'On July 22, 1988, my brother showed up at my mother's apartment early in the morning, unexpectedly. It was a Friday, and once again he said that he wanted to move back in. He seemed out of sorts, nervous, and said he hadn't slept the night before. Throughout the day, he took several naps in my old bedroom, on the second floor of the duplex. When she checked on him, my mother noticed he'd opened the sliding glass door to the balcony. It was a summer day, and the heat was overwhelming.

"Don't you want me to turn on the air conditioner?" she asked him.

"No," he said. "It's fine the way it is."

They ate lunch together, and talked. My mother was concerned, but not overly so. She knew that something was wrong, but Carter wouldn't say what. After lunch she let him sleep for a time, then checked on him to see if there was anything he wanted. At some point, as he lay on the sofa in the library, she read him a story by Michael Cunningham called White Angel, which had just been published in The New Yorker. In the story, a young boy unexpectedly dies after he runs through a plate-glass sliding door in his parents' living room while they are having a party. A shard of glass severs an artery in his neck. The violence of the story surprised my mother, but it didn't seem to upset Carter.

"That was a good story," he said.

He took another nap.

At about 7.00 P.M., he came into my mom's room. He appeared dazed, disoriented.

"What's going on? What's going on?" he asked.

"Nothing's going on," my mother said soothingly.

"No, no," he said, shaking his head. He ran from her room, "as if he knew where he was going, knew the destination," she would later tell me. My mother followed him as he ran up the curving staircase, into my room, through the sliding glass door, and onto the balcony.

By the time she got there, he was perched on the low stone wall that surrounded the terrace outside my room. His right foot was on top of the wall, his left foot was touching the terrace floor.

"What are you doing?" she cried out, and started moving toward him.

"No, no. Don't come near me," he said.

"Don't do this to me, don't do this to Anderson, don't do this to Daddy," my mother pleaded.

"Will I ever feel again?" he asked.

My mother is not sure how long they were out there on the terrace. It all happened very fast. He looked down at the ground, fourteen stories below. A helicopter passed overhead, a glint of silver in the late-summer sky. Then he moved.

"He was like a gymnast," my mother remembers. "He went over the ledge and hung on the edge like it was a practice bar in a gym."

"I shouted, 'Carter, come back!' " she told me later, "just for a moment I thought he was going to. But he didn't. He just let go." '

-Anderson Cooper recounting the story of his brother Carter's suicide, in his book Dispatches from the Edge


I don't know how many people reading this have felt like Carter has. If you're like him you may not read this at all. Ever. Because you can't.

I know what that feels like, to feel worthless, helpless, vulnerable, heartless. "Will I ever feel again?" I've asked myself that, too. It's felt useless sometimes - I know so well that I have so much: I live in Canada, I have a full family, I have so many friends, I have goals in life, I have dreams, and I have the ability to achieve those dreams. Yet sometimes it all feels useless - like I can't get there even though all that is there.

Carter Cooper's situation is obviously radically different from my own: he'd lost his father (which I hope I won't for a very, very long time), his mother was Gloria Vanderbilt, he lived in New York - you'd think he'd be the last person to kill himself.

And yet ...

And yet he did, and never explained why.

Anderson elaborates as to his thoughts on that a bit in his book, which I've quoted from above (Dispatches from the Edge, © 2006 Anderson Cooper) - he thinks that their father's death (Wyatt Cooper; of heart failure) affected Carter as much as it did himself, but as he was drowning his pain in weltschmerz (reporting on the most grisly of wars and disasters), he never saw (nor let himself feel) the emotions on the scale of what was happening to Carter.

I think Carter and I might have gotten along well (even though he would be older than my father at this point), somehow. I'm not sure why.

That feeling ... the feeling of being absolutely lost, of having nothing left - because what is the world in your pocket when your heart is shattered? - of being absolutely alone, of having no one there to hold you and love you ... it's one of the most frightening feelings in the world. It eats away at your heart until it starts eating away at your soul, and then you've got nothing left.

Thanks be to God, I wasn't alone when I felt that way.

And that's why I'm here.