Grateful for All of It

One of my celebrity crushes is Anderson Cooper. 😍I enjoy his 📚books about his famous mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the Vanderbilt family. I get a kick out of his 😂giggles on the New Year’s Eve broadcasts. When he came to my hometown to cover the Joplin EF5 tornado in 2011, I knew people who saw him at a restaurant. 🍽 Applebee’s, I think. They probably told me just to rub it in.😜When I heard about his new podcast, All There Is with Anderson Cooper, I was intrigued. This was different from other podcasts I listened to while on the trail. This one deals with 😢grief- not a subject I thought I wanted to hear about while exercising, but it is Anderson, so…

As much as we’d like to avoid it, none of us gets out of this life without struggling through grief. 😔If you haven’t experienced it yet, you will. I hate to tell you that, but it’s true. So many friends and loved ones are carrying heavy, heavy loads. On the podcast, Anderson is processing his own grief as he sifts through 📦boxes that once belonged to his mother. The boxes also hold treasures of his father, who died when Anderson was ten years old, and his brother, who died by suicide at age 23 when Anderson was 21.

In the Second Episode, Stephen Colbert joins Anderson to discuss how he came to be grateful for grief. Colbert related his experiences following the deaths of his father and two older brothers in an Eastern Airlines 🛩plane crash in 1974 when he was ten. They share insights about living with grief and what it’s like to be older than their fathers were when they died. Their observations about ❤️love and 😢loss are moving and raw. If you’re someone who read the names Cooper and Colbert and can’t get beyond some political notions to see them as people, please think again. This podcast is worth your ⏳time because grief will find all of us at some point in our lives. You can listen to All There Is with Anderson Cooper wherever you get your podcasts.

Colbert told Cooper, “If you’re grateful for your life, then you have to be grateful for all of it.” ❤️Grateful for our lives. ❤️Grateful for the lives of our family and friends. ❤️Grateful for the time we share together. ❤️Grateful for all of it.💖