Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper Read Free Book Online

New York Post in the apartment. HEIR’S TRAGIC LAST HOURS was the headline on the front page. They kept referring to my mother as the “Poor Little Rich Girl,” a tag that tabloids had given her as a child at the height of her mother and aunt’s custody battle. I threw the paper out. I didn’t want my mother to see that she was once again in the headlines.
    When we arrived at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel for Carter’s wake, about a half-dozen photographers snapped pictures as I helped my mom out of the car. I hated them: circling like vultures over our barely breathing bodies.
    I’d forgotten that moment, that feeling, until this past year, when I found myself reporting outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice watching a jostling crowd of cameramen follow her father’s and mother’s every move. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, and her feeding tube had been removed. Her parents were fighting to have it put back in.
    “Khraw, khraw,” a producer standing next to me screeched, mimicking the sound of circling buzzards.
    “I’ve become what I once hated,” I thought to myself—sadly, not for the first time.
    Carter’s casket was in the largest room the funeral home had, but the line of mourners stretched down the block. My mom stood receiving people, one by one looking into their eyes for answers.
    There had been no invitations issued, so it wasn’t possible to control who got on the line. I ended up screening those gathered, pulling some close friends off the queue and telling them just to come in. Occasionally I’d approach a stranger, trying to find out who he or she was. Several were merely curious passersby. One man was holding a copy of the New York Post and wanted my mom to autograph it. I thanked him for coming and asked someone to show him out.
    My brother was wearing a gray Paul Stuart suit. I’d gone to his apartment the day before the wake to pick it out. When I’d seen the suit in his closet, I’d wanted it for myself, then felt guilty for being selfish, so I decided that that was the suit he should be buried in. In the taxi on my way home, I sat with it on my lap. The radio was on, and an interviewer was saying to a caller, “Hey, I mean look at that Vanderbilt kid. I mean the interest on his trust fund was probably more than I’ll make in my lifetime, and that didn’t stop him from jumping off a building. I mean, am I right or what?”
    The morticians had parted my brother’s hair on the wrong side. “Oh, no, that’s not him,” I almost said. “There’s been some kind of mistake.”
    I noticed a silver screw with a bolt sticking out of the back of his head. I hoped my mom couldn’t see it. If she did, she showed no sign. Before we left, we stood together by the casket. My mother looked at my brother’s face, and closed her eyes for a moment. Then, just as she had with my father, she asked for a pair of scissors, and cut off a lock of Carter’s hair.
    MY FINAL YEAR of college was a blur. I spent most of my time trying to understand what had happened, worried that whatever dark impulse had driven my brother to his death might still be lurking somewhere out there, waiting for me.
    Many times that year, I wished I had a mark, a scar, a missing limb, something children could have pointed at, at which adults could tell them not to stare. At least then they would have seen, would have known. I wouldn’t have been expected to smile and mingle, meet and greet. Everyone could have seen that, like a broken locket, I had only half a heart.
    Senior year became a series of holidays and celebrations to avoid. My mother and I ordered Chinese takeout on Thanksgiving, watched movies on Christmas. We stopped giving gifts, ignored each other’s birthdays. Each event was a reminder of what we’d lost. On weekends I’d take the train back to New York. We’d eat dinner at home, mostly stay indoors. For the first few months, I slept in the guest room downstairs, unable to set foot in my