Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [15]
My mother lay in bed retelling the story of Carter’s death to each person who came to visit her, as if by repeating it she’d discover some new piece of information that would explain it all, would perhaps reveal that it hadn’t really happened, that it was all a misunderstanding, a terrible dream.
“Like a gymnast,” she’d say to each new visitor. I knew it helped her to go over and over it, combing the sand for some clue, some shard that would bring Carter back. No matter how many times I heard the story, however, it still didn’t make any sense.
After a while I stopped listening. The story didn’t get me any closer to understanding. If anything, it pointed out what wasn’t known, and what might never be. “Why?” That’s the question everyone asked: Why kill himself? Why do it in front of his mother? Why didn’t he leave a note?
Sometimes my mother wept, and screamed. I think I envied her that. I cried, but at night, in my pillow, not wanting others to hear. I suppose I worried that if I let go, I, too, would fall off the edge, plunge into whatever blackness had swept my brother away.
A handful of reporters and cameramen waited outside the building. It didn’t occur to me that this had become a media event until my mother’s lawyer accidentally left a copy of the New York Post in the apartment. HEIR’S TRAGIC LAST HOURS was the headline on the front page. They kept referring to my mother as the “Poor Little Rich Girl,” a tag that tabloids had given her as a child at the height of her mother and aunt’s custody battle. I threw the paper out. I didn’t want my mother to see that she was once again in the headlines.
When we arrived at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel for Carter’s wake, about a half-dozen photographers snapped pictures as I helped my mom out of the car. I hated them: circling like vultures over our barely breathing bodies.
I’d forgotten that moment, that feeling, until this past year, when I found myself reporting outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice watching a jostling crowd of cameramen follow her father’s and mother’s every move. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, and her feeding tube had been removed. Her parents were fighting to have it put back in.
“Khraw, khraw,” a producer standing next to me screeched, mimicking the sound of circling buzzards.
“I’ve become what I once hated,” I thought to myself—sadly, not for the first time.
Carter’s casket was in the largest room the funeral home had, but the line of mourners stretched down the block. My mom stood receiving people, one by one looking into their eyes for answers.
There had been no invitations issued, so it wasn’t possible to control who got on the line. I ended up screening those gathered, pulling some close friends off the queue and telling them just to come in. Occasionally I’d approach a stranger, trying to find out who he or she was. Several were merely curious passersby. One man was holding a copy of the New York Post and wanted my mom to autograph it. I thanked him for coming and asked someone to show him out.
My brother was wearing a gray Paul Stuart suit. I’d gone to his apartment the day before the wake to pick it out. When I’d seen the suit in his closet, I’d wanted it for myself, then felt guilty for being selfish, so I decided that that was the suit he should be buried in. In the taxi on my way home, I sat with it on my lap. The radio was on, and an interviewer was saying to a caller, “Hey, I mean look at that Vanderbilt kid. I mean the interest on his trust fund was probably more than I’ll make in my lifetime, and that didn’t stop him from jumping off a building. I mean, am I right or what?”
The morticians had parted my brother’s hair on the wrong side. “Oh, no, that’s not him,” I almost said. “There’s been some kind of mistake.”
I noticed a silver screw with a bolt sticking out of the back of his head. I hoped my mom couldn’t see it. If