The Rainbow Comes and Goes

by Anderson Cooper

  “What’s going on?” he said, seemingly disoriented.

  “Nothing’s going on,” my mom assured him.

  He ran from her room and up the stairs of the duplex apartment, through my room, and out onto the balcony. When my mom caught up to him, he was sitting on the ledge fourteen stories above the street. She tried to talk to him, begging him to come inside, but he refused. A plane passed overhead, and after looking up at it, he spun off the ledge and hung from the side of the building, his hands holding on to the balcony.

  After a few seconds, he let go.

  I have heard it said that the greatest loss a human being can experience is the loss of a child. This is true. The person you were before, you will never be again; it doesn’t just change you, it demolishes you. The rest of your life is spent on another level, the level of those who have lost a child.

  If you are blessed with other children, you go on living to be there for them, but the loss will consume you at unexpected times for the rest of your life.

  Just yesterday a moment clear as the day it happened flashed into my mind.

  Carter, age six, at our house in Southampton, jumps out of the pool, exuberantly running toward me to hug me. “Mommy, I want to marry you!” he yells.

  Hundreds of treasured moments: your father holding Carter as a baby, dancing around the room on a night when he couldn’t sleep, singing along to a Jobim bossa nova playing softly in the background. Carter, as a teenager, coming into my dressing room for the first time at 10 Gracie Square after we had just moved in, while, outside, fat flakes of snow swirled.

  “Oh, Mom,” he said, “It’s such a hopeful room.”

  And it was.

  I will remember everything about him forever.

  Is the pain less? No, just different. It is not something you “work through”; it is not something that goes away or fades into the landscape. It is there forever and ever, inescapable until the day you die.

  I have learned to live with it. Carter died twenty-seven years ago. There are times he comes to me in dreams, appearing as he would at the age he should be now. But these are fleeting images that vanish as I try to hold on to them. Carter is not here. He has no brilliant career. No loving wife he is crazy about. No son named Wyatt. No daughter named Gloria. He . . . they exist only in memory and on this page.

  I love to talk about him to his friends. Recently someone whom I hadn’t seen in a while and who knew Carter told me she thought it might be too painful for me to speak of him, and was somewhat surprised when I told her how happy it made me to do just that. It brings him to me. He is not forgotten. How proud today he would be of you and what you are making of your life.

  I imagine you two interacting, not as you did as children, but today, as men. Your father is there, too. But these images fade quickly as well.

  Only you and I are left. Even though I don’t get to see you as much as I’d like, because you are so busy, I do get to see you every night on a TV screen, and what better gift could a mother receive?

  So thank you, God or Whoever or Whatever is in charge of things. I have no complaints.

  You and I are different in how we handle grief. I know for you it’s important to talk to people. I remember in the days after Carter’s death you would tell everyone who came to the apartment what had happened. Reliving the horror over and over again helped you and I was glad something did, but I found it hard to talk about what I was feeling. In times of crisis, I grow silent. I wish I were better at talking about painful things.

  After Carter’s death, I sensed your withdrawal, which continued on into the weeks that followed, as friends came to the apartment hoping to bring solace to our grief.

  I lay in bed in my room unable to stop crying, a verbal stream of details pouring out, going over it, again and again, talking about how it happened. If indeed you did actually spend long stretches alone with me, I don’t remember them.

  But I knew you were in the apartment somewhere, talking with others, especially Carol Matthau, my lifelong friend, who had arrived from California. I knew this because she told me that the two of you had long conversations alone, although she kept their contents secret from me.

  Although at first I was aware of your distance from me, and upset by it, soon the waterfall of tears that kept flowing from me washed away any awareness that you were shutting me out.

  I wanted to die and I knew that only the stream of pain I kept going over and over and over again was what was keeping me alive.

  A month after Carter died, you had to go back to school. You didn’t want to go, but I knew you should. The day you left, you gave me a letter.

  “From now on we are partners,” you’d written. I felt that, too.

  But soon after, you said to me, “Don’t drink.”

  It stunned me that we were not as close as I had thought, that you were unaware that even though I was once again besieged by grief, I would never have turned to drinking to dissolve my pain.

  I did feel we were partners and still do, now more than ever. What I said about drinking was that I couldn’t be as close to you as I wanted in the wake of Carter’s death if you began to drink again. I didn’t think you would turn to alcohol immediately, but I feared you eventually would. If you had, it would have been impossible for me to remain close to you. I would have shut myself off from you for my own protection.

  After Daddy died, you didn’t drink for several weeks, and I thought perhaps you never would again, but then one cold winter’s day I came home from school and I could tell that you were drunk. Alcohol transformed you into another person and left me angry and feeling very alone.

  You didn’t drink after Carter’s death, however, and I am so proud of you for giving up alcohol altogether.

  It is strange for me to talk about this with you. For my entire childhood, this was something that was never spoken about in our house. Your drinking, occasional and unpredictable as it was, felt like a constant presence, and yet it was never discussed. How many silent dinners did I sit through pretending I didn’t notice?

  You mentioned drinking as a teenager that summer in Los Angeles, when you lived with your mother, and you alluded to her drinking as well. Was that when it began for you?

  Though I’d started drinking sherry before going out on dates that summer of 1941 in Los Angeles, it was not until my marriage to Leopold that a pattern emerged. It was infrequent at first, but toward the end of our marriage I began to have spells of drinking and sobbing. The first time it happened, Leopold was by my side, and he put his arms around me, saying, “Pray to Divine Mother,” the deity he believed in.

  I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. I kept sobbing and couldn’t stop.

  I lived in terror that I had inherited the alcoholism of my father. My beautiful, generous half-sister Cathleen, my father’s daughter from his first marriage, was also an alcoholic. I never even knew of her existence until I was fifteen and Auntie Ger told me I was to meet her. She had waited to introduce us, to make certain Cathleen would not drink in my company. She never did.

  Episodes of drinking and sobbing came and went as thunderclaps erupting in dark night. I would pass out into sleep and awake the next morning with a headache, but no memory of why I had been crying. The waves of tears had washed me back on the shore, safe and sound, but once again balanced on the tightrope.

  These episodes were never a daily occurrence. A look in the mirror at what drink and tears did to my face shocked me. (Vanity! Vanity!) I was too preoccupied with beauty to risk continuing. Purged and clear, I’d press on. But time would pass, and the pattern would repeat itself.

  I needed someone to talk to, but betrayed and lied to by Leopold, I found he was no longer the god I’d worshiped, trusted, and adored.

  The fear I might lose control led me to the psychiatrist I mentioned, Dr. McKinney. Well into my time in therapy, I asked him if he thought I was an alcoholic like my father and my half-sister.

  “No,” he said, “you like being in
dependent too much.”

  Do you think Mom is an alcoholic?” Carter once asked me when we were in high school.

  I was so shocked he said that word out loud that I didn’t know how to respond. We had never spoken of it before. Each of us dealt with it in silence. I was so surprised to hear him use the word that I dismissed his question, and never spoke with him about it again. Put off by my silence, he never attempted to, either.

  Your drinking made it difficult to trust you. I never knew what I would find when I came home from school each day. I dreaded going anywhere with you, worried that you might start drinking: on planes, at restaurants, parties. The person you became scared and angered me. I was never sure if you were aware of what you were doing. I assumed you were, but I didn’t know.

  The day after you’d drunk too much, it would be as if nothing had happened. It added another element of danger and fear to our lives, and contributed to the feeling that we were somehow adrift. Even now, typing this out, I feel that fear. I can remember it and realize I have spent much of my adult life making sure I never feel that way again.

  It means the world to me that you have come to trust me enough to express the feelings you have accumulated over the years about my drinking episodes. I can only imagine the courage this took. It is more than brave, considering the close relationship we now share.

  It has been twenty-seven years since Carter’s death, and despite all the difficulties I have faced since then, I no longer have an issue with alcohol. At ninety-one, my liver and heart are healthy, as they have been throughout my life, and instead of an alcoholic, I am a workaholic.

  As for the years before, I am sorry for the times I disappointed you as a mother. My flaws are rooted in things that happened way back in the beginning, as they are for most people, and I hope that knowing me now as you do, you understand where they came from, and can find it in your heart to forgive me.

  You have proved, by your life and what you have made of yourself, that you have triumphed over whatever shortcomings I may have had as a mother.

  Recently you asked me, “Do you think you are like your mother?”

  I told you that I never really knew her, so how could I answer?

  Well, the answer is, perhaps I am.

  I don’t view these things as failings, and I certainly understand their roots, more now than ever. As I said, I am very proud of you. I certainly don’t think you are like your mother now. Perhaps you once were. How could you not be, even though she wasn’t involved in your life? But you forged your own path, and broke the cycle that was set in motion long before you were born.

  You have done so much with your life, touched so many people. You are open and honest, and you can reach out to others in ways your mother never could.

  We have never spoken of forgiveness, and I have no knowledge what your thoughts, or doubts, if any, are on the subject, but I still smile thinking of the line from the Lord’s Prayer, which Dodo taught me and which I’d repeat every night kneeling by my bed before jumping in to sleep, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

  I hadn’t a clue what it meant, but today I understand, and although it has preoccupied most of my life, I’ve at last come to know that forgiveness is much simpler than I could ever have imagined: whatever problem you have with someone, project yourself into the other person and see it from their point of view.

  When you do this, good and evil shuffle into patterns and you are capable of forgiving trespasses. When you understand from whence the good or evil came, and the other person’s actions or motivations, only then can you forgive and let it go. Most children believe that trauma, death, or divorce happen because of something they have done, though they don’t understand exactly what; they think it is their fault. I certainly believed I was to blame for all that happened when I was a child. I felt guilty about the custody battle between my mother and Auntie Ger, even though I couldn’t understand why. I also thought it was somehow my fault my mother was branded a lesbian.

  It was difficult to let go of that. It took me years to understand and forgive her for the pain she caused and to forgive myself for the crippling guilt that has been with me all my life—guilt that has hung over me from the time I found out my father died an alcoholic at forty-five, and my half-sister Cathleen at forty of the same disease.

  Finally I figured it out. It was not my fault. I wish it had been different, but I did what I could, as we all do with situations that are handed to us.

  At best, I no longer agonize intensely as I did over my failings or the failings of others. I accept them. At worst, I have to admit that somewhere within still lurks a demon of rage. Age makes it impossible to put right the things that went wrong. There is little time left.

  I’ve never heard you mention the demon of rage before. It surprises me, because I have often felt that I, too, am fueled by rage, and I have only ever told a few people that.

  It is not the “rage to live” you wrote about before, but rage at the unfairness of losing my dad and Carter. It is like a hot furnace that fuels a ship across the sea, but this rage requires no tending; no one needs to stoke its coals. It burns continuously, powering me forward through calm seas and rough.

  Yes, it is different from the “rage to live,” but perhaps connected in some way. For me it is rage over much of what happened. Rage at my mother for instigating the custody case against Auntie Ger. Rage at the position I was put in as a child. Had she not done that, and let me stay with my aunt, so much would have been different. I became a pawn in a battle that never should have taken place.

  I have no respect for those who harbor self-pity and I have none of it in reference to myself, but the rage is there, burning hot, deep in my core.

  I understand now how little I knew you when my father died. I always thought that you and I didn’t have much in common and that I was just like him. The fact that he and I looked so much alike made it easier to believe we were so similar.

  “Buddy, that boy is the spittin’ image of you,” his sisters used to say when he would take Carter and me to Mississippi. I’m sure it was irritating for you to hear that, as if you didn’t have much of a role in the matter.

  I see now just how much like you I really am, how similar we are and always have been. It makes me feel so much closer to you.

  I may look like my dad, but I am most definitely your son. We share the same drive and determination, the same restlessness and rage. It is good to know you’ve felt these things, too, and to see how they have both helped and hindered you.

  To quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “I love you in ways that are infinite and as in eternity have no beginning or end.”

  But are we alike?

  Sometimes I think hardly at all. You are the living image of your father, not only in appearance, but in valuing the same standards he held in high regard, standards that are sometimes hard to live by.

  Other times, yes, we are indeed completely alike. We share sensitivity, tempered by poise and the reserve to reveal only what we wish to communicate.

  We have the gift of editing, presenting ourselves in different ways to different people. We are not gossips. We are worthy to be trusted with secrets of family and friends. We have fun going to the movies together, sharing a bag of popcorn. We do not burden each other with trivial troubles, or pull each other down with unsupportive comments. We advise each other on pressing matters from time to time, and you always give me a short, sensible, well-thought-out solution to any problem. I try to respond in the same manner.

  We both spend a lot of time organizing our lives, secretly working out various options and scenarios in our heads. Luckily, yours are far more practical, and more likely to become reality than mine, which continue to be influenced by the enchanted fairy tales I read as a child. In spite of this, I treasure those fairy tales still, for they are, in large part, what spur my creativity.

  We share a restless spirit; in fact, we are never at rest, and rarely, if ever,
will anything satisfy Andy and his mom. Soon something beckons. It’s there, around the corner, just out of sight. All we need do is follow.

  All my life I have craved and longed for love, and I have not been deprived; my cup hath runneth over, but it was never enough. It never got anywhere near where the trouble really was: no mother and father, as my secret sister Susan Sontag knew about so well.

  Here, Andy, thankfully, we are not alike. Even though you lost your father when you were ten, you knew that there wasn’t a moment from birth when you didn’t have and know his support. How fully, completely, he loved you and Carter. Although only those years were given, they were enough for him to pass on to you the values that have made you the person you are: my son, treasured each moment of my life.

  Years ago I asked how you made it through all the traumas in your life.

  “I had an image of myself: that at my core there was a rock-hard diamond that nothing could get at, nothing could crack,” you said.

  It was not a boast. It was a statement of fact. The words were tinged with sadness.

  Do you still feel you have that rock-hard diamond in your core, or has that changed with time?

  As death approaches, I no longer imagine a diamond at my secret core. Instead, I see shimmering flashes of moonlight on the calm of a midnight sea.

  A voice calls across the water, “Forgive me.” It is my voice, but I am not speaking to “Our Father, who art in heaven.” I’m calling out to those I have hurt. They know who they are. I pray they forgive me, as I forgive those who have trespassed against me.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” the words I banished so long ago, now come foremost to my mind. For me, this has nothing to do with the confessional, but with an acknowledgment of the mistakes I have made. You may find, as I have, that the longer you live, time becomes a giant jigsaw puzzle, with the missing pieces not only unexpectedly discovered, but sliding into place, irrevocably and finally, as B comes after A in the alphabet. Even if it’s too late, alas, to rectify every mistake, what matter the bitterness or regrets? I have found solace in living long enough to understand and forgive the person I once was.