Anderson Cooper and his mom Gloria Vanderbilt revealed they'll never feel "closure" over the death of Carter Cooper.
In 1988, Carter, the brother of Anderson and youngest son of Gloria, committed suicide at age 23 by jumping off the 14th-floor balcony of his mother's Manhattan apartment.
"The most terrible word in the English language, 'closure,'" Vanderbilt said in a recent interview with People magazine and Entertainment Weekly editorial director Jess Cagle.
“It doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing,” the 48-year-old news anchor added.
Since his tragic death, they make it a point not to celebrate the holidays.
"Well, I remember the first Christmas we were together after it happened — cause he died July 22 — and we went to the movies," Gloria, 92, remarked. "And then we went to the automat, and from then on we've never done anything about Christmas," they told the magazine.
Carter, the oldest child of Gloria and author Wyatt Cooper, was a Princeton University graduate and working at American Heritage as a book editor before his death.
He had been seeing a therapist for depression a month before throwing himself off the balcony right in front of his mother.
"I think he had this impulse that he could not contain," Anderson told Howard Stern in 2014. "He had woken up from a nap and was disoriented and ran to her room and said, 'What's going on, what's going on?' Then he ran to his room on the second floor and went out onto the ledge."
His brother's death had a huge impact on the career choices made by Anderson, a successful CNN anchor and "60 Minutes" correspondent.
“I started going overseas and going to places where life and death was very real and where people were suffering tremendous losses. Hearing their stories and hearing people talk about it sort of helped me to get to a place where I could talk about it, I think,” he told People.
Vanderbilt, who admitted in the interview that she often has vivid dreams of her late son, welcomes stories of his life because it "brings him alive."
"Some people ... who knew Carter will start to talk about him and then say, 'Oh, I'm sorry.' And I say, 'No, I love to talk about him. More, more, more.'"
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