All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Will Reeve: The Long Journey Into Grief

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

America knew actor Christopher Reeve as Superman, but to Will Reeve, now an ABC News correspondent, he was “Dad.” Will was 12 years old when his father died in 2004, and then in 2006 his mom Dana Reeve also died. Will sits down with Anderson to share what he calls his “long journey into grief.”  Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline and watch the video version on YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of junior chicken, McDouble, or chicken snack wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. Last night, laying in bed trying to sleep, I found myself suddenly feeling the little boy I once was. It wasn't just that I thought about him, I could actually feel him laying in bed in the dark in my old room a few miles from where I live now. It was like he was still there, still awake, unable to sleep as he often was because he was worrying about his future and about his ability to survive without his dad. I found myself talking to the little boy, telling him it would be okay, that he would figure it all out, that he wouldn't feel so alone forever. This may sound like new age gobbledygook. It certainly would have to me a couple of years ago,

but it felt very real last night and it helped to talk to that boy, to let him know he's seen, and to begin to give his grief, which I am now feeling in ways I never have before, some space and some love. This is all there is. My guest today is Will Reeve, who learned a lot about loss as a child. He's 32 now and a correspondent for ABC News, where I also once worked. Will's dad, the actor Christopher Reeve, is probably best known for playing Superman. Will was nearly three in 1995 when his dad was paralyzed from the neck down in a horse riding accident.

His dad and his wife, Will's mom, Dana, created the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to advocate for research into spinal cord injuries. Will and his two half-siblings, Matthew and Alexandra, recently participated in a moving documentary called Superman, The Christopher Reeve Story. Will was 12 when his dad died of heart failure in 2004. His mom, Dana, died less than two years later from lung cancer. The fact that my dad was in a wheelchair and couldn't move felt totally normal, and I don't really know anything different. He was injured right before my third birthday. So I got about nine-ish years with him in a wheelchair. And I do not recall ever once in that time with him wishing that I had a different dad. I never felt any envy or jealousy of my friends because he was

every bit the father that anyone could ever hope for emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. He was there for me always. And love that he, the love that both my parents, but the love that my dad showed me in the short time we had together has sustained me until present day and probably way beyond. And then he died a few months after my 12th birthday. Did you see him at the end? Yeah. Were you aware of what exactly was going on? I was 12. Yeah. I remember all of it. I was there. I saw him. I was in seventh grade. School had just started that fall. And I had this great group of friends and we were discovering girls growing up in a safe and sheltered environment. And life was great.

And my dad was there for me all the time. We would have dinner together. A nurse would sit with him and feed him, but he and I would just chat and watch sports and hang out. On October 9th, my mom was in California working on a play. My dad took me to one of my hockey games and then we had dinner and then watched a baseball game on TV in his bedroom. And there was a little perch on the hospital bed that he slept in. And I sat right behind him. So we were basically at eye level. And I was off to the side. And he could just move his eyes and see me.

And then it was way past my bedtime. So I just ran upstairs. All right, good night. And I remember I didn't say I love you, which I normally did. We were a house full of love. We told each other that we loved each other, but for whatever reason, I wanted to run upstairs and I didn't say I love you. I fall asleep and then later on, the door slams open

and the nurse on duty comes in and says, "'Well, it's very bad. "'Your father has fallen into a coma.'" And I remember just seeing flashing ambulance lights and heard the clacking of a gurney. And it was on the way out and I could see my dad's body and they were doing chest compressions. I remember being so scared and so confused.

And I remember praying, saying, please, God, let my dad live. The next day, I remember walking in to the hospital and the first thing I saw was my dad in a room with a bunch of doctors and nurses around him doing chest compressions. And keep in mind, for the previous nine years, my dad was always perfectly still. He didn't move.

His body wasn't supposed to move violently in any direction. And yet, here it was was convulsing. And someone took me into a room and I could hear my mom next door in the room with my dad wailing. And then eventually she quietly walked in the room and told me that he was gone and that I should come with her and walk in and say anything that I might want to say to him. And she said, he can still hear you. And I remember telling him, and he had turned a little like blue at this point. I remember saying, dad, I love you. And I will always do whatever I can to make you proud. And then I walked out into the waiting room of all my family and thus began a great long journey into grief.

Christmas Day, we were supposed to go to the intensive care ward and my dad had come up with the idea of getting cassette recorders for my brother and I for Christmas so that we could record the conversation. Anyway, yeah, he had a heart attack and we never opened the tape recorders and we didn't go. But I don't think I realized, I mean, I was 10, you were 12. I mean, I knew what it meant, but I don't know that the full ramifications of it were clear to me. Was it clear to you? My mom did a really good job of making it clear to me. She was emotionally evolved and very open with me. By necessity for the nine years of my dad's injury,

we had to talk about, it wasn't the first topic of conversation on any given day, but it permeated everything that we did. Your dad dies four months later, your grandmother dies. Yeah. And then after that. And then a year and a little, like a little over a year later, my mom dies.

It's bang, bang, bang. From diagnosis of lung cancer to death, how long was it? She told me in July of 2005. Didn't smoke. I don't think she drank much. And yet there she is with lung cancer. And then March of 2006, she died. And I knew it was worse than she told me because I saw a piece of paper, one of her doctor's appointments in the kitchen one day.

I didn't know what any of the stages meant, but she had stage four. And on that piece of paper, there was another little line at the bottom that said they had also discovered lesions on her liver. And at that point, I figured, oh, that doesn't sound good. I don't know much, but I chose to believe that it would all be fine because that was the pervading mentality in our household. You chose hope. Were you able to say goodbye to your mom? Yes, I was.

I was in school. The headmaster told me, like, you have to go into the city and you're going to need to say everything that you might want to say to your mom. And I remember sitting with her and a few other people and I couldn't take my eyes off of her. Other people would be talking and they were trying to keep the spirits up, but I couldn't take my eyes off of her because she was so ill and she didn't look like my mom. And I remember someone was telling her a story and her eyes were closed and I thought that she had died in that moment. And I remember the dread thinking that I had seen what I thought I just saw. That turned out to be a trial run for that feeling that came like a day later, but I did get to see her. And I had,

I had just made the high honor roll in school the day before. And I found out that I had gotten into the high school that she really wanted me to go to, uh, the next year. And I got to tell her that I came out and go, Hey mom, I made high honor roll. and I got into this school and we won our hockey game the other day, much like I would tell her that in normal better times. And I think she heard me and then I left. And then that night she died. I heard the phone ring with the news telling my siblings we were sharing a hotel room in New York City. And I knew enough to know what they had just heard. And I was awake, but I pretended not to be.

You pretended to be asleep? Yeah. Because you didn't want to? I didn't want to face it. That's so final. In that moment, I learned both of my parents are dead. I might've been young, but I wasn't too young to know how catastrophic that was.

And I think there was a part of me that thought if I fell back asleep and woke up in the morning that it may have all been a dream, but I just, I, I couldn't, I couldn't handle that. It was that moment. That was the low moment of my life so far. Oh man, they're gone. Yeah. That was the prevailing emotion for me was a mixture of dread, emptiness, and denial. So that's a long way of saying, yes, I got to see her. I got to talk to her, but that has felt very incomplete for almost two decades now. That one makes me mad.

It feels so unfair. And I just, I have a lot more work to do to make sense of her death. And then you moved in with the neighbors. Yeah. The Poochies. Insofar as anything in that realm

can feel natural, it felt as natural as it could be. And it was an all-hands-on-deck situation. Everybody was chipping in, family members, my brother and sister, the Poochies, our next-door neighbors who were the parents of my best friend and were best friends with my parents. To this day, 18-plus years later, they're in my family. Of all the magical, beautiful things that I've experienced and benefited from in my life, the Poochies are probably at the top of the list. It's a miracle that they exist in my life. I'm so grateful to them. I love them so much. I just thought about your mom and it must have been so difficult for her. It had to have been. And I think about what she must have been feeling and thinking and worrying about at the end of each day in that final month when she was in the hospital.

I wonder what she was thinking about me. And she must have been so scared. And we never got to talk about it. I think if there's anything in my entire experience with grief, that's probably the hardest to wrestle with. Her loneliness. Her loneliness and the, the, I don't even know how to articulate it. I haven't really talked about this part before, but the fact that she was slipping away from me. Helplessness is probably the word. She was so in command, she was so competent, she was so on top of everything.

And I was 13 and I wish that I had been more aware in the moment of what she was dealing with. She wanted me to live as normal a life as possible, even when she was sick. And that's what I wanted too, because I didn't think she was going to die. And I don't regret that. But what I do regret is not realizing how sick she was. There's a moment that I go back to that this will be the second time I've ever shared this story. The first time was with my grief counselor and I couldn't get through the story. So we'll see

how this one goes. It was near-ish to the end for her. So this is maybe January, February of 2006. And it was bedtime for me. And she had lost all of her hair at this point and she was visibly sick, but she was still home. And she took me up to bed and I realized I'd forgotten something downstairs. And for my whole life in that moment as like a spoiled little kid, I'd be like, oh, I forgot my whatever downstairs. Mom, can you go get it while I brush my teeth? And that's what I said this time. I was like, oh, I forgot my thing. Like, mom, go get it for me.

And she was like, I can't. It had been so hard for her to get up the stairs that going back down to then come back up was like too much. But then she went and did it anyway. And I, in that moment, as a 13-year-old, didn't grasp the severity and the gravity of that situation. And then pretty soon thereafter, she died. And I didn't think that that moment where I sent her back down the stairs had killed her, but it certainly hadn't helped.

And I didn't blame myself, but I didn't let myself off the hook either. I was in this terrible purgatory of what could I have done differently in any moment. And that's one that I still come back to. You went back to that moment shortly after she died. I mean, that was- I've come back to that moment more times than I can count. And this is going on 18, 19 years now. I don't sit here thinking that I did anything wrong. It's a moment that I can cling to that allows me to access the hard parts of the

grief because I try to do that too. I think part of what I've learned as I've tried to understand it better and have it serve me rather than fight me is you need to push on the pain points. You need to work at it. It's like you go to the gym to get strong. You read books to get smart. You got to go to the dark places in your own way in order to bring light there. Is that something you were able to do always? Or is that something you've only recently been able to do? I've recently been much more intentional about it during covid when everyone was grieving something or someone i got way more intentional about accessing my grief i started working with a grief therapist named david kessler he is now just a dear friend he's been such a resource and has helped me deliberately access the wound.

I heard Andrew Garfield talking about the only way to the gift is through the wound. David talks about the wound as well. The wound needs to be tended to, and that's how you bring healing. And that is a process that I have been way more deliberate about since I met David. I actually want to play what about since I met David. I actually want to play what Andrew said that you referenced. Has that grief stayed with you? Yeah, it's here now.

You feel it now? Yeah, and it's the only route to feeling her close again. It's a crazy thing. It's like, again, it's the longing, it's the admission of the pain, it's the crying out. Hey, I need you. Where are you? I miss you so much. And only in that absence, only in really inhabiting that absence and being that little boy at the bottom of that empty cave in vast darkness and just kind of crying out that's the only moment that she that she comes like it's a necessity and it's so weird it's like the longing and the grief, fully inhabiting it and feeling it

is the only way I can really feel close to her again. The grief and the loss is the only route to the vitality of being alive. The wound is the only route to the gift. I just think that's such an amazing phrase, the wound is the only route to the gift. Andrew seems far more eloquent. It's the British accent.

True. He could say anything and sound smarter. Having British half-siblings, I understand that all too well. I realized a lot of the places that I was screwing up in my life on a personal level may have been influenced by my unaddressed grief. And I realized that I needed to dig in on the grief specifically. And I will say that I've been grateful to you from afar for doing this project and starting your community and for your humility and vulnerability saying you're just starting now to figure it out and to deal with it.

That's given me a lot of confidence to myself and to others that I have no real idea of how deep the wound is. But I'm working on addressing it. So thank you for that. That's very kind. Sweet. We're going to take a short break. But when we come back, more of my conversation with Will Reeve. Advantage Banking Account and we'll give another $100 to a charity of your choice. This great perk and more only at RBC. Visit rbc.com slash get 100 give 100. Conditions apply. Ends January 31st, 2025. Complete offer eligibility criteria by March 31st, 2025.

Choose one of five eligible charities up to $500,000 in total contributions. We're back with Will Reeve. So your mom dies and you move in with the neighbors, the Poochies, who become your family. Did you grieve? No. No. I learned pretty quickly that whenever I didn't seem like I was grieving, people remarked how strong and adjusted and tough, et cetera, I was. The stronger and happier I seemed,

the better I was received by the world around me. People would tell me that I seemed like I was doing great. And so I figured I was. People like to see that. Yeah. It makes them feel comfortable and safe. Grief is weird and scary and a little yucky, right? To everyone involved.

If the person who should be sad seems happy, that gives everybody else around the permission to not be sad. And I internalized that in the time after my parents passed away. And I think that that propelled me through a lot of my life up until this point. And by and large, I am a happy, positive, well-adjusted person. I don't show or maybe I don't access the dark, scary places as much as maybe I quote unquote should have. But I also try to eliminate the word should about anything that I'm feeling and try to replace it with am. This is what I am right now. I'm happy, I'm sad, et cetera. So that's a long answer to your short question. Did I grieve? Probably not enough, but grief is permanent and lifelong. So I've got time. Do you feel it as a presence in your life now?

In ways, but it doesn't drag me down. It's a cliche to say I miss my parents every day. But of course, I do miss my parents every day. I'm sure you miss your parents and your brother all the time. But that doesn't prevent you from being in the present moment and living life accordingly. You're covering a hurricane. I doubt you're also acutely missing your mother in that moment, unless something that happens there reminds you of her. Do I have that right? It's more, for me, it's the ripple effects of having buried my grief. And what I've woken up to is the strategies that I imposed upon myself as a kid after my dad's death to not feel feelings. Those are strategies which I've used my entire life.

It is how I've navigated every social interaction, everything. So it's baked into the whole of you. It is baked in, yeah. And it's baked into the whole of you. It is baked in, yeah. And it was successful at the time early on. You know, my brother jumped off a building in front of my mom 10 years after my dad died. I did not do that. This got me through and enabled me to work and function.

But those strategies are working against me. And I'm trying to allow myself to actually feel what grief is and feel it to an extent that the strategies go away. So in that sense, I'm not standing in the hurricane missing my mom. But it's certainly, it's why I'm doing this job. It's why I started going to wars because I wanted to know how to survive. I was very worried about my survival. I was very worried about how I was going to make a living. I was very worried about how I would do all these things

I had no idea how to do. And I wanted to undertake a course of study in human survival. I wish that I had that. I wish that that had been my response. Yours seems far healthier. Maybe. I learned at a very young age that life is going to hit you with its hardest punch anytime, often without warning, and you have to get up and get on with things. See, I learned that too, but it put me into a defensive crouch and an aggressive posture that required me to not feel things.

In my mind. I mean, it didn't really, but I could have handled it a million different ways if I had been healthy. Did you know in the moment that you were in a defensive crouch and aggressive posture, or has your journey now toward the wound exposed that to you? I started to understand what I'd been doing going to wars in my early 20s and being drawn to very difficult circumstances and trying to understand how people survive. My objective was not to become a TV reporter. Actually, it was to go to these places. I was trying to understand how people survive. My objective was not to become a TV reporter. Actually, it was to go to these places. I was trying to understand how do you survive?

Like, how do you survive this? Did you figure it out? And did it help? Yeah. I know this is an interview of me, but like this is helping me too. It did. Yeah.

To know that people can survive. My life is so easy compared to so many of the people I interact with. And so, yeah, it's helped tremendously. Yeah. easy compared to so many of the people I interact with. And so, yeah, it's helped tremendously. I'm still trying to make sense of what I'm supposed to do with the pain, with the grief. It exists. It always will. It's helped shape who I am, but I'm still trying to find something to do with my grief that feels as big as the grief itself is. But you feel it as a presence in your life. Yeah, I do. I've only started to figure out

my grief in recent times. I have more of an understanding of my own grief and my own psyche than I ever have. And I've done a much better job in recent times of noticing when the grief is encroaching into my life. And instead of pushing it away or bottling it up or self-sabotaging in some way that is clearly the grief demon entering through a different door, I've gotten way better at stopping, acknowledging, analyzing, and then raising my hand for help as necessary. And that has made a world of difference to me. My grief counselor, David, taught me something that I think we all know inherently, but are

terrified to confront, which is that love and grief are a package deal. You can't have one without the other. If you love someone, you are going to lose them. I think about that all the time. And I wonder why anyone chooses to love. And the conclusion I've come to is because it is absolutely worth it. The loss will never compare to the love. And that has sustained me. It's scary to lose someone. But to quote my dad who said, if you believe the game is worthwhile, you play the hand you're dealt. Losing my parents was and always will be tragic,

but getting to love and be loved by them is what I remember about my experience with them. I don't focus on the fact that they're gone. I focus on the fact that they were here. I don't know if you have a question or series of questions that you wish you could ask your parents that you might have never gotten to. For me, I know my parents loved me. I know they were proud of me. I know the values that they wanted me to live by. The question I wish I could ask them will never be answered. I will never find an answer to it. It's, am I doing a good job? How am I doing? And that goes back to the time I did have with my parents.

I looked to them for reassurance constantly and they always gave it to me. So to not have it now or ever again from the two people I love the most is really hard. Yeah, I think about that with my dad a lot. I would love to... I mean, I know my dad would be amazed and overjoyed by everything I've done. And he would be so much better doing this than anything I've done.

I'm very much like him, but he was a born raconteur and storyteller. My mom once was trying to get through to him on the phone, and the line was busy for like two hours, and finally she got through to him and she said, who were you talking to for so long? He goes, it was the wrong number. So, yeah, I've thought about that a lot. Like, wow, it would be so awesome to just hear my dad call me up and say, wow, you know, I saw that. Yeah.

Those are the things you – in my experience, it's the small moments that build up to make a complete memory of a person. Yes, I wish my parents could be at any big moment in my life. What I'm still trying to maneuver through is their absence in the small moments. There's an emotional moment in the documentary. I say something to the effect of, the day my mom died, I've been alone since then. And that's gotten some pickup. But to clarify what I meant, what I mean by saying I've been alone since my parents died was that there is a void in me. There is a wound, if you will, that's permanent.

And I learned that immediately when my mom died. I now have this hole inside of me. And my work has been to be okay with not filling that hole, but allow for that hole to exist and realize that I'm still okay. I'm wounded. I'm not dead. It didn't finish me. And I have had so many people

who have showed up for me and stayed with me. But every day without my parents has been incomplete. There's a distinction there that matters. The two people I want most will never be there. And that's okay too, because I can bring them along for the ride in whatever way I can. So my advice or my suggestion or my example

for anyone who's going through it is, it's okay for it to be messy and incomplete and confusing and you don't need to have all the answers. You need to just allow for the mess and allow for the pain and acknowledge it and work at it at the pace that feels right to you, the one thing that will be destructive is if you ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. But you can do it at your own pace, and there's no finish line

because grief dies the day you do. We're never going to have it all figured out. The wound will be there. The hole is there, whatever you want to call it, however you want to identify it. It's permanent, but that is okay because you can heal there and you can live a full, meaningful life with the wound. Thank you so much. It's been a privilege. You can watch a video version of this and other interviews right now at cnn.com forward slash all there is online. It's our new online grief community. You can also hear moving voicemails there from other listeners and leave comments of your own. The documentary Will took part in about his dad, Superman,

the Christopher Reeve story, is available to own on digital now. Next week on All There Is, I'm joined by author Andrew Sullivan for a conversation about the deaths of friends and lovers he lived through during the AIDS crisis and about the recent death of his mom,

with whom he had a difficult and complicated relationship his whole life. All I can say is I feel relief. It is my faith that what she is now is so much better than anything that happened to her on earth. And so the grief with her, I don't know whether I've kind of just pushed it away because I can't.

She was so important to me. She gave me a thought that I could be somebody. But also, I don't know anybody who suffered the way she did because it was psychologically absolutely crippling to be with her when she would be on her knees grabbing your shirt, weeping, sobbing. I can't go on, I can't go on. I was like 12.

So I felt relief. Relief, not 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 D'Zula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is our executive producer.

Support from Nick Godsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Haddad, Charlie Moore, Carrie Rubin, Carrie Pritchard, Shimri Chitreit, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John D'Onora, Lainey Steinhardt, Jameis Andrest, Nicole Pesereau, and Lisa Namero. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage. Hey, Prime members. Are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free

or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash adfreepodcasts. That's amazon.com slash adfreepodcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.