In the June/July issue of Details magazine, CNN's Anderson Cooper writes about a career of bearing witness to the endings and ends of life, starting with his fury at the reporters who shadowed his mother (Gloria Vanderbilt, not named in the article) at the funeral home after the suicide of his brother when Cooper was in college. The whole piece, which goes on to mention his experiences covering Sarajevo, Rwanda, Somalia, Princess Diana, and Schiavo, is well-written and hard to read for the stark truths in it. Cooper has a way of noting that the duality of covering death while grieving it is more complex than the actual reporting can sometimes reveal.
In the last graf of the article, he talks about taking sides within his own profession:
"Nearly 2 million people lined up to see the body of Pope John Paul II...standing in that line, listening to teenagers sing songs about the pope, watching old ladies clutch his picture to their chests, I found myself tearing up more than once. A print reporter saw me in the crowd one night and came over to show off his world-weariness. He began to make jokes about the people standing in line. I simply walked away. He didn't deserve to be there. He didn't remember why he was."
