Andrew Gross Quotes

I did not realize how broken I was until I saw how broken Mama was.

I don't think I've ever put it in words before. But daddy took a gun and ended his life and took momma's with him.

But for me, a physician, chief medical correspondent for a major network, and women's health expert, the thought of exposing myself to millions of people as someone who'd been completely blindsided by the suicide of my children's father, and by the impact of that suicide on Alex and Chloe and me, was nothing short of terrifying.

While this has been a private part of my family's life, it is now clear a media story will soon emerge. My father tragically ended his life while battling terminal cancer in 1979.

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

I don't deal with death very well. My brother, John Candy, my dad, my mom, Brandon Tartikoff just a couple of weeks ago. I mean, you lose a lot of people in your life, and that's one thing I am constantly working on - pain management.

Cancer is a very sad thing, but you can always take something from every experience.

Last time I spoke to my mom she called me from a pay phone, and we didn't have the best talk. Ever since my stepdad passed away three years ago, she has been very depressed and hasn't been herself at all.

There's many, many people who have been through a lot worse things than I went through. I lost my dad when I was 14 and to violence.

When suicide hit my family, we learned first-hand that no one is immune from what is now the 10th leading cause of death in the US.

My dad was a serious alcoholic, and ultimately, that's why he died. When you're a child of someone who struggled with things like that, you look for the common thread. Is there a pattern? Is there an inheritance of pathology in some way? That haunts me.

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

This morning a terrible family tragedy has occurred, we are devastated to report that our beloved brother, son, and friend, Sawyer Sweeten, took his own life. He was weeks away from his 20th birthday. At this sensitive time, our family requests privacy and we beg of you to reach out to the ones you love.

When my wife passed, I stopped doing interviews and I stopped doing meet-and-greets, mostly because I sort of became this suicide ambassador. Everybody wanted to tell me their story.

Suicide doesn't solve your problems. It only makes them infinitely, un-countably worse.

I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

I think illness is a family journey, no matter what the outcome. Everybody has to be allowed to process it and mourn and deal with it in their own way.

I think, in real life, when we're facing death - that is, when we come out on the other side of it, whether it's death of a friend or a family member - you come out on the other side of the mourning cherishing your life that much more.

I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.

When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.

My wife Cecily Adams was dying of cancer, my daughter Madeline was struggling to overcome an autism diagnosis, and my father was dying, all at the same time. Writing the journal was a cathartic experience, and an extremely positive one.

It takes an extraordinary toll on me to re-live my experiences, the horrors of my past and the pain I had to endure. And yet, I believe remembering is the only way to promote healing, to promote awareness and accountability.

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.