Coming Back To Life – All There Is with Anderson Cooper

“Death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something.” Pope Francis wrote those words in February. A new beginning he called it, because he said, we’ll experience something that we’ve never fully experienced: eternity. I’ve been thinking a lot about those words the last few days while I’ve been working here in Rome. I hope he’s right that death is a new beginning. I’m not sure what I believe about what happens to us after we die. But I am certain that when someone we love dies, it is a new beginning for those of us left behind. The good news, which I’ve learned through doing this podcast, is that the death of someone we love doesn’t have to be the end of our relationship with them. We can still talk with them, walk with them and hold them close in our hearts and in our lives. I never believed that before, I certainly never felt it, but I do now. I feel my dad with me, part of me, and my understanding of him, my love for him, has deepened as I’ve become a father and am older now than he ever was. I still struggle to feel my brother, my sadness and pain over his death and the distance that existed between us before it is still so great. But I hope to one day soon be able to turn toward that pain, turn toward him, and feel him in a new way. As Andrew Garfield said in the last season of the podcast, “the wound is the only route to the gift.” The death of someone you love is not the end of everything. It can be the beginning of something new with the person you’ve lost.

I think there’s a sense of an ongoing conversation.

That’s Father Patrick Mary Briscoe, a priest I met in Rome a few days ago.

What has ended here on this life isn’t really the end of the story. We say in the Catholic funeral liturgy that life has changed, not ended.

Life is changed not ended, and your life with the person you’ve lost doesn’t have to end as well. Wherever you are in your grief, I’m glad you’re here. This is All There Is.

My guest on this special edition of the podcast today is Elaine Pagels. She’s a professor of religion at Princeton University. Her newest book out just now is called Miracles and Wonder, the Historical Mystery of Jesus. In 1987, Elaine’s son Mark, who was six and a half, died of an incurable medical condition. Not long after, her husband of nearly 20 years, a theoretical physicist named Heinz fell while hiking and died as well. She wrote about it in a book called Why Religion? A Personal Story. We recorded this interview weeks before Pope Francis’ death. I started out the interview by asking Elaine about her son, Mark, who was born with a hole in his heart. Doctors were able to operate on him when he was about a year old, but they soon discovered he had that incurable condition. It’s called pulmonary hypertension. Elaine and Heinz were told there was nothing they could do.

What do you do in that situation? I mean, what happens when you go home?

Kind of go crazy. I remember leaving the hospital and just wanting to walk out in the street and have a car hit me. I didn’t want to die. I just thought, I can’t deal with this at all. I refused to believe them.

You refuse to believe that Mark…

I kept thinking, no, he’s not going to die. I could not imagine that. I was trying to anesthetize myself with whatever I could, with alcohol, with whatever I could use. It didn’t work much. They kept saying, oh, you have to go to this nurse at baby’s hospital. And I thought, I’m not going go talk to her. She’s the one in charge of parents with dying children, and my child is not dying.

She was a bereavement specialist.

Yes. Finally, I was desperate enough and I went and that’s when she said there’s a name for what you’re going through. It’s called mourning. She said it doesn’t start when somebody dies, it starts when you get news like that. But it was a relief.

To have a name for it, to…

I felt that I was falling apart and disintegrating, so it somehow did help.

Your husband Heinz said something, which you write about in the book, Why Religion. You said, “once when he saw me in anguish after we received our child’s crushing diagnosis, he said something I often recall, everyone’s life has something like this in it. Angry, I snapped back, no, not this, not a child with a terminal illness. No, he said, not, this, but something like, this. Much later, I came to realize how much truth there is in what he said. ”

Yes, yes, I was angry when he said that, but everyone does experience whatever tests us to our limits and often way beyond. And when I was thinking about some of the work I do in the history of religion, I was thinking of a text that talks about how in suffering, we recognize each other in a different way than we ordinarily recognize other people. We identify in a deeper way than just meeting someone and finding out. Who is this person socially. And that’s why it is very helpful to do what you’re doing with this podcast, to speak to people who have had experiences different from anyone else’s, and yet they connect with each other, and you’ve allowed them to connect with you, and I think that’s very important.

How did you get through each day?

Oh, well, he lived for another four years, and we had a wonderful time. We went to the Museum of Natural History all the time, we went to The Wilderness, and he had a Wonderful kindergarten, and kindergarten friends, and he was making paintings, and he dreaming what he was gonna do when he grew up. So we had great deal of joy with him. But I can’t tell you that there wasn’t at the back of it a shadow that we always felt.

Well, he had been in school every day that week, but because his heart was getting weaker, he wasn’t feeling too well. So I took him to the hospital and they took some blood and at that point he just went into cardiac arrest. And I ran down the hall with him in my arms, yelling for doctors. And about, I want to say 20 of them came into that room and started working on his heart. And I talked to him slowly and carefully and… Clearly throughout that process and at a certain point I felt that the connection I felt with him snapped and that he was not there. And I fainted. I felt like I was in an ecstatic state. It was very strange. It’s like I’m going with him. But I faint and they took me into another room and revived me while the doctors worked on his heart. And my husband arrived and he was just And I said, no, it’s not over till it’s over. Let’s ask him to come back.

Let’s ask Mark to come back.

Yeah, so we spoke to him from the other room and said we wanted him to come with us and I felt that he was actually there. And after a few minutes, the doctors came in and said, we don’t want to get your hopes up, but his heart started again.

You said you felt his presence in that room?

I felt that he hurt us, and then he was going back into his body. So we went into the room where he was, and very soon his heart stopped. He didn’t have enough oxygen. That’s the problem with pulmonary hypertension. His body couldn’t sustain his life. And then he left. I mean, we could feel it happen. He breathed out, and it was like I could see like a little trace of silver up on the ceiling, and a feeling that that was… He was departing. And after that, he didn’t seem to be there anymore. That’s just how it felt. I just felt that he’d gone. He was no longer in the room. And I also felt that he was delighted to be out of the body. He was full of joy. And that really surprised me because I was absolutely brokenhearted. And you know, I went into that experience with a very different view of death. I had assumed that when a person dies, they’re just annihilated, all of the molecules disperse, There’s nothing left. That was my conviction.

Had you seen somebody die before?

Not like that. And so after that I thought something else has happened. Something I didn’t expect. The sense of that person. That entity going somewhere else. I don’t know what to make of it to this day. I don’ have a conclusion about what happens, but that changed my view of death. It certainly didn’t seem simply like annihilation.

It opened up a possibility of something.

Yes, and it could be wishful thinking of course, but it was not a thought so much as an experience of almost a visceral experience of presence and absence, the way you would feel if somebody’s in the room or if they’re gone. So very mysterious.

I was there when my mom died and it’s incredible to see the life force or the soul or the spirit, however one wants to describe it, leave.

Did you have that sense that…

I mean, I was holding her hand and looking at her face, and I could see the moment. Yeah, I feel very privileged to have been there. And that transition moment, I mean you see it in the person’s face.

Yes, I was very glad I was there for him. And also for me, it was important to see and be present.

But your study of religion, did it help when confronted with a loss which is unimaginable?

Not at the time. Some people said, oh, your faith must have helped you. And I thought, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I felt like all of that talk about faith and God and everything was like being at the bottom of the sea and hearing someone from up there talking about something. So no, I didn’t feel any sense of faith or anything like that. I was kind of so overwhelmed and devastated and grieved.

You write about being at Mark’s funeral and at the church and standing at the back of the church. Oh, yes. And you talked about a feeling you had, and I just want to read what you said. You said, I seem to see the whole scene embraced by a huge net made of ropes with enormous spaces between the knots through which we could be swept away at any moment out of the world. I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved and that nothing else could have kept us in this world.

Yes, I just felt that there were so many people at the church that day, from all parts of our lives, and I just wanted to be out of there. I just couldn’t bear the emotion, the intensity of it. At the same time, I felt held in that space by the connections with the people there, without which I would have just wanted, I think, to leave the world. Later, someone told me about the image of Indra’s net. The Indian goddess who casts a net which connects us all in a kind of the image is to me like a sparkling spider’s web or something like that.

Yeah, I read that Indra’s Net in both Buddhist and Hindu mythology symbolizes the universe as a web of interconnectedness

That’s exactly what it felt like. And also, that brought me to the work I was doing on the Gospel of Thomas that talks about the connectedness of all beings in the universe.

What is it? What’s the gospel of Thomas?

The Gospel of Thomas is one of the secret Gospels that was discovered in 1945, about the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but in Egypt, with a group of other sacred texts. They were censored when the Church became a sort of unified institution in the 4th century. And this one claims to be the teaching of the Apostle Thomas. But it’s about the connectedness of all beings.

It says, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring fourth will save you. If you do not bring forth, what is within you what you do not bring fourth, will destroy you. I love that.

I love it, too. That was the saying that really startled me when I read it, and I thought, well, you don’t have to believe it. It just happens to be true.

Yeah. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forward will save you. If you do not bring forth, what is with in you? If you suppress it, if you reject it, what do you not bring forward? It will destroy you.

I totally believe that, and of course, Anderson, I took it psychologically. But I also understand it has a spiritual meaning, because the suggestion there is that every human being has within us a connection to the divine source from which everything comes. And they talk about it as energy or light. Light is a metaphor for that energy. And so what that saying can mean on another level is if you recognize that deep within there is this light energy or this energy or call it light. Which is what we’ll call the image of God in you. It’s a kind of spiritual connection between you and the source of all being, which you may not even know is there. But if you bring it forth, it’s a great deliverance.

In a lot of places in the Bible, suffering is punishment, but in the gospel of truth, suffering is not punishment. It’s through the eyes of wisdom, suffering can show how we are connected to each other. So that’s the gospel truth? It is. Is that different than the gospel Thomas?

Yes. There were about five or six named secret Gospels found in the same collection. An Orthodox version of Christianity says that Jesus had to suffer and die to forgive the human race from sin. The Gospel of Truth says Jesus came into the world to teach us what’s written on our heart, that we belong to each other in the Same Family. And suffering is the result of the fact that we’re born into a world and we’re mortal beings and we die. That’s just part of nature. It’s not punishment. But it’s read, say, in the Hebrew Bible as if it were punishment. Adam and Eve wouldn’t have died, right? If they hadn’t sinned, that’s the story. But actually, reading death as a punishment, as Jews and Christians have for thousands of years, amplify those feelings of shame and anger and frustration. But seeing it as part of a natural process is quite different. For so many people, certainly like me. If you’re brought up in a family that doesn’t know how to deal with grief, it can just eat at way at you inside.

I mean, did you allow yourself to grieve, Mark, at the time?

Well, I couldn’t help grieving. But I had been brought up in a family that would just try to avoid the topic of death. Even my parents wouldn’t talk about it.

Your parents did not come to Mark’s funeral, nor, when you visited them, did they want to look at a video of the funeral or talk about his death at all?

They just kind of were totally silent. I mean, that’s… They didn’t want to discuss it, and that’s why I was brought up, too.

It’s stunning to me that this is your mom and dad not acknowledging the death of your child.

I think they didn’t have any language for that. I don’t understand that. I think it’s much better to have ways to openly grieve with other people or celebrate or weep or something. But many people do keep it very shut down, as you say that you did.

It’s interesting that you say with other people because it’s only now that I sort of remember that as a child there was some sort of shame in the fact that my father had died and so the idea of the funeral and all of that just felt like something I was obligated to do and wanted to get through but was embarrassed by the whole thing. I was ashamed in some way.

Well, Anderson, I think shame is a big part of it. I mean, if you’re a parent and your child dies, one of the responses to that is shame. It’s like your job as a parent primarily is to keep your child alive. And if you fail, and it doesn’t matter if you did everything possible that you could, it doesn’ matter because you still failed. And that’s how I felt very ashamed. Of being a parent whose child had died, and I think that’s deeply part of it, for many of us anyway.

We’ll be right back with more of my interview with Elaine Pagels. Welcome back to All There Is in my interview with Elaine Pagels. Before Mark died, Elaine and Heinz adopted another child. She would go on to adopt a second child as well. How long after Mark died did Heinz die?

Oh, well, it was about a year.

He went out hiking as he had for 22 years, twice a week. But on one hike, he was showing the way to one of his graduate students. He simply fell on the way back, 2,000 feet, and probably died within seconds.

A policeman came to your house. Yes. What happened?

Well, he hadn’t come back from the hike, and there were helicopters searching for him all day. Could hear them. And late in the day, this policeman came to tell me that my husband had fallen and he had died. And he said, you know, God never gives us more than we can handle. That made me so angry, I could not even speak. I just thought, how do you know what I can handle? Do you know that our son died a year ago? I just, I was livid. I had my hands on the door of the deck to sort of steady myself. And when he said that, I don’t know how I ripped off the handles, but I did. I was kind of in a blind state of, I don’ know even what, I thought for three days I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t do anything. I mean, I just thought, this cannot be. It just cannot be, but it was, of course.

You also write about anger in your reading of religious texts. You realize that only God is allowed to have anger.

Yes, in the Bible the Lord gets angry very often, and he does awful things. He kills 70,000 people in one blow when he sends the angel of death to wipe people out because he’s angry at King David. So I realized what the Hebrew Bible teaches you about grief is that it’s all right to You feel sad, you tear your clothes. You put away mirrors, you weep and cry, and you have your friends come over, and you do all the rituals of grieving, but you can’t get angry. It’s only the Lord who has the right to get angry, and the only people who are approved to get angry is, say, Moses when he’s articulating the anger of the Lord.

And yet, in grief, there is justifiable anger.

I was stunned to read the date that Heinz died. Heinz die July 23rd, 1988. And my brother Carter died July 22nd, 1988, one day apart. And both fell, different circumstances. As my brother. Leapt over the balcony of our apartment building and then let go. But I just find it so strange to think you were in Colorado, I was in New York, a day apart, our lives changed forever.

And we lived in New York, of course.

And my brother went to Princeton where you taught? Yeah. For years, and even still to this day, that date, July 22nd, is so fraught for me. Was July 23rd fraught you for a long time?

Oh, absolutely, for a very long time. It would come up like a tidal wave. You’d feel it coming, and you’d feel it coming and feel it coming until that day, and then it would kind of crash and maybe release a bit. But it was a sense of traumatic loss. It doesn’t feel that way now, but it was 35 years, Anderson, before I felt I could really go into the black hole of the grief for both the people. They were my entire family. I had my husband and my child at the time. And I couldn’t go near there.

You had to suppress or bury grief to a certain extent to function.

‘Yes, and I did it quite successfully. As long as I had children to deal with at home, they keep you busy all the time, especially if you’re a single parent and you’re working full-time and you are writing books. I didn’t have time to think and that was part of the point, just keep busy.

It doesn’t go away. I didn’t wake up to the fact that I hadn’t grieved until they had two years ago and I’m still like slowly turning to it and sort of touching it in increments and it still feels like there is an overwhelming… Thing that I’m keeping at bay.

Yes, keeping it at bay was keeping you safe, because after all, your father, your brother, that’s a huge load of grief, especially when you were a child, and it was held in. So it was enormous. And part of your functioning is protecting you from being overwhelmed by it, until you could gradually let more and more and more in, and that’s releasing it.

So for you, what was the point that you decided to turn to it?

‘Well, it was seeing this really good therapist after my children were out of the house and in college and into their own lives when I was by myself. And then I went into the black hole and I started to write about what happened and re-experiencing it. It was very, very painful.

That became the book, Why Religion?

Yes, it did, and I never thought I’d publish it because it was so personal. And then I thought finally, yeah, but this is, this happens to everybody, really. So that helped a great deal. And then talking about it and letting it out, bring forth what is within you. And then only after that, a year and a half after that I was able to, I met someone that I could dare to love without being terrified of loss in the same way. And I could. And when that happened, I started to cry and cry and crying.

Had you cried much before that?

Not much, which is amazing, isn’t it?

I’m right there with you on that crying thing until now.

I was not crying a lot and then I began to weep for my son and he’s a marvelous man and he could understand and allow that to happen and he wasn’t alarmed by it and I wasn’t alarmed I’ll hit it.

So you can cry in front of him.

Oh, yes. I hadn’t had anyone like that. I’d been really alone, except for children. And you can’t keep doing that to children at all. So that was a great release. But also what you’re doing, the work that you’re doing with grief, and I think also writing about it, talking with other people, there’s nothing very unique about any of us in this regard. I mean, in one sense, every experience is totally unique. And has its own particular shape. But in another sense, there’s such deep communality.

Yeah, I had a woman come up to me outside my house the other day and we ended up talking for 20 minutes and I’m still in touch with her, her husband died just recently. But it is extraordinary to me that anybody who passed on the street has experienced this or will experience this.

What has been the effect of that?

Um, I mean, I still feel like I am, this is very early days for me and I’m, I have to figure out a way to spend time with grief and allow myself to. It’s something I, you know, I cry in, inopportune times, but I feel like, I’m still, I need to keep a lid somewhat on it because I worry like there is a flood there that will overwhelm

Well, that’s right, and it’s a gradual process.

A therapist said to you, you have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later.

She was right. She’d been through it. And now I can allow for much more space, much more openness. The currents go through like a river more. And they’re much more livable. And they don’t require me to be playing a type A personality. Which I think could have done me in if I’d kept doing that. Because when you get to be older, it’s hard to keep that up. And I think.

So it’s a relief at this point, and I would imagine for you very much as well, to begin to let some of that open up and release.

I’m still going through these endless boxes of my mom, my dad, and my brothers. And I’ve been going through photographs, thousands of photographs, to organize them. And it’s been very difficult. But I always heard people talk about, oh, I feel somebody I’ve lost with me, or they’re always with me or things like that. And I never understood what they were talking about. But I have…

I have begun to feel my dad, and I’ve begun to even feel the little boy that I was. And that’s been incredible, like actually feeling the little boy that was and being able to kind of turn to him and communicate with him. It’s, it doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s when it does, it is. I feel like that is the root to something.

Yes, to your own experience, right? And acknowledging more of it, allowing more of to be felt. And that must be different now than it was when you started this process.

I mean, yeah, it did not exist when I started this process, really, to any degree. And now I feel it much more.

And it makes us much more compassionate about other people. And then I was thinking, you know, having children of your own and seeing how sensitive a child is.

I mean, you want to protect that child and allow his emotional responses to be heard.

I talked with Francis Weller, who’s been on the podcast twice, and I talk to him now once a week on Zoom. And it’s one of the things we were just talking about the other day, he pointed out in me talking to the little child that I was and feeling him, if that was my son, what would I do? And I would immediately grab that little boy and hold him and tell him that everything was going to be all right. And I’d talked to him. And so that idea is… Is very powerful for me. Is there something you’ve learned in your grief that you could say that would be helpful for others?

That if you try to hold it in, and pretend it isn’t there, it’s not going away. That if you don’t find ways to release it gradually, or suddenly, or however it happens, you will be suffering more than necessary. And now, I feel a lot more gratitude. Gratitude for that wonderful child that I had. Fortunate marriage I had for 22 years without grieving for it now, because I have a life that is full in a very different way, and I finally realized that I could be happy again. That was a surprise.

I get a lot of direct messages on Instagram. I was reading a couple going home after work last night, and there were several people who had just experienced a loss, devastating losses, and could not imagine how they will get through the next month, days. What would you say if somebody asked you, how am I going to get through this?

I would say it’s hard to imagine that you can get through this. It’s certainly been hard for me. The surprise is that it can change eventually.

And you can have a wonderful life again, which didn’t seem possible to me then. This is not a sad story. This is a story about coming back to life.

You exude life. And by the way, that’s how I responded last night. In the end, I said this was actually a mother who had lost a child. And I said that I wished my mom was alive to give her advice and that I didn’t feel qualified to, but I know that my mom was able to laugh again and that that’s possible.

It doesn’t seem possible then, but it is. Yeah, and I think it helps to hear that from someone, even though no doubt she didn’t feel that at all.

Elaine, thank you so much.

Thank you, I’m very happy to see you today.

Elaine’s book about the loss of her son and husband is called Why Religion? A Personal Story. Her newest book is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. Thanks for listening to this special episode of the podcast. I may release a few more single episodes in the weeks and months ahead, and I’m already planning for a fourth season of the pod cast as well. All there is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Her senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is our executive producer. Support from Nick Godsell, Ben Evans, Chuck Hagdad, Charlie Moore, Kerry Rubin, Shimri Shitrtit, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dionora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundige.