Anderson Cooper Says 40-Year-Old Essay by His Father Helped Him Realize He'd 'Buried My Ability to Feel Joy'

Cindy Ord/Getty, Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty

Anderson Cooper’s father taught him an important lesson about grief.

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During the season 1 finale ofAll There Islast November, Anderson asked listeners to share their insights about grief. Though he was able to get through only about 200 of the thousand messages that poured in at time time, he returned to them a few months ago to listen to all 46 hours.

“It turned out to be one of the most moving experiences of my life,” wrote theAnderson Cooper 360°host, adding that it “awakened something in me that I had buried long ago.”

Inspired to return to the work he started in the first season ofAll There Is, he began going through his family’s boxes again — which led him to an essay that changed his outlook on grief entirely.

“I decided to start going through the boxes of my parents’ and brother’s things once again, and the first one I opened was full of my dad’s papers. He was a writer,” Cooper wrote. “On top of the pile was an essay he wrote more than 40 years ago. I’d never seen it before.”

Anderson Cooper’s family, Wyatt Cooper, Carter Cooper, Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt, in 1972.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty

Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty

In the decades-old paper, “The Importance of Grieving,” Wyatt “wrote about what happens to children when they aren’t able to properly grieve.”

“He quoted a psychologist who said, ‘When a person is unable to complete a mourning task in childhood, he either has to surrender his emotions in order that they do not suddenly overwhelm him, or else he may be haunted constantly throughout his life, with a sadness for which he can never find an appropriate explanation,’” shared Anderson, who is also father to sonSebastian Luke, 21 months. “When I read that, I realized, for the first time: That’s me. That’s exactly what I did.”

The CNN anchor said that he “dug a deep hole” to push his emotions into when his dad died (“I barely even cried”) and continued to dig it deeper when his brother took his own life.

“I thought I could keep all that grief buried forever, but it turns out grief doesn’t work that way,” Cooper wrote. “As one podcast listener said to me, ‘It has to go somewhere.’”

Anderson Cooper/ Instagram

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Now, with the help of more than a thousand voice messages and Wyatt’s wisdom from his late father, Anderson has realized that he is ready to grieve.

“I see now that in burying my grief, I’ve also buried my ability to feel joy, and I don’t want to do that any longer,” he wrote. “I can’t. I want to feel all there is.”

source: people.com