Gary Sinise: ‘The Hole In The Heart Is Always There’

All There Is with Anderson Cooper

Gary Sinise shares the profound grief of losing his son Mac to chordoma cancer in January 2024, reflecting on their bond, Mac's final musica

Key takeaways

Grief does not heal but evolves; the emotional wounds remain, though they become more manageable over time.
Mac's final year was marked by remarkable creativity, culminating in an album titled 'Resurrection and Revival' recorded while he was bedridden.

Main topics

Grieving the loss of a child
Cancer journey with chordoma

Notable quotes

The hole in the heart is always there.

I was not going to go there. I'm in the fight with him, and we are going to beat this.

Conclusion

Gary Sinise finds solace in honoring Mac's memory through music and sh

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest today is award-winning actor and philanthropist Gary Sinise. You likely know him from CSI New York or Apollo 13 or Forrest Gump. He's also a musician, and in 2011, he established the Gary Sinise Foundation to help support and advocate for veterans. Gary's son, McKenna Anthony Sinise, who was also known as Mac, was an avid drummer and worked with Gary at the foundation. Mack was diagnosed with a rare cancer called chordoma in 2018, the same year that Gary's wife, Moira Harris, was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. After treatment, Moira went into remission and remains cancer-free, but Mack's cancer spread. In 2023, he started working on some music he'd written in college but never finished, and over the following months, those efforts became an entire album called Resurrection and Revival, featuring Mack on harmonica with members of Gary's band, the Lieutenant Dan Band. Mack died at the beginning of 2024 on January 5th, the same week his album went to press. He was just 33 years old. I spoke with Gary from his foundation headquarters in Nashville in April. Thank you so much for doing this. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Speaker 5 (1:17) It is my absolute pleasure. How has grief been for you? It's over two years now since we lost our son. It was a very, very difficult battle where he became more and more disabled. The cancer that he had was called chordoma. It's something that is very, very rare. It's a spine cancer. It will start in the base of the spine or the skull base right up here at the top of the spine. And it's a tumor that grows there. It's very possible that that tumor was there when he was born. And it grew very, very slowly. He was diagnosed when he was 27, but he was having pain in his tailbone for two or three years before Speaker 4 (2:00) that. You were actually with your wife meeting with doctors because she had stage 3 breast cancer and she'd been going through chemo treatments and radiation treatments. And you asked a doctor to take a look at your son because he was having some pain in his tailbone. Speaker 5 (2:16) I asked her spine surgeon if he would take a look at Mac. And he put him in the scanner, and he tells me Mac has a tumor. And I'm sitting there with my wife talking about her chemo, and now Mac has a tumor. Speaker 5 (2:33) And it was very, very difficult. He had the first surgery in September of 2018. And then we were told that the cancer had come back and started to spread. And grief changes as time goes on. I don't think that little phrase, time heals all wounds, is really appropriate because it doesn't really heal the wounds. What happens is you just learn to manage them a little bit better as time goes on. The hole in the heart is always there, right? The missing loved one is forever there. And Mac is, for both my wife and I, he's just with us every minute of the day. Where things were very, very fresh in the beginning, and it was just, you know, you couldn't contain your emotions. Now it's those emotions will... kind of jump up and surprise you. I was in church the other day, and all of a sudden, bang. I just was picturing him sitting right next to me, and it just overwhelmed me. And that's the type of thing that happens, isn't it? We just, we carry them with us always, and they jump out and surprise us every once in a while. Do you feel, Mac? Yes, yes, very, very present. Because for me, I have continued to press on and do all kinds of things that are related to my son. The music that I sent to you, all that music is very present because I continue to work on it. So for me, it's a little bit different because I'm kind of living with these various projects every day that are related to my son. Speaker 4 (4:14) What an incredible blessing, though, to have... all the videos that you have and all the music you have and have rediscovered. Can you talk a little bit about you were going through his phone and stumble across a whole trove of recordings, messages to you, videos I understand that he actually made for you talking to the camera late at night in the hospital that you came across. I mean that's incredible. Speaker 5 (4:45) I had no idea what I was going to discover, but after he died, you know, I just wanted to connect to him so badly that I don't even know what I was looking for necessarily. I just looked through, like, his text messages. And so I found messages from people that had been sending him messages on the day he died. Then I went into his photos. And I found videos. He was very disabled by the cancer. He was confined to a hospital bed at home. And late at night, he just started recording things. And they were messages or just thoughts that he was having. And you know, Anderson, intellectually, you know how serious everything is. And you're watching the cancer destroy. His ability to do a lot of things paralyzed him, and it was getting worse. But for me, I'm the dad who was the fighter next to him, fighting every minute to try