I started this podcast four years ago going through old boxes of things my mom and dad and brother left behind when they died. They're still in my basement. It's been a while since I've tried to sort through them, but like many of you the pain of the past is never far away.

When I was six years old, I lost my mother.

Many of you have left voicemails from long ago losses that still echo in your lives today.

My baby brother died at birth. The griefs affected me the whole life.

My four and a half year old brother Scott died.

I've been living with grief for over 40 years.

My dad died about 24 years ago. And I've never really dealt with it.

My brother's death keeps surfacing in my thoughts.

But underneath there's pain that never really goes away.

'As Ken Burns said on an earlier podcast, "the half-life of grief is endless". Mariska Hargitay knows that very well.

Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay have just left this American Airlines plane. A huge crowd has gathered.

Mariska's mom, actress Jayne Mansfield, died when she was three. She was raised by her father, Hungarian actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.

'Today, she was signed to a long-term movie contract by 20th Century Fox. At the moment, she is also the most photographed woman in show business.

Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car crash in 1967. Mariska was in the car with her. In her 20s, she discovered Mickey Hargitay was not her biological father, and Italian singer Nelson Sardelli was. After decades spent coming to terms with her past and wanting to learn more about the mother she doesn't remember, Mariska has made a remarkable documentary called "My Mom Jayne".

I think that's where I start now, is looking that here is our mother, this little girl whose father died when she was three years old, and she was in the car with him. We start there with Jayne. We start there with loss. And I go, I know that one.

Did you feel that early on, this sense of loss and longing?

Think my whole life. As a child I did always feel separate and of course I didn't know about why I felt so separate but I just knew that I was like on this island by myself. My whole life I feel like I've had a hole in my heart just something has always been wrong, something has always been missing, something could never be filled and there was always us this incredible sadness. When I look back at the photos of me, there was a lot of frozen smiles and I remember I had a big personality and I was very happy. But when I got sad, I don't think my parents knew how to deal with it. So, they would tell me to snap out of it and that I was like a black cloud. And that was really rough for me because I learned quickly that there wasn't room for my sadness. And now I see it as it was too much for my dad. He had so much grief and so much pain and so much that he almost couldn't handle anymore. And so I learned very young to be the joy bringer, to be fun girl, to be just every room I walked into, light it up and make it better. And there came a big cost.

It's exhausting.

It's not only exhausting, but you betray yourself and you sacrifice yourself, and you become a people pleaser and you do everything for other people to keep them happy. And there's a lot of good things to it too, but it's been a very beautiful journey of integration and unencumbering. My nervous system is utterly and completely different. And I just have so much more internal space for everything. For my family, for my children, for my creativity, for my acting, for my directing, and I just have a piece that I never had before. Making this film was one of the most liberating things that I've ever done because people said, oh, it's so personal. I can't believe how vulnerable you are. But our vulnerability is our greatest strength and our greatest connector. And so in telling the story, I don't feel vulnerable. I feel free and I feel like there's an invisible string with everyone because we all have a story and you never know what somebody else carries. I was trying to reach out, you know, across that divide and say, who are you? Who was the woman behind the pose? Why did she make these decisions? Who is the woman that made these choices and why? So it was very interesting journey, this film, but also to couple that with the mourning, the longing, the yearning, but also the kind of embarrassment and shame and then wishing that my mom was something else and the complication with her voice. That was a really big thing to me.

The voice which she put on, it's not who she was.

Yes. It wasn't who she was, but also I was trying to connect to something real. So when I heard that voice, it was just like a *SLAP* it was just, like, you're not getting in, there's no getting in. And that was one of the most profound gifts in the archival film. I would see these moments that I'd never seen before and hear her in her lower register and in her true, authentic self just talking normally. And go *GASP* there you are, there you are. And it was sacred, it was holy, it was everything that I wanted.

Your mom was three years old and in a car when her father died of a heart attack, and then you were in the car three years old when your mom was killed in a car crash.

I just find that staggering and truly like remarkable. And that's why when I was 34, I was convinced that was the year that I was gonna...

That was the age your mom was when she died.

My mom died at 34, and when I was 34, I got in a motorcycle accident. A car hit me at a stop sign, and I remember I went flying through the air, and when you're in an accident like that, everything slows down, and it was so slow, and I remembered going, wow, it's really happening. I'm gonna die right now, same as my mom. I was at peace about it, and after that accident, when I landed, and I was fine, was really the sort of aha moment that my whole life changed.

In what way?

I separated from her and said, I'm not my mother. And I don't carry that karma with me. It was very freeing time and everything sort of changed and my outlook changed. And I think I got a renewed sense of clarity and seeing possibility in a new way.

Was it both surviving an accident, but also living past the age that your mom had been?

Yes.

You always thought 34 was gonna be it.

Yeah definitely. I actually I think in a way manifested the accident. I don't really have the words for it, but I just think it's no accident that I was 34 and I had this experience and that's what changed it. That's what broke it and that kind of fear base that was running me really. I had a lot of PTSD growing up and dissociation from the car accident and I didn't know what it was.

From when you were three years old.

Yeah, because I was left in the car, and there's been a few times when I've been in cars or in certain situations that I definitely got activated.

Some strangers took your siblings...

Out of the car...

Out of the car...

On the side of the road.

They were taken to the hospital, and then one of your brothers said...

Where's my baby sister?

And you are still in the vehicle.

Yeah, under the passenger seat.

Do you remember that?

I don't. Thank God. But my body does. My body definitely does. And I had a lot of that, and I didn't know what it was. And so I used to override my feelings, just override grief. And if I got activated, I would just, like, keep moving.

Ya. Well, I know that.

Yeah. And then I realized that's not sustainable. And I have this really amazing therapist. That's amazing. And we talk about a lot of things, and then any time we would go near the accident, or when my mom died, I would seriously go, look, I'm so sorry, I was so tired, I didn't sleep last night. And I would start to close my eyes and almost like a narcoleptic, fall asleep. And she said, well, that's your sleepy part coming in. And I sort of went...hmm...

You had no idea you were doing that?

'No, I, listen, I work 16 hours a day. I don't sleep well, and I am really tired. But she said, I find it interesting that it only happens when we get close to this. And it's just like a wound, right? If somebody goes near you, you pull it back, and this was my defense mechanism and my survival skill. So just like I don't remember the accident, which is my body's survival mechanism. And so as we worked on it, she started giving me tools to sort of ask those parts that would fall asleep to step aside. It's somatic work and it was life-changing and I didn't fall asleep anymore. And I've had some pretty profound experiences with that kind of work where another time my body actually fell asleep. You know when your foot falls asleep or your leg falls asleep? My whole body fell asleep. Like that. And that was insane. After, when it stops, you can actually feel like trauma leaving the body. I'm sure you've read the book, "The Body Keeps the Score", and how trauma gets stuck in the body if we don't release it. And so I've done so much of that work.

We're gonna take a quick break. Coming up, I talk with Mariska about the discovery she made, about her father, Mickey Hargitay, and about his death in 2006.

Our last words to each other, and he kept saying to me, was,  birshka...always. Always.

You had a family storage unit that you, the family hadn't been to since 1969. What was it like for you going into there?

Crazy. I was so excited and afraid not knowing what I would find and the first day it was thrilling and lonely at the same time. And then the second time when I said to my siblings, please guys, come, come. And we just had so much fun. There's all the, you know, the press books and all those, I mean, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of those things. And you know, listen, when she died, unfortunately it was a very chaotic time, and so a lot of things were taken and sold off, stolen. I remember it was years ago and somebody called me and they had my mother's charm bracelet. And so I had to buy it from them. And it was such an interesting thing because you're like, how crazy is this? I'm buying something. But in all fairness to them, they bought it. So I was like, I get it, that's fair. But, to have it back was so deeply meaningful because they were the charms. One of the charms had my name on it and my brother's names on it, my sister's name on, and all the things that she did. And this is your life and all these great things. And over the years, people have been very generous and sent me some things or offered to sell me things. And some of the things are meaningful, you know, coats and pieces of clothing, costume jewelry, earrings.

You got your mom's piano back.

Well that. That is the miracle.

From Engelbert Humperdinck.

I did. Haha. And I was trying to find it for years, really. It was obviously one of the greatest days of my life. Talk about integration, right? Talk about a dream come true and everything felt right in the world. I had become sort of obsessed with her musical talents and the fact that she played the violin and the piano so beautifully. And so being able to see this thing, this piece that showed me this whole other side of her that connected me to her so deeply and sort of fulfilled all these dreams. And through the making of this movie, I found this whole other person that I didn't know existed.

What a gift.

What a gift and also I'd spent my life separating myself, being a tomboy. I don't want to be that I don't want to sexy. I don't want be that. I'm not that. I'm serious, and I'm gonna play a cop for my whole life. And to go on this journey of seeing the similarities and again being able to integrate her because I had exercised her from my being and said yeah, that's, we're different and we don't have a lot in common and I, I'm doing other things and I'm doing it a different way and a lot of it's in reaction to the choices you made and here I am now sitting in this cozy place that I never had going I'm like you in so many ways that continue, that the world continues to show me. And even photos of her, like seeing photos of making these faces that I make or a photo where she looks, my son looks exactly like her, my eldest son. And when he was a baby, he used to go, and that was his shtick, and we didn't know where it came from. But he'd go...it was the cutest thing. And then I see all these photos of him doing that. I mean, just little weird things like that. But the fact that she was so, had this hunger and ambition and she loved kids the way I do. But my whole life, and I'm sure you had this, Anderson, was people would say, what's it like to be? And you go, I don't have anything to compare it to. This is the only thing I know. And for me, I was so young, but it was just all the ghosts and all the things. And now I go like this to all of it...

I used to think I was so different than my mom, and now I realize, oh my God, I am so much like my mom. And it's a lovely thing.

Yeah. And when you grow up feeling so alone, and then all of a sudden you realize, that you're not. And that's been also the other gift. I felt like I modeled myself after my father.

You were 25 when you learned, really for the first time, that he was not your biological father.

Yeah. He was everything to me. So strong and so clear and so loving and so committed and determined. And everything that he taught me about working hard and being excellent and how it takes that much more. Whatever you're doing, it takes that much more, to be excellent, to win. And all these different things that he said over the years that I've integrated into myself, that when I found out at 25 that he was not my biological father, that undid me almost worse, almost worse. Because that's when I felt, oh, I am really alone here. Like, really alone.

Your dad had told you not to read...

The books.

The books that were out there about your mom.

Yeah, I mean, he literally said, don't read those. They're sensationalistic bullshit. And they were. He was right. But I guess he, you know, he knew. And he was just like, they were tabloidy. It was horrible, cruel, unfair, one note. You know, just not journalism in any way. I mean if you're going to write a book about somebody, get it right. So I never did. And I'm so glad that I didn't. And even though I was raised in Hollywood, in West Hollywood. I really didn't have a very, like, Hollywood... we were just away from all of it. The day that I feel like I became an adult was the day that confronted my father when I saw the picture of Nelson. And I drove up to my father's house, which, where he was literally building me a house. How's that for a metaphor? He was actually building me house. And I just started going after him and going, why didn't you tell me? How could you not tell me. You lied to me. You lied me. And because my dad used to talk about the facts, just the facts. He was really into the facts and the way he denied it and the ways he said, what are you talking about? You look exactly like my grandfather. You're my daughter. You're MY daughter! And in this moment I went *GASP*... I have to take care of you. And he couldn't, I don't want to say handle it, that feels wrong. He couldn't like, this was the new reality. This is where we were. And I knew where it came from and the love that it came from that I went, I got it. And I said, okay, Dad, sorry. I just thought, and we never spoke of it again. Well, he did say a couple times, remember when you thought that crazy thing. But I loved my father so much, and he loved me, and he was so devoted to me that I didn't want to betray him in any way because he never admitted to me that he wasn't my biological father.

'It says a lot about you, in that moment of life-changing realization, understandably, anger, confusion, everything, that you would see that in him and realize, oh, I'm an adult now and I see this and he needs this.

I could feel his pain. He couldn't really talk about her without crying. I think there was so much left unsaid. There was so many pain that he witnessed and the fact that he couldn't change her or help her at the end in the dark days. He loved her so much and he couldn't do anything about it. I just wanted to like love him back as devotedly and committedly and lovingly as he had. How he'd given me his life. And so, it was a beautiful moment of maturity and me going, it doesn't matter, it doesn' matter. And here's a guy from Hungary who, you know, didn't believe in therapy. And when I said I'm going to therapy, he's like, therapy's bullshit, you gotta know who you are and where you're going and where ya came from. That's what he would say. You gotta know where you came from, who you were and where you're going. And you don't get married, he goes, find out where you going and then who's coming with you. And, you know, all this great stuff. So I go, I know who I'm dealing with. He's not going to get in there and start talking about his feelings. You get up, you pick yourself up by your boot straps and you keep moving. And that's what he did. I healed myself a different way.

He died in 2006.

Yeah. He died two months after my son was born.

Wow.

But he got to meet him. And my son is named August Miklos after him. And I was in the hospital, and he was in a hospital at the same time on different floors.

Really?

Yeah, he had multiple myeloma. And so...but we were there together.

He must have been so thrilled to meet your son.

Yeah he was. And again, with my father, one of the greatest gifts that I have with grief and death. We got to say goodbye. It's such a beautiful way, that he just lives in here now.

You feel that?

Yeah. Our last words to each other, and he kept saying to me, was, birshka, always. Always. So now, you know, I just am so grateful for that. And so he used to leave like pomegranates on my front door. And we loved Bougainvillea, and I had a lot of Bouginvillea in my house. And so whenever I'm in LA and Bouganvillea, you know, a beautiful red leaf falls, I know it's him. And there were all these little signs, little things that he used do, drop cherries off of my house, and again, pomegranates. And so those things just remind me, red tail hawks and...But, um...

One of the last things my mom said to me was, "always and forever".

I would get up and hug you right now. But that's the gift when you get to say goodbye.

Yeah.

You know? It makes a big difference.

You said, "I spent 35 years trying to hide that story to honor my dad, but something that I've also realized is that sometimes keeping a secret doesn't honor anyone and it's taken me a long time to figure that out." There's so many people who have these secrets.

Yeah. There's so many people who have these secrets, and it was very painful for me to carry that secret. Growing up thinking, why didn't Nelson claim me? I don't matter. I'm not good enough. He didn't want me. Everyone lied to me. I'm an accident. I shouldn't be here.

You had all those thoughts?

'Consistently. Not great for the self-esteem, feeling that you're an accident. And then my mother left me in a mess. So much anger, so much rage, and it is very painful to be angry at a dead person. And so it was leaving me in a mess. And so when I was I think 29 or 30 I went to Colorado to take care of my grandmother, because my grandfather was having an operation, and so I went into her closet and I opened up the shoe box and I found the letter my mother wrote to my grandmother that explained everything. The letter that said, what should I do? I love Mickey and I love Nelson and I'm so excited about this Italian baby but I don't know what to do. So that was the first moment when I went, I had empathy for her. And that she was talking to me from heaven. That was the moment, the first that I went, okay, I'm not alone in this somehow, you know? Because I've always been somebody who's looking for the signs, looking for signs, and to be open for the sign. And so after that, I went to Vegas and found Nelson. And what Nelson said to me when he first told me that night, when I asked him about my father, was that when they spoke, my dad said, Nelson, you don't have to tell me who the father of this baby is. And Nelson said to Mickey, you're the father this baby, because you're that one that wakes up with her in the middle of the night. You're the one that takes care of her. You're the one that will be there when she cries. And that was so beautiful and so extraordinary because they did have an agreement. And I think it was so honorable of Nelson never to say anything, but the fact that there was this acknowledgement between the two men, so beautiful. It was truly extraordinary to me and noble in that way. And the irony is, I feel like everyone made the right decision, for me. And I have nothing but gratitude. I look at how my father loved me and I was his daughter. I was his daughter. And I felt like that. I'm the one who's most like him in my family. I mean, all the kids are like him, but I've really adopted it in a way. And then I look at Nelson, who I used to, again, just say, are you not thinking about me? Do you not know about me, do you not care? How can you not see me and see that we look exactly alike? How can not send me an anonymous birthday card? I just wanted some acknowledgement, but there was never any. And then I remember my stepmother was so beautiful because the day that I said, mom, did you know? Did you know, and she said, very elegantly I might add, all I know is that your father feels that you're his daughter. And I thought that was so gorgeous, because that was true. And so now, again, of course, all my life I've had to make peace with my story, but I look at it now, I look you, I look at people like us that are driven by empathy and compassion and connection, and our pasts are what made us the way we are now. So I do look at like a gift. We all have secrets, we all have skeletons in our closet, But if we look at them with disciplined curiosity, many times we can get to the other side.

Disciplined curiosity. I haven't heard that.

But that's how I felt because there was curiosity, but it was fearful curiosity and judgmental curiosity, at the beginning. Going, how could you do that? How could you that? To all of them, I said that.

I do think, though, that moment when you can look at your parent or whomever it is with empathy because she, you know, it's so easy to look at things parents do with anger, but when you realize, like, wow, she didn't know how to be a parent. She didn't have a parent, and she's doing really the best she can.

That's exactly right. It's just this little kind of wonderful thing to be able as an adult to have maternal feelings for your parent.

Yeah, my mom, she didn't need my anger, she needed my help. And I have tremendous empathy for her and always have. And I'm glad I saw that.

That's exactly right, and that's...

It helps with, for me, it helps with the grief.

Yeah.

Like, the grief I feel over my mom's death, it's very much impacted by the empathy that I had for her for a long time. But I love that you came to know your mom.

Me too, and introduce her to the world in a new way.

Yeah. I love that I know her too.

She was pretty remarkable.

Is there something you've learned in your grief that would be helpful for others?

Yeah Yeah, there is. For me, I remember when I was young and I would read old diaries and they'd say, when will it stop? The pain is never ending. And I remember thinking it's bottomless well and I'll never get over it and I'll always be this sad. I'll always be the sad. And that's when you lose hope. And then I learned to practice tolerating it. And when we can tolerate our pain, that's when it dissipates. And so I practice that a lot of saying, I'm strong enough to go through this. And that's what changed everything for me, really, is that I would practice when I felt sad, instead of avoiding it and putting on the frozen smile, I'd be like, I am really sad. Really sad. And I would sit in it and I would cry. But when we cry, we feel better afterwards. And something happens, chemically even, in our body, where the grief leaves. And so, I've had a lot of practice of sitting in my grief and sitting in trauma and learning how to talk to myself, but mostly learning to tolerate pain. And every single time when I sit in it and lean toward it. Is when it starts to dissipate. And so now when I'm sad, I go, wow, I'm really sad right now. And I give it to myself. I don't put on a smile. And I don't pretend. I cry a lot. And I like it because it's true and it's authentic. Doesn't make me weak.

It's inconvenient.

It's inconvenient. Haha...we're just human beings. We're trying to figure out the human being was designed that way. So I think that when we do cry, a little piece of the grief goes. And you know, the only way out is through, and I think that if we can tolerate little bits at a time and lean into it and be kind to ourselves and gentle with ourselves without the judgment like we would to somebody else, what's that old thing of taking care of your inner child? How we would do someone else, give them a hug and say, I'm right here. And so when I get sad, I say that, I'm here with you, I gotcha. And I do now.

You have that compassion for yourself.

And you also, I think so much of healing comes when somebody bears witness to you and says, I'm right here with you. You don't have to say anything. You have to be with them and invest in them and say, I'm here right here with you and you are not alone because the biggest fear in our grief is that we're alone in it and we'll be alone, forever. And I think that's the biggest of being a human being is like, I will be out of community. I will be out of connection. As human beings, we need connection. And so I think that our grief and our collective grief and our trauma connects us to each other and makes it all more bearable. Because the fact is, so we all are carrying something. We all have something. But as I've talked about mine, the load gets lighter every time. The load gets ighter. But I think, again, there's so much healing that comes from having somebody bear witness to you and say whatever it is, I believe you, I love you I'm just here with you. And if we can learn to say that to ourselves then that's the jackpot.

Thank you so much.

You're so welcome. Thank you for having me.

That was really lovely.

'Mariska's documentary, "My Mom Jayne", is available to stream on HBO Max and she's making her Broadway debut now in the play "Every Brilliant Thing", which runs until July 5th. If you have thoughts you'd like to share about my conversation with Mariska or about your own experiences with grief, we'd love to hear from you. You can leave a comment on our grief community page at cnn.com/allthereis or leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. On Thursday, June 4th, I hope you join me at 9.15 p.m. For my streaming show, All There Is Live. You can watch it on cnn.com/allthereis. It streams there live for free. It'll also be free to stream on our community page for a week. On an upcoming episode of the podcast, my conversation with the actress, Amanda Peet. Last year, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and the following day, her father died. Then her mother, just a few months later.

It's weird sometimes coming to New York because they were both here for so long and when I come in and I see the skyline there's a funny kind of emptiness and weirdness that neither of them are here. It's very... and a weird childlike feeling of like being untethered, like an orphan, like where's the person who would walk through fire for me?

Amanda Peet on an upcoming episode of the podcast. Thanks for listening.