Stephen Colbert recently sat down for an interview with GQ magazine, where he opened up about losing his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash. The magazine quotes him as follows:
"You've got to learn to love the bomb. Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10."
Colbert, the youngest of 11 children, lost his father and two of his brothers Peter, 18, and Paul, 15, to a plane crash in 1974 when he was 10. Peter and Paul were the two siblings closest in age to Colbert; after their deaths he was alone with his mother who relocated them to downtown Charleston, South Carolina.
I'm not angry. I'm not. I'm mystified, I'll tell you that. But I'm not angry. I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.
On how his mother dealt with grief:
"By her example I am not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no. … It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering. Which does not mean to be defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness. What punishments of God are not gifts?' So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head."
On the acceptance that arrived when he was 35:
"It stopped me dead. I went, 'Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.' I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true. It's not the same thing as wanting it to have happened. But you can't change everything about the world. You certainly can't change things that have already happened."
Read the full interview at GQ.
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