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All There Is with Anderson Cooper
Grief can feel so lonely but talking about it and listening to others share their experiences helps. In all new episodes of this award-winning podcast, Anderson Cooper continues his deeply personal exploration of grief in all its complexities. In moving and honest discussions, he learns from others who have faced life-altering losses. Join the community to share your story and watch Anderson's weekly streaming show All There Is Live at cnn.com/allthereis
Gavin Newsom
All There Is with Anderson Cooper
Mar 3, 2026
California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks with Anderson about growing up the child of divorced parents whose pasts were rarely talked about. Newsom witnessed his mom's death by doctor-assisted suicide and says it's only now that he has come to terms with what happened and the impact it had on him. This and other episodes of All There Is are available at cnn.com/allthereis or wherever you get podcasts.
Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Madeleine Thompson Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin Kari Pricher and Polson Kanneth
Episode Transcript
Anderson Cooper
00:00:01
'Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is a politician, but we aren't talking politics. Gavin Newsom is the governor of California. In 2002, his mom, Tessa, left him a voicemail. "Gavin, if you wanna see me," she said, "'you should probably do so before Thursday, because that's gonna be my last day on Earth." She'd been battling breast cancer for four years and had decided to die by doctor-assisted suicide, which was illegal in California. Newsom was by his mom's bedside when she died. He's written a book about his life called :Young Man in a Hurry, a Memoir of Discovery." I spoke to him last week. You had a really interesting childhood and a really strange bifurcated existence in a lot of different ways.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:00:48
Yeah, my father just took off. Was sort of broken by two campaigns for local office.
Anderson Cooper
00:00:54
'He ran for two offices back-to-back, lost, spent the money he had.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:00:58
Yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:00:59
'He said he had basically a nervous breakdown later, but but the extent to which like your dad and your mom did not talk about stuff with you-
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:01:07
Never. And I didn't even know why they got divorced. I never knew that story about my dad until I discovered some audio recordings that were done that my dad did near the end of his life with other family members. And I listened to them and I'm like, this explains everything. Not only does it explain the thing they never talked about, mom and dad never talked about the reason they divorced, but also explain why my mom was so aggressively insistent that I not get into politics. And she never expressed why. She just constantly pushed me away from politics. And to understand then the origin story of their breakup and the fact that my mom had to become an adult very quickly with two young kids. She came from no wealth, no money, just hustled to make ends meet. My father was distant in every way, financially and otherwise. It explains so much of why I have doubts, anxieties, fear, resentment, anger, and it's allowed me just to let it go and now to understand more deeply and uh you know and frankly apologize for many of those emotions and those aspersions that frankly I cast against them when I was growing up.
Anderson Cooper
00:02:15
There's a couple of parallels that I found really interesting. I grew up not talking about anything. I also had dyslexia. I'm not sure what my diagnosis was. I used to go see a doctor. It was spotted early, unlike with you, and I was told about it, unlike with you. But I don't think mine was as bad as you.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:02:35
There's a kid in the back of the classroom, literally soaking hands, still, still happens a lot, sweaty under the armpits, heart pounding, shy beyond words, and felt like I was dumb, and actually knew I was dumb, because I just wasn't smarter than anyone else. Spelling bees, the whole thing.
Anderson Cooper
00:02:52
There's a moment when your mom is trying to help you read and struggling with it, can't really do it. She closes the book and she says to you, it's okay to be average, Gavin.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:03:04
The worst words I've, I mean, I'll tell you, if I look at my life, that may have been the most piercing thing. I resented her for years and years.
Anderson Cooper
00:03:13
For that line?
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:03:14
'Yeah. You don't want to say that to your kid. And I struggle with that. And I kid you not, only through the process of writing this book did I forgive her. Because now as a parent myself with four young kids struggling and just... Like, I get the exhaustion, and it's what she was saying, and I really believe she was, saying, is just, just be yourself. You don't have to be someone else. It's okay, let it go. And I didn't, and it was a chip on my shoulder. It's, you know, and I don't think it's there like it was before. And, you, know, look, I don't want to overstep, I don't want to paint an overly negative picture. But-.
Anderson Cooper
00:03:53
'She had secrets, she had-
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:03:55
She had all these struggles. I never, she never revealed them. I lacked the curiosity to really push her on it, I didn't want to engage. When she was a kid, her father, my grandfather, was drunk, which was a daily occurrence, and had a gun and put the two girls, my mom and her twin, up against the mantle of the fireplace and said he was going to kill them, put a gun right to their head. Until my grandmother, Jean, came in and calmly put him down and then he passed out. She never told me that, I learned about that. I didn't know about my grandfather's suicide. I didn't t know what shaped his drinking. I didn't know what shaped his suicide.
Anderson Cooper
00:04:36
He had been a prisoner of war, of the Japanese, during World War II. He ended up shooting himself in his bed.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:04:42
Yeah, and how that must've shaped my mom. And we never talked about that. The first few years of her life, she was so traumatized in that house. It was a house of horrors, they described it, and later learned, and she didn't even talk for years. Quite literally didn't talk.
Anderson Cooper
00:04:57
And your mom and her identical twin had their own kind of language.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:05:00
Language. And it was sort of this gibberish she would speak to Annie and Annie would be the one to sort of translate her to the real world. See all those things, I wish I knew, because then I would have known my mom, and then I would've known myself better. She like, her father, like a lot of members of the family, I mean she, the sadness for her was she would get home and open that jug of Safeway white wine.
Anderson Cooper
00:05:25
So she drank too?
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:05:25
Yeah, and it was, she wasn't, she drank, but in a different way, it was just was almost medicinal. It was just to zone out and she'd wake up at 4:30, 5 in the morning, seven days a week was at work. I mean, when people talk about three jobs, three jobs are quite literally the jobs on the weekend, not just the two jobs.
Anderson Cooper
00:05:43
She used to work as a waitress one day at a...
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:05:47
'Ramona's restaurant, part-time bookkeeper. She worked for aid to adoption of special kids, the DeBolt family, intellectual and physical disabilities.
Anderson Cooper
00:05:55
You wrote in the book, you said, I was trying to solve the riddle of my identity, the question put there by my learning disability and the vastly different worlds that she and my father had presented to me. As I grew up trying to grasp which of these worlds if either suited me best, she had worried about the persona I was constructing to cover up what she considered a crack at my core. If my remaking was skim plaster, she feared it would crumble, it would not hold me into adulthood. What was the crack at your core?
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:06:21
Well, I just, this young man in a hurry, I was just seeking something, validation, external affirmation. I was hustling, and I didn't take time to pause, I didn't take time to engage, reflect. And my mother, advanced breast cancer, had gone into remission the first time, and it came back, and frankly I took it for granted, because I was like, oh, she'll be okay.
Anderson Cooper
00:06:44
You wrote in the book, you said, my way of dealing with her illness was to spend even more hours at work.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:06:49
That's what I was doing.
Anderson Cooper
00:06:50
You ran from it.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:06:51
Yeah, of course I ran from it. I was just totally, fully absorbed by myself. I'm running a few businesses. I'd opened a wine store out of college, a restaurant, was involved in some other businesses. I was on the county board of supervisors. And I'm so blessed to have an amazing rock star sister. And she absorbed the emotional side of all of it. And so I felt like, okay that's being taken care of. My sister's got this. And so, I'm just going to try to take care of what I can take care of. Just go. Just grind. I was very distant from her. And she leaves me a voicemail and she says, hello, it's your mom. Next week, if you're interested, I will be my last day of life and if you want, you should stop by. And I remember calling my sister right away and said, what the hell is going on? She's like, what's the hell's wrong with you? Why haven't you been paying attention? Mom's suffering and she's doing this assisted suicide.
Anderson Cooper
00:07:38
Your mom literally left you a voicemail saying Thursday will be my last day on Earth.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:07:43
'I have it on a small little, you know, back to Walgreens little tape recorder with the old tapes and I kept it and I don't know why I kept it. I mean it was such a sad and pathetic thing that she felt she needed to do that, to leave me a voicemail because otherwise I wasn't going to return her call or wasn't around. And sort of the finality of it. And again, you talk about psychology and pattern interrupts, that was her just scratching the record player. Get out of your routine, man. Pay attention to me. Wake up. Grow up. So it was, that was kind of the plaster. I put a mask on and my face was growing into it. I was becoming someone that I'm not, someone I didn't necessarily like, someone that was unworthy of being her son. And I started to spend a little more time with her and I didn't realize the pain she was in. Just the physical, excruciating pain she was in and, you know, try to boil a hard-boiled egg, she couldn't eat, and it was just the canker sores in her throat and the cancer treatments, and the body had significantly deteriorated. And so it made me deeply understand, and boy, I'll tell you, deeply revere the doctor who was willing to do this, it was illegal at the time. That last few hours, friends and family came over in her apartment, everyone, I came a little late, they had all said their goodbyes, she's in her bedroom preparing for the assisted suicide. And the last two she wanted to be with were my sister and I.
Anderson Cooper
00:09:11
When you came in, she had a photo of you and your sister on her chest, and she said, my works of art.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:09:16
Works of art, yeah. And so you're there, it's emotional. You don't know what you're, I've never experienced anything like this. And the two of us were in there looking through old photographs, sort of 1970s old pictures. And she was describing the moment and talking about her relationship to that moment. And she had, I remember there's a bottle of pills. And my only job was the doctor said, would you have her take these 20 minutes before whatever time the doctor was coming? And so that was my job. And I just remember, and I remember saying, Mom, you need to take these two pills, which was gonna prepare for the actual cocktail. And in the process of those 20 or 30 minutes we were talking, you could tell she was just sort of getting looser and more relaxed. And my sister was getting more anxious, more, and she's holding, we're holding both her hands on both sides of the bed as she's looking through. And the two of us trying to show her pictures and the stories. Doctor comes in and my sister just, you know, then it's real. And he does what he does and she's crying. I'm crying.
Anderson Cooper
00:10:20
So the doctor administered whatever the cocktail was?
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:10:22
'The cocktail. And he beautifully, what a, like an angel. I mean, he... an angel. He passed away years ago. I never got a chance to thank him as well. Risked everything. Talk about, you know, put his license on the line. Just so calmly. And you know, said goodbye and when he left, my sister really started to break down and she looked at me and I said, you can go. I remember it was, you can go. And she said, thank you, and just left. And I was there, and for those last minutes, and those breaths, there was nothing- this is not- nothing romantic about this. I mean, it was like violent, the breaths, and you're like, Jesus, what am I doing here? And holding her hand, and then, and then this stillness but stiffness. And I just put my head on her stomach that had distended, and just bawled. Saying to her muttering to her for 20 minutes the things I couldn't, I didn't have the guts to say 20 minutes before, feeling like, you know, it was like the talk about the mask like grow up man, it's just that moment and you know I had a resentment for years about that too.
Anderson Cooper
00:11:45
Resentment that she asked you to be there.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:11:47
'Yeah, just again through the lens of this sort of shitty son that was- it was about me, but it wasn't about me. But I was like, who does this? Who would invite someone in to see this, the experience? Like I saw the trauma of my sister. I'm like, she's not, we've struggled with this. Like, should we have done this together? But I kid you not, once again, this- I mean, this is why everyone should journal and write. I didn't know, I have never done anything like this. In the process of writing this I also- back to, it's okay to be average, I was like, wait a second, I was holding her hand, she's still, I'm still holding her hand. That breath, that's my breath, it's the last breath. And I'm like, oh God, what a gift. What a gift, like, how blessed am I, thank you. But she's not around for me to say it. And so, you know, what I have to do is you have to be a better husband and father to my own kids and make up for all of that. But that was hard.
Anderson Cooper
00:12:48
'You view it as a gift now that-
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:12:50
Yeah, I do, I didn't, I really feel the breath. I feel there's this thing, it's just this notion of this letting go. It's powerful. I didn't, I've never had the feeling of understanding that, of a breath. I feel for 57 years, like just all wound up and just accepting, just accepting things I can't control, just accepting them. Things I can, taking account and responsibility to be better and more.
Anderson Cooper
00:13:18
More of my conversation with California Governor Gavin Newsom in just a moment. Welcome back to my conversation with Governor Gavin Newsom. Do you feel grief?
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:13:30
I feel...
Anderson Cooper
00:13:34
Because not everyone does, or it has different meanings for different people.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:13:36
Yeah, it's really such a basic question, isn't it? It's interesting, just as you pose it. I feel loss. I feel regret. I feel inadequate, just inadequate. I feel grace, humility. I feel, I guess, human.
Anderson Cooper
00:13:57
Do you miss her?
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:13:58
'Oh, God. I mean, Anderson, in the book, I talk about the one speech that I have to read and periodically will do a teleprompter thing was with my inaugural speech when I got elected governor. And my little two-year-old or three, whatever he was at the time, Dutch with his pacifier right out of central casting kid. All of us had those moments with our kids and ran up on stage as I'm speaking. And I'm terrified to look off the telepromter because there's no way I'll get back on the script. And everyone's staring at the kid running on the stage. My wife tried to grab him, and he's running away, and he eventually just lands on my leg, and I'm in the middle of the speech, and I'm just staring there. And I just instinctually lifted him up, and he puts his, just puts his head right in my, just like, and he starts falling asleep, and I'm reading the speech. And I'm like, and I swear to you, like, oh, where's my mom to see this? Because that is someone she would have been proud of. That moment, that's what she wanted me...I'm sorry, man. Jesus.
Anderson Cooper
00:15:12
Let's take a look at that moment, actually.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:15:13
Oh gosh.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:15:14
Now more than ever, we Californians know how much a house matters and children. Because so many of our neighbors have lost theirs. We will support parents. They need support, trust me. So that they can give their kids the love and care that they need.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:15:54
My biggest fear and my wife's biggest fear was, now what kind of dad are you gonna be? You gonna be your father? Or are you going to be, she didn't know.
Anderson Cooper
00:16:03
And that was actually a question of mine. How do you break that cycle?
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:16:06
'Yeah, I think it just happens. It's like you're struck by lightning. And I didn't, you know, I was I remember just the birth of my oldest who just turned 16, which is incredible. And it felt like lightning when she was swaddled, and I was like, oh, oh thank God. Like, I'll tell you the coolest thing for me. Like, actually. And if you have a 14-year-old boy, you can appreciate this. Like, he leaves, and I'm gonna embarrass him now, but when he leaves he's always like, "Love you. Love you." Fourteen. And I'm like, man, that's called at winning. Like, I'm, like, that, and that's the same boy that texted me saying, Dad, did I hear you might run for president? And he goes, you can't do that. We're still too young, and we need you around. Life.
Anderson Cooper
00:16:58
'I now, I got my, I have a four-year-old and almost six-year-old, and I'm trying to do all the things which don't come naturally, which is to talk about myself to them and show, you know, my own sadness or my own joy or whatever it is.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:17:14
I try to say I love you every time I talk to them, and sometimes I fall short. And it's the greatest thing in the world because my dad could never do that.
Anderson Cooper
00:17:24
Your dad, even on his deathbed, a home attendant said to him, "Tell your son you love him," and he didn't.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:17:33
It was right after I got elected. It was the night of my election after the, after you may have announced, literally Anderson, you may have announced the results of the California governor's race. I'm sitting there with my father. He's in his wheelchair. It's a miracle he lived that, to see it.
Anderson Cooper
00:17:47
He was keeping himself alive to see you elected and was hugely proud
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:17:51
It was everything, and that's and...
Anderson Cooper
00:17:54
It was everything he wanted to be.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:17:56
Everything he wanted to be, and this was, like, I mean come on, California governor. Mayor was extraordinary to him but governor, this is ridiculous, and, and then she says, "You must be so proud, Bill," and everyone's egging him on, and he does this Gleeson thing, oh, you know, the old Irish thing. He's just joy to be, you know, some, you know, thing, a little or quotes Yeats or something. When in doubt, always quoted Yeats. And he couldn't say it, but I never doubted he did. Never doubted that he did, because he told all his friends, and they always told me. They said, I was with your father last night, he's so proud of you, watch this. I'm like, come on, man, tell me. So, I never felt that distance in that respect, but I also never felt that direct connection.
Anderson Cooper
00:18:37
I listened to a podcast you did with David Axelrod a long time ago.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:18:41
Oh gosh, yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:18:41
You were saying that your dad, as you grew more athletic, your dad gravitated more towards you than he had previously.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:18:49
No, now I'm interesting.
Anderson Cooper
00:18:50
Right. Yeah.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:18:51
I'm sorry to say it like that. I was all of a sudden interesting. Yeah, but all of the sudden, I was the captain of my basketball team, and, all of sudden, we're in the playoffs. All of a sudden, I'm leading scorer on the team, and, all of a sudden, I'm hitting 400 baseball and getting some college recruits, and all of a sudden now he's showing up with his friends because their friends are like, "Hey, Bill, congrats," but it was wonderful.
Anderson Cooper
00:19:16
He was bringing friends to see you play.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:19:18
Yeah, and I'd look up there. I'm like, oh my god, Dad's there. And you're performing for him, man. You're diving now. You're not just going to the ball. You're driving for the ball, and you're dying at the end of the day for the thing that you really were longing for, and that is, "Can I take you to dinner?" and you go have dinner with Dad.
Anderson Cooper
00:19:36
He would have dinner with you, but he would bring, it was his friends because...
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:19:39
'Never one-on-one. I don't think I've ever had one-on-one dinner with my dad.
Anderson Cooper
00:19:42
He couldn't be alone with you.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:19:44
Yeah.
Anderson Cooper
00:19:44
He never really opened up to you. He, he was charming and could tell a great story, but if you were looking for truths of who he was or his past, or you weren't going to get them.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:19:55
You weren't going to get it. And he came from a very strict household, old Irish Catholic family and very religious. And so certain things were just not discussed at all. And he certainly passed that down. But, boy, was he a great storyteller. What a wonderful friend. And what an extraordinary father he became. And he's my sense of idealism. He's the spirit, he's the pride I have in public service. And you combine that with my mom's grit and hard work and dedication. This blend, but yeah, he became such an extraordinary example to me, but again, he didn't raise us.
Anderson Cooper
00:20:36
Did you have anybody who you confided in when you were a kid? You couldn't really talk to your dad, couldn't talk to your mom.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:20:41
No, I mean I...
Anderson Cooper
00:20:43
I developed a very strong internal conversation in my head and a very, a voice in my head which may be a psychopath, I'm not sure, but is, is, is an unreliable narrator at best. But yeah, I didn't really have anybody I ever talked to.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:21:04
No, I was, I did the same thing on the basketball court in the backyard for hours and hours and hours and hour and hours. Playing baseball, just throwing the ball against the hard wall, and then throwing the ball in the air, and it's the bottom of the ninth, and I'm in center field. Just those narratives that would shape. And then candidly try and be like Remington Steele and Pierce Brosnan, and literally furrowed brow, which I wish I would get rid of now that I think I started creating when I was in high school and literally just looking around and trying to see who I could become, who can I absorb.
Anderson Cooper
00:21:40
Pierce Brosnan, that was, Remington Steele was the model. See for me was T.E. Lawrence or Colonel Kurtz.Yours is better.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:21:49
Sorry, much better, much much better. Mine's been more enduring as well.
Anderson Cooper
00:21:52
Yeah, mine were like psychopaths.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:21:53
Psychopaths. But I think, and you may have discovered this with your learning differences. You tend to overcompensate in other ways, and one of the overcompensations is the gift. It's the superpower, and that is the ability to absorb and read the room. You recognize that pain in other people, and you're more sensitive to that, and you can absorb that. And I just, look, I think that's, at the end of the day, it's a hell of a lot healthier than those that have no shame, no empathy, or those that assert that empathy is somehow destroying Western civilization, as one infamous individual has done. It's not about aggression, it's about empathy, caring, and collaboration, and that's what strength looks like. And, you know, I found that strength in my parents, and I did, for all their imperfections, for my imperfections. Those are the gifts they gave me.
Anderson Cooper
00:22:44
Gavin Newsom, thank you so much.
Governor Gavin Newsom
00:22:46
It's great to be with you.
Anderson Cooper
00:22:48
Gavin Newsom's book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, is out now. This week, we're bringing you an extra podcast episode. This Thursday, you can hear my conversation with Robert Irwin. His dad, Steve Irwin, who was a conservationist and TV star, best known as the Crocodile Hunter, was killed when Robert was just two years old. Steve was shooting a documentary underwater when he was killed by a stingray. Robert Irwin has followed in his dad's footsteps as a conservationist. You may also know him from Dancing with the Stars.
Robert Irwin
00:23:19
I'm a very sentimental person, and my dad was like, he's kind of like Indiana Jones, right? When you walked into his office, it was like a museum. I mean, he has got like, Maasai spears on the wall, and he's got like swords from like, like he, like...
Anderson Cooper
00:23:38
It's exactly what you would imagine his office to be like.
Robert Irwin
00:23:40
Literally his office was like Indiana Jones. And I remember I would often, you know, just walk in, and everything was left pristine, exactly the same, right? Nothing was touched. And sometimes I would just walk in, and I felt like I was in, like, I don't know, like sacred ground. Don't touch anything, don't breathe on anything. And I would kind of just look, just on my own to just sort of get, I don't know, feel him again. And then one day I went, you know what? I don't think he's gonna mind. So, I started taking stuff. I went in, and there's all of his shirts on a rack that he used to wear, all his khaki shirts. I looked at that, and I went, I wonder if that fits me. So, I popped it in the wash; I put it on, I'm like, yep, that fits. And I'm, like, great, I'm gonna start wearing his shirts. He had a watch on the table that was sitting there, always told the same time. And I went, I'm going to get that thing working again and got it working and started wearing it. And now it's like this really powerful thing. It's like almost like it was, that was like this stepping off point to be like, he's this almost like untouchable part of my life that is like held stale in time. But then I kind of went, no, no, I can embrace that. I can bring that into my world. So that was kind of really, that was really powerful.
Anderson Cooper
00:24:56
I love that. That's really awesome. Yeah, I understand that.
Robert Irwin
00:24:58
Do you know what I mean? I found his...
Anderson Cooper
00:24:59
Yeah, and it also gives new life to these things which become, you know, draped in memory and maybe sadness and are frozen in time, as you say, and it brings them alive again.
Robert Irwin
00:25:14
Brings them alive again.
Anderson Cooper
00:25:15
And it brings him alive, in a way.
Anderson Cooper
00:25:16
It's a great conversation, and it'll be available Thursday, March 5th at 9 p.m. Eastern. You can watch it on CNN.com/AllThereIs, YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Then next week on Thursday, March 12th, join me at 9:15 p.m. Eastern for my live streaming show, All There Is Live. If you haven't seen it, you can catch an old episode on CNN.com/AllThereIs right now. And if you missed the live stream, it'll be posted the following day on that website for a week. Thanks so much for listening. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone.