Loss helps us love – comedian opens up about grief

Pain and loss allow us to connect with others who are suffering and to love more deeply, a well-known US comedian and chat show host has said.

Interviewed on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, Stephen Colbert, the Catholic host of The Late Show talked about the deaths of his father and brothers Peter and Paul in a 1974 plane crash when he was aged 10, and said that the tragedy eventually taught him to be a better human being.

“It’s a gift to exist and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that,” Mr Colbert said, explaining that he had eventually come to realise how this had helped him.

“I don’t want it to have happened,” he said. “I want it to not have happened, but if you are grateful for your life—which I think is a positive thing to do, not everybody is, and I am not always but it’s the most positive thing to do—then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.”

Loss gives an awareness of others’ loss, and enables connection between people, he said, with his childhood tragedy eventually helping him to understand and love others in an especially deep way, such that he has become grateful for his own suffering.

“It’s about the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of being here and being human if you can’t be the most human you can be?” he said. “I want to be the most human I can be, and that involves acknowledging and ultimately being grateful for the things that I wish didn’t happen because they gave me a gift.”

Responding to how Mr Cooper’s observation that pain is something that everyone experiences, Mr Colbert said: “And in my tradition, that’s the great gift of the sacrifice of Christ – it’s that God does it too, that you’re really not alone, that God does it too.”