 25 years of life? And I've got like enough memories that I could count on both hands, basically. But then I think memories maybe show up in a weird way. It's not so much like a story in a book as it is just a feeling that kind of passes through you and you almost don't even know that it exists. And that's been something like, I think.

I think, especially for kids or for anybody out there who is experiencing recent loss and having that fear of forgetting, which I really felt, you're going to have like a different way of understanding what memory means. Because we talk about memories as like things that have happened in your life as if they're on a TV screen that you can watch or in a book that you can read. And I think what makes it so hard to explain grief is that it's like operating in a different time space continuum where memories don't exist as a book you can read, but they're really just a sensation, maybe a smell. But words don't do it justice, which is why I've become maybe less afraid of forgetting. I do feel that within me pretty constantly is like maybe it's the dream that triggers it. Maybe it's the smell. Maybe it's just feeling really, really sad one day, and that helps remind me that I want to take some time

and remember my dad and think about him. I feel like people need to understand that on top of the burden of losing someone you've lost, the burden of feeling like you're going to forget them is so, so scary, especially for kids. Give yourself the time and the grace to know that memory is not what you think it is. Coming up, what Michaela told herself, last Olympics that helped her feel closer to her dad.

I'm literally not here for the medal and I'm not here for anything else besides just the joy that I get between the start and a finish with really good skiing and powerful skiing. And that made me feel more connected to my dad than I have in a long time. Finding a source you can trust for weather forecast should be easy, right? This is CNN meteorologist Derek Van Damme, thrilled to introduce the new CNN Weather app. Check your daily forecast to plan your day, the weekly forecast to see what's on the way, and prepare for any major storm with our robust real-time video coverage. The app is stunning, and if you're a weather nerd like me, you'll love our in-depth stories and the photo of the day.

Download the CNN Weather app on iOS today. Welcome back. Two years after her father's death, Michaela competed in her third winter Olympics. It was in Beijing. She'd won gold medals and her two previous Olympics, but this time she didn't win any medals. I didn't even start to dive into understanding the grief until after the Beijing Olympics. That was my first Olympics where my dad was not there. And after somebody, like a fan, found my number and called, like three times in a row, and I finally answered it, he's like, just hear me out for a second. I won't ever bother you again, but I need to tell you my theory.

And it was basically that I didn't want to experience a successful Olympics where he wasn't at the finish line. It was a weird conversation, but I did take it to heart. And I started seeing this psychologist, and that was when I started to dive into some of the pain more thoroughly, trying to unpack the Olympics and how that ties to how I've felt. feel I'm able to honor my dad's memory. And I've only come to realize that more. Ironically, because of the crash I had in Killington two years ago in November, I got this weird, very, very weird accident, one in a million chance, but I got basically a stab wound to my abdomen and nearly went through my colon. So going through that process and then returning to racing after that,

I struggled mentally a lot more than I would have ever anticipated. And I started to learn a lot more about PTSD during that time and realized how close PTSD and grief are like sort of like sister symptoms or signals, I guess, you might call it, in psychology. like the fogginess, the apathy. I think the only real big difference was with sort of PTSD from a traumatic crash or impact. It was more like I had an extreme fear, like an uncontrollable fear of that happening again. Whereas with my dad's accident, it was like I had like a complete sense of apathy in my whole body. But otherwise there was so much like this cloudy film is over your eyes and you're just seeing. the world in a different color.

I'd read that you sought counseling for PTSD after the crash, and I wondered how much of it was crash-related and how much of it was having witnessed the video of your father laying on the ground and seeing your dad and hearing his heartbeat and hearing his heartbeat stop. What I learned during some of those sessions was a history of traumatic events makes you more susceptible to showing these signals with future traumatic events.

They all do intertwine. Going through these checkpoints on PTSD from that crash, it did inspire, like, diving into the grief a little bit more, too. You describe grief as a maze. In what way does it feel like a maze do you? A lot of people talk about waves crashing down on you and you just don't really have time to come up for air. The maze is just like, I just keep reaching dead ends. I suppose maybe there's a similarity

to you describing your childhood and so much of your life is running from this. And it's just something to be navigated but not fixed. And you never really find your way through it, but you're somehow becoming more understanding of what that maze is. And maybe you find patterns to the way that things are going to feel when something crops up for myself to know certain scenarios where like I need to remove myself from the room and go to the bathroom and get collected versus my eyes might well up but I'm going to be able to smile and I'll be okay. It's like sort of learning to navigate something that you realize that there's not really an end to it. In 2026, Michaela competed in her fourth Olympics in Cortina, Italy.

She won a gold medal in the women's slalom and became the first American alpine skier to win three Olympic gold medals. I saw one headline. It was describing your performance at the last Olympics. And part of the headline was that you overcame grief to win. And I thought it was tough. Hard no. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. I thought it was sort of funny. Like it just, I mean, it's an interesting idea of like grief. Oh, like I won at it. I won. I've overcome it. It's done. I'm better now.

Right. Yeah. You said, we equate winning with being okay and failure with being not okay. The real truth is that I'm neither okay nor not okay. It really depends on the day and it has almost nothing to do with how fast I came down a mountain. Yeah. People writing the headlines should know better. We don't use words like overcome grief. Those worlds don't exist together, you know? Because it's misleading. We speak in such definitives. You experience hardship, you overcome it. When you learn a lesson, you have learned that lesson for life. And what I've more experience is I'm learning the same lessons over and over.

And just because I figured out on this one day how to channel my nerves and tension and anxiety and fear of criticism to get through that course two times in a row that fast, just because I figured it out on one day doesn't mean I can do it tomorrow. But on this day, the Olympic slalom this year, I think because of all of the work that I had done work on my skiing, work with physical training and all of that obvious stuff. And then the mental work with my psychologist and we would do group sessions with my coaches and with my whole team. This all led to me feeling on race day like I was willing to accept the risk. that if it didn't go well, I would be very harshly criticized. I just really needed to face head on that I wouldn't be able to control headlines. Most people wouldn't understand the traumatic things

that have happened in my life and to my family. They won't pay attention to anything else besides that I'm supposed to win gold on that day. And I really needed to accept that. And it was like not until the solemn race day that I felt pretty at one with that fear. Like I could hold it in my hands and say, this is really, really scary. And I still believe that this is worth it. You're here to ski the way you know how to ski. I'm literally not here for the medal and I'm not here for anything else besides just the joy that I get between the start and to finish with really good skiing and powerful skiing.

and that made me feel more connected to my dad than I have in a long time because it was just so solely focused on my technical prowess or my ability to ski that well. And that made you feel more connected to your dad? I think it did because both of my parents taught me how to ski when I was a baby, and they were both so focused on the technique side of things. But even as I was racing World Cup, winning World Cups, My dad would still make these comments, get your hands up or like this or that.

Or he had a couple things that he would always focus on with skiing technique. And I was like, dad, that doesn't apply here. Like, that's going to be awkward. That looks like a very old style of skiing. But at the end of the day, when I'm skiing my very best, I'm doing the things that he said I should do. I'm doing the things that my mom tells me I should do. So I'm always like, darn it. They're totally right.

I had a moment before the second run where I was trying to take a little bit of a rest and I was laying on the floor and usually I'm able to fall asleep like a 15 minute power nap kind of thing. And on this day, I actually just found myself crying like trying to communicate with my dad and had this moment of an epiphany before the second run that I was going to win. It was like, today is a the day that I win an Olympic gold medal with my dad not being alive. And it was like, I don't even feel weird saying that. And if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. But I do believe that this will be the day. That was like a moment more centered around my dad. And then in the finish area, I was standing there looking at the scoreboard in like such disbelief that that had actually happened the way that I believed it was going to happen. And I wanted to feel my dad there. I was trying to talk to my dad and just not having him respond, which was like sort of horrible and somehow felt like I had accepted that in the moment. Like maybe it's okay that he doesn't reply, but I can still talk to him.

This is like we've talked about wanting to feel their presence. I wish people say, say like, oh, I saw a butterfly. It landed on the handlebars of my bike or some owl keeps following me on my road trip or something like this. And they're like, I know it's this person. It's my wife. It's my husband. It's my father. And I'm like, are you making this up? How do I get that? And maybe that's my problem. Where's my owl? Yeah, where's my? I mean, come on. How do you get to feel the presence in that way? But in life, there's sort of these like bursts of growth or bursts of understanding. And I think crossing the finish line of Cortina in that solemn was a burst of understanding for me that went far beyond winning a gold medal. That was so

secondary to these other feelings that I had, but that gold will always represent those feelings to me. You talked about this. I want to play the press conference after the third gold medal. This was a moment I have dreamed about. I've also been very scared of this moment. Everything in life that you do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience. It's like being born again. And I still have so many moments where I resist this. I don't want to be in life.

without my dad. And maybe today was the first time that I could actually accept this, like reality. And instead of thinking I would be going in this moment without him to take the moment to be silent with him. And with the whole team with me, who's here with me now and with my mom who is here with me now and has been with me since the beginning. It was just like a little bit more spiritual than I usually am, but I'm really grateful for that.

Yeah. You've talked about how it helps you. to have these conversations with people and the connection that talking about it brings. And I've definitely felt that. I wish my dad could see who I've become to this point. You described grief as you said, it's like you have an injury in your soul.

There's no timetable. There's no rehabilitation. Some days you wake up and you think, what's the point? Do you still feel that? Yeah. I think I question the point of existence almost every day. but it's maybe not as sharp of a feeling, certainly not the same as in those initial weeks and months,

when I was just laying in bed literally like, what's the point of even feeling my body move? You know, now I enjoy feeling my muscles and feeling strong and feeling life. I enjoy that. But I do definitely, like from an existential perspective, I'm like, what are we doing? And I feel like these days, it's just so constant

because everybody has so many opinions. And there is so much negativity. There's also so much positivity. And I just wonder, I'm like, where does this all come from? Why are we even doing this? Yeah. I have those questions as well, except not on this podcast. I know why I'm doing this.

This is the one thing that makes frigging sense in this entire universe. Is there something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others? I didn't think I was going to return to ski racing, and there was some point in time several weeks later. I think my mom asked, like, when are you going to try to ski again? I don't even think I responded, but I think, like, a couple days later,

we decided that it's worth putting skis on and going out on the mountain and just seeing what that feels like because we had already talked about feeling really hard to connect with him and she was thinking one of the places he loved to be the most was a mountain so maybe being on the mountain

will help you feel connected maybe it'll be healing and you don't have to race again but you could just see what it feels like to ski your mom talked about this and she says what she said to you was we don't have to ski anymore but we need to do something besides sit at home home so if you want we can try skiing and maybe you could go on the hill and feel dad there.

Did you feel him there when you went? No. I think I maybe it's like how you said it. And maybe the way people talk about feeling the presence of a loved one is maybe I've been thinking about it too simply. I felt closer to him in that I was looking out over the mountain ranges on the chairlift, appreciating a scene that I had appreciated with him so many times before. And it was like, even though your eyes aren't set on this beauty, the beauty does exist.

Your world gets flipped and you're starting to like re-align certain items in the universe. So we're spinning on a different axis, but you're figuring out how to align things. That was kind of how I felt it a little bit at the time. I don't feel him, but I get to see things that I saw when I was with him. And I like that that still exists. Where I am now, you know, six years later, I couldn't imagine my life not having returned to skiing. So I guess for people who are like struggling with guilt or struggling with purpose, if there are things that you loved to do before losing this person, I think the likelihood is you're going to love to do them. again after losing that person.

And particularly if it's something that you shared with that person, give yourself time, but at least give it a go. Just see. Because I was very much thinking I was going to cut that out of my life entirely. And in the end, skiing has been one of the things that has inspired the most growth for me as a human. I totally agree that talking about these things, It brings a lot of connection and a lot of meaning to life and maybe not meaning that we want or would have asked for.

But I really appreciate that you're doing this. You're making it more obvious to the world just how much more complete a human experience is than what we see on TV and social media. And I'm really appreciative of you leading the way in helping the world understand how much broader a human experience is than that. You can hear more from Michaela on her podcast. What's the point with Michaela Schifrin? It's on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. If you have thoughts you'd like to share about my conversation with Michaela or about your own experiences with grief, we'd love to hear from you.

You can leave a comment on our grief community page at cnan.com slash all there is or leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. On Thursday, June 25th, there'll be a new podcast episode. Thanks for listening.