{"id":203897,"date":"2026-03-14T22:24:59","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T02:24:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=203897"},"modified":"2026-03-14T22:29:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T02:29:21","slug":"on-grief-eric-church-and-anderson-cooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=203897","title":{"rendered":"On grief: Eric Church and Anderson Cooper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PwlqaQ7p1jc?si=YSYasiHmHOS2YmI1\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\nAnderson Cooper&#8217;s &#8220;grief&#8221; series has been going on for years now, really, and I always find them so soothing, so comforting, just &#8230; the quietness of two people listening and talking, sharing, opening up the space to share thoughts on grief. There&#8217;s something weirdly healing about these conversations. Maybe healing isn&#8217;t the word. Maybe being in the &#8220;presence&#8221; of an honest conversation about what&#8217;s really going on &#8230; helps me to <i>drop in<\/i> to what&#8217;s really going on. Cooper creates a little oasis around himself and his guest. Grief is so personal and yet so universal. Grief takes many forms. There is no right (or wrong) way. But there&#8217;s no way you could even know this unless people TALKED about grief, which we don&#8217;t in this culture. At all.<\/p>\n<p>I love Eric Church so much &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=131329\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">I saw him at Outlaw Fest back in 2017<\/a>! with Willie freakin&#8217; Nelson! &#8211; and here he joins Anderson to talk about grief. I was aware of many of these events &#8211; the embolism that nearly killed him, the Las Vegas shooting &#8211; but I guess I was unaware about his brother&#8217;s death. Church&#8217;s brother &#8211; who co-wrote a couple songs with Eric &#8211; died by suicide in 2018. Anderson Cooper&#8217;s brother also died by suicide, 40 years ago, but things like this don&#8217;t get easier, they just change. So the two men talk about all of this with a disarming openness &#8211; nobody &#8220;has this&#8221;. Nobody does grief right. A conversation like this is almost like: How are YOU doing with all this? How do YOU cope with this? Because here&#8217;s how I&#8217;M trying to cope.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve watched all of Anderson&#8217;s videos about grief &#8211; I always &#8220;get&#8221; something out of them, but also there&#8217;s something so lovely in just sitting and listening. I really love that he&#8217;s doing this. This one hits pretty deep. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anderson Cooper&#8217;s &#8220;grief&#8221; series has been going on for years now, really, and I always find them so soothing, so comforting, just &#8230; the quietness of two people listening and talking, sharing, opening up the space to share thoughts on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=203897\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[2494],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203897"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=203897"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203903,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203897\/revisions\/203903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=203897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=203897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=203897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}