Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [4]
At dawn I board the plane, the first of several I’ll take to get to Sri Lanka. When I sit down, the flight attendant tells me I still have confetti in my hair.
SOMETIMES I WONDER if I’m the person I was born to be, if the life I’ve lived really is the one I was meant to, or if it is some half life, a mutation engineered by loss, cobbled together by the will to survive.
My father’s name was Wyatt Cooper. He was born in Quitman, Mississippi, a small town hit hard by the Depression, which started just two years after his birth. His family was poor, his father was a farmer, though by all accounts not a very diligent one.
My father was a born storyteller. As a child, he was often asked to give sermons at Quitman’s First Baptist Church when the preacher was out of town.
He wanted to be an actor from the time he was little, but in Quitman during the Depression that didn’t seem like a very realistic goal.
“Listen to me, boy, and I’ll make you the youngest goddamn governor this state’s ever had,” my grandfather would bellow at my dad. But my father had no interest in his father’s far-fetched political plans.
Whenever he could save up money, he’d hitch a ride into Quitman and see movies at the Majestic, the only theater in town. The Philadelphia Story played there; so did Gone With the Wind. Films showed for only a day or two, but my father tried to see them all. He’d save the ticket stubs in a scrapbook.
Eventually he left Mississippi and worked as an actor in Hollywood and Italy, did stage productions, and took bit parts in TV dramas and cigarette ads, but his career never really took off. He found more success as a screenwriter, working at Twentieth Century Fox.
My parents met at a dinner party. Their backgrounds could not have been more different. My father had never been married and had a large clan of brothers and sisters and a mother whom he adored. My mother was an only child estranged from her mother, and her third marriage, to director Sidney Lumet, had just ended. In each other, however, they recognized something—a desire for family, a need to belong. “There was something about his eyes,” my mother later told me. “We were from very different worlds, but he understood me better than anyone else ever had.” They were married just before Christmas, 1964. One year later my brother, Carter, was born. I came along two years after that.
My mother is a remarkably talented artist, and when I was young she began to design home furnishings. She then moved into fashion, and produced an enormously successful line of designer jeans and perfume. My father was working on a book and writing magazine articles. He usually wrote from home, and sometimes, late at night, if I couldn’t sleep, I’d go into his study and curl up in his lap like a puppy, my arms wrapped around his neck, my ear pressed against his chest. I could always fall asleep listening to the beat of his heart.
I’M UNABLE TO sleep on the flight to Sri Lanka. It’s nearly a week since the tsunami struck and already I fear I’ve missed the story—the bodies and the burials, the emotion of the moment. Like a raw recruit who thinks the war will end before he sees action, I wanted to go the minute this happened. It’s the way it always is: find the worst-off place and plunge in head first. It sounds strange, ghoulish, perhaps, but it’s the truth. I want to be there, want to see it. Once I am there, however, I’ve quickly seen enough.
On the plane the flight attendant asks a Sri Lankan passenger if she’s comfortable.
“I just lost three people in my family,” the passenger says.
“Oh, that’s terrible,” the flight attendant says, pausing