The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss

by Anderson Cooper

How can my body betray me when there is so much still to be done?

it isn’t age itself that betrays you; it is your body, and with its deterioration goes your power.

When I was a child, adults really didn’t communicate very much with children.

The first Vanderbilt to arrive in America was named Jan Aertson. He came to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in 1650 as an indentured servant hoping to escape a life of poverty in Europe. He settled on Staten Island, and that is where his descendants remained for nearly a century, until Jan Aertson’s great-great-great-grandson Cornelius Vanderbilt changed the family’s fortunes forever.

When he died in 1877, he had amassed one of the greatest fortunes of his time,

My mother’s father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was Cornelius’s great-great-grandson.

My grandmother Gloria Morgan was Reginald’s second wife, having married him two years before his death.

She was eighteen when she gave birth to my mom, and was completely unprepared to be a widow or a parent.

Like many children born into wealthy families at that time, my mother was taken care of by a governess. Her name was Emma Keislich, but my mother called her “Dodo.” She was the most important person in my mother’s young life.

a fatherless girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.”

That is the full quote from Mary Gordon’s novel The Company of Women, and when I came across it, I knew it to be the foundation of my life.