Bereaved But Still Me

The Trauma and Grief of Being a Reporter

August 05, 2021 John Vause Season 5 Episode 8
Bereaved But Still Me
The Trauma and Grief of Being a Reporter
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Show Notes Transcript

How does a person react to having to give bad news day after day, even hour after hour? When COVID-19 news is what is being talked about around the clock for months, how does that affect a news correspondent? What feelings are evoked when doing stories about COVID-19?

This episode features John Vause, a multi-award-winning journalist for CNN International (CNNI). 

John started out as a reporter in Australia and after a stint in Los Angeles as a correspondent, decided to stay in the United States. 

For the past twenty years, he has been a reporter and anchor with CNN. He covered 9/11 from New York, was in Kabul for the fall of the Taliban, was a unilateral reporter for the Iraq war, Jerusalem correspondent for 3 years, and a Beijing correspondent for 4 years.

In 2010 he was ready for a change and returned to Atlanta for a new role as anchor, and for more than a decade, he’s fronted CNNI’s overnight programs from the United States which are targeted at European morning viewers.

He currently co-anchors ‘CNN Newsroom’ from 12-2 AM ET on CNNI.

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John Vause:

It was a little 12 year old boy who, who died alone in hospital. And even now I don't even know who this kid is or was. I, that's all I know is that there was a 12 year old boy who died by himself. And to me that's it's heartbreaking.

HUG Info:

How does a person react to having to give bad news day after day, even hour after hour with COVID-19 news is what's being talked about around the clock for months, how does that affect the news correspondent? What feelings are evoked when doing stories about COVID-19? Welcome to "Bereaved But Still Me", formerly known as"Heart to Heart with Michael", a program for the bereaved community. Our purpose is to empower members of our community and our guest today is John Vause, a multi award winning journalist for CNN International. John started out as a reporter in Australia and after a stint in Los Angeles as a correspondent, decided to stay in the US. For the past 20 years John has been a reporter and anchor with CNN. He's covered 9/11 from New York, was in Kabul for the fall of the Taliban, was a unilateral reporter for the Iraq War, a Jerusalem correspondent for three years, and Beijing correspondent for four years. In 2010. He was ready for a change and returned to Atlanta for a new role as anchor, and for more than a decade he's fronted CNN International's overnight programs from the US which are targeted at European morning viewers. He currently co-anchors CNN Newsroom from 12 to 2 AM Eastern Time on CNN International. On this program,"The Trauma and Grief of Being a Reporter", I'll be talking with John about some of the stories he's covered over the decades as a news correspondent. He'll share his experiences with COVID-19, and we'll also discuss how news correspondents deal with post traumatic stress disorder and grief. John, thank you so much for joining us on"Bereaved But Still Me".

John Vause:

Pleasure to be here, Michael. Thank you.

Michael Liben:

Let's start with you telling us about how you became a news correspondent in the first place.

John Vause:

Yeah, it's because I was a terrible lawyer. I didn't actually quite get to be a lawyer, I was a terrible law student there could be a better way of saying it. In Australia, they have a system where you can work part time at a law firm and you do articles which basically means it's a six year thing. You study part time you are article to a master you get paid an atrociously appalling amount of money. I wasn't particularly good at it anyway. And to earn extra money I worked as a sports reporter on the weekends for the local TV station - North Queensland television at the time, doesn't exist anymore. The locals call it "not quite TV", but did the job, did the trick, got me the experience that I needed, and after...so long story, but on a Friday afternoon, I actually damaged one of the senior partners' car because I parked it incorrectly. And I went upstairs and I said Mr., Mr. Cleary, I'm terribly sorry, but I scratched your car and I quit. I packed up and headed to Canberra from Townsville, which is that that 3000 miles south, and the rest is history. Look at me now. That was like 1990, so about 30 years ago,

Michael Liben:

I don't know of any better way to quit - scratching the boss's car first.

John Vause:

It was a lot more than a scratch.

Michael Liben:

Congratulations, you win. I thought I've had a few good ones but you won.

John Vause:

It wasn't, it was my best best of last, I think, I'm good at things like that.

Michael Liben:

I'm glad you're still with CNN, one of the things that we don't really think about much is that people covering the big stories can themselves be affected personally by what they cover. What are some of the big stories you've covered, and what's had the biggest impact on you?

John Vause:

I guess the important thing here is to make the point that we are volunteers like journalists, cameraman, anchors, everybody who covers the news, we volunteer to do this, right? It's like no one forces us to go and do it. So this is on us. And so I think people often find that, you know, reporters whining about you know, the the suffering or whatever they've been through. I think a lot of people find that sometimes a little bit hard to swallow. Because a lot of people don't like the media and I can understand that. And I want to say the point that we volunteer to do this, but at the same time we are also affected in a major way often by what we see and what we do. For me you know, I've covered wars in Israe,l I've covered the ongoing terror attacks in Jerusalem and Israel during the [...], bus bombings, I've been to school shootings in the US, natural disasters, Haiti earthquake, that Sichuan earthquake, and they've all had terrible moments for me. The singular one event, which I will never forget, and it's still with me, a lot of them are but this one in particular, is Sandy Hook. And it was just inexplicable to understand how...it was just beyond comprehension to see how that could happen. These little kids, 20 kids just in grade one and two, just the the bodies were cut to pieces with wounds they sustained from the automatic weapons' fire and the teachers that were killed and to seeing those parents grieving before the holidays in this sort of Norman Rockwell style town that, you know, it was so shattered by all of this and and then what followed the sheer hopelessness to get any kind of meaningful change through Congress to make, you know, to do something about this violence at schools. It was just so devastating on so many different levels. And the people from Sandy Hook that mobilized afterwards and have continued to campaign for something that they truly believe in for real change has been, the upside of the story, it has been inspiring. But the way it began, was just heartbreaking.

Michael Liben:

This is a job that nobody forced you to do. Do you think maybe it attracts a certain kind of person? Do you think people think that being a war correspondent is some kind of glamour, and then they find out it's not really glamorous,

John Vause:

I suppose to say that if they if they think it's, it's glamorous, or exciting, or whatever, most soon learn that is not. I am a coward. I have no desire to go and be shot at. I don't like being in danger. I don't like being scared. But I remember when, at the height of the Iraq war, I had been a unilateral reporter at the very beginning, which basically meant we were not embedded. So we were roaming around the countryside with just me and our security team and my producer and cameraman. And it was, from a reporting point of view, I hate to say, it was great, but it was incredibly, it was a great experience in the sense that we reported on stories that I don't think you could ever do again. And the freedom we had to do, that was fantastic. I did that for six months. And then a couple of years later, when things got really bad. They asked me to go back and do a rotation. And I said, "Sure, I'll go but I'm getting, I will go from the airport, to the Bureau...", which was heavily fortified, "I will stay there for my rotation. And unless it's huge, I'm not leaving that Bureau for six weeks, and then I'm going back to the airport, because I just don't want to die".

Michael Liben:

And I don't think that's cowardice, by the way. I think that's just smart.

John Vause:

Well, some people may see it as being careless. I think it's smart, because I'm still here. And I know that there were reporters who were going out and covering stories at that time, reporters from France and from Italy, who ended up in orange jumpsuits and had their heads cut off. And that's what happens. You know, if you're, if you don't take this seriously, and it is scary, it is terrifying.

Michael Liben:

Does the constant coverage of stories like that take their toll on reporter's mental health? And have you been afflicted yourself with post traumatic stress disorder? And this is something that maybe is much more common amongst journalists, but we don't hear about it. Yeah.

John Vause:

Yeah, and look, for a very long time, you know, I grew up in this environment as a reporter in Australia. And I did the Port Arthur massacre. This was my first big mass shooting I ever did. At the time, it was the world's worst mass shooting. Thirty-five people were killed by a guy called Martin Bryant. He hunted two little girls down, shot and killed them. He locked their father in the trunk of a car and set it on fire. I mean, he just, it was at Port Arthur in Tasmania, I remember seeing the thirty-five bodies lined up under blue tarpaulin and the blue tarps. I covered that story for a month and I was the first one for our network down there. We'd flown by chopper across the strait, and arrived in Tasmania. And I remember going back to the newsroom, and just not feeling right, and just wanting to cry. But we had a news director at the time, and I worked for a network at the time in Australia, which was just, "Man up, son! It's part of the game, you toughen up". And it's like, well, I guess I'm not tough, because I can't toughen up and I can't stop thinking about the people who died. I can't stop thinking about the people who told me about their loved ones who were killed and their friends who died and I can't stop seeing the thirty-five bodies underneath the blue tarps, that stays with you. And then you know, I got this job at CNN, which was great, you sort of move on. And I remember being in New York for 9/11 and I was actually down at ground zero when the American Express [...] tower building was in danger of collapsing. And again, you know, things that you remember, orange buckets arriving by the truckload. And I turned to one of the guys who were the emergency crews who was next to us as they were guiding us through the site. And I said,"What are the buckets for?" and he said, "Body parts".

Michael Liben:

I knew it.

John Vause:

Yeah. And it was just like, "Oh, my God". And that's, that's the end for these people. And again, you know, you just think about each one of these buckets is a body or a person and that's a family and that's a life.

Michael Liben:

Pieces of somebody, a part of somebody.

John Vause:

Yeah, if you're lucky. And so that's you take that with you. And then you - Jerusalem was was really tough gig there for a while. I mean, I remember, I think there's like six or seven suicide bombings in one month.

Michael Liben:

Right? That was the beginning of a big wave...

John Vause:

And unless you've lived through it, you don't know what that's like, you can guess and you can try and you can be sympathetic and empathetic and all this but you don't know what that's like, unless you're living there...[indecipherable].

Michael Liben:

I was living there and I am living there. But I didn't see it up close. I had I had this tremendous, I don't know what, streak of luck that a lot of these things went off the day after I had been like right there. It's terrifying. But you saw Netanya from the inside, you were at Netanya. You want to talk about that?

John Vause:

For some reason we were the first crews there and others had taken a long time to follow. And we managed to actually get inside the ballroom where this happened because it was, it was a Seder meal for Passover, if people remember this, and it was at that seaside hotel in Netanya, and we were actually doing live shots walking through this ballroom, but what had happened is because of the force of the explosion, it set off the fire alarms so the room had flooded to an extent. And so basically, we were sloshing around a mixture of, of water, and blood, and brains, and flesh, and everything that was like that was leftover from the suicide bombing. There were bits of people's skull still embedded in the ceiling above us, it was all that's left of it. And what what had happened, and this is this is, you know, what happens in television, is that the producers in New York and DC, they saw the live shot that we had done for one of the early morning shows and the producers, and don't get this wrong way, it's just how we talk, "That's great TV!" and I'm like it's not great TV, it's horrendous, but I know you mean. "Let's do it again!", and so I had to do this thing over and over and over again, through the blood and like just every hour, almost non stop. And you kind of leave that thinking, "What, what the hell am I doing?"

Michael Liben:

Exactly

John Vause:

What that live shot did with Netanya is that it actually for the first time on live television showed the world exactly what the end result of the suicide bombings actually is. Look at this devastation. Look at this, because these, this body parts, because what happened here, these were people who were sitting down to a Seder meal meant to be a happy moment. And this, this is how they ended their lives. And that, in many ways is a great thing to show the world, the end result of what terror attacks are all about. And maybe we need to start doing something about it. Because if you don't know about it, you don't feel it, you don't know it, you won't do anything. That's kind of how I justify a lot of the stuff that I've done over the times and to give it some meaning.

Anna Jaworski:

You're listening to "Bereaved But Still Me". If you have a question or comment that you would like addressed on our program, please send an email to Michael Liben at michael@bereavedbutstillme.com. That's michael@bereavedbutstillme.com.

Disclaimer:

This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The opinions expressed in the podcast are not those of Hearts Unite the Globe, but of the hosts and guests and are intended to spark discussion about issues pertaining to congenital heart disease or bereavement.

Michael Liben:

John, you've covered some of the biggest stories of our time. But now let's talk about COVID-19, which is an equally big story with a devastating death toll. When did you first start covering that story? And what was your initial take on it?

John Vause:

I think the pandemic and COVID-19 is the biggest story of our generation, to be honest. I think the pandemic itself is the lightning strike and the social upheaval which is yet to come will be the thunder. And we have not seen that yet. Believe me everything we've been through, that's just the warm up act. This is a monumental, life changing, society changing event. We did our first story on the pandemic, on the virus itself. It was December 17, or December 18, 2019. And I remember doing a live shot with our correspondent in Hong Kong. And it was at that point was just a mystery virus, which had appeared and China claimed to have it all under control. So I remember asking the correspondent in Hong Kong,"Gee, how do we know the Chinese are telling the truth? Because usually they don't?" "Actually, well, they've been sent a lot of tests, and it's been looked at in the labs and said nothing to worry about". "Oh, really?" and I remember we went to a commercial break afterwards. And I did say to them - the control room, and our producers, just an offhand comment, "I think we should keep an eye on this story, I think it's going to be big". Naturally, no one listened to me. But the reason why I thought this was going to be a big story is I lived through SARS. I was actually in Iraq during the war, when the SARS epidemic was raging, and we were terrified about SARS, we were terrified about being gassed by Saddam which was one of a whole bunch of things. So I just remember that, you know, this was a confluence of events. And then we saw, so when I saw these mystery virus reports coming out of China, it was like, you know, "Deja vu, here we go again". And so yeah, we have really covered this story intensely since the end of 2019. And I was the person who kept banging on about like the stock market doesn't reflect the true impact of the virus. You know, we're not getting the truth out of China. We're not we're not getting the real facts here. We don't know the extent of this. The WHO is not on they need to lift their game. They haven't actually identified this as a pandemic, they need to do that, I kept saying it is airborne. I said it was airborne in January because it could not be moving this quickly if it wasn't, a whole bunch of things that have since borne out to be correct. I got a whole bunch of stuff wrong too. So but the one consistent, horrible thing about this pandemic - it just goes from country to country to country and it ,the death tolll just goes through the roof. And you know, for a while there, it was the US and it's been Brazil, and now we're in India, and the next thing will be all those countries around India - there'll be Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka... China won't be impacted. But these other smaller, less wealthy countries will be. If you think India has had a bad time with it, at least they have some kind of medical public health system in place. Countries like Nepal, and Bhutan and Sri Lanka, they have public health care, there's no chance they're gonna be able to cope with this virus.

Michael Liben:

You know, India produces more vaccines around the world than almost anybody and they don't have enough for themselves.

John Vause:

There's outrage in India right now, because the Modi government continued to export vaccines to other countries. They but again, you but then so what do they do? They stop exports to the COVAX program, which is the UN funded vaccine program for countries who can't afford to buy the, you know, the vaccines on their own, I said, a bunch of countries in Africa are going to be impacted, they won't get vaccines, because India's had to stop to try and vaccinate their own people, which is totally fair and understandable and all the rest of it. But the the domino effect or the ripple effect is, is is going to be felt for a very long time to come.

Michael Liben:

One of the things they taught me in communications classes was that a news story is called a story because it usually plays out with a beginning, a middle, and hopefully a happy ending, and news likes to have a happy ending. Yeah, but COVID-19 seems to be the story that never ends. So how to news correspondents deal with a story that doesn't seem to have an ending, much less a satisfying ending?

John Vause:

You know, the thing about this story too, that is very much spot on, it just doesn't seem to end. But at the same time, what is similar about it is that the story doesn't change. You know, we were talking about this the other day with with India, we were trying to move the story forward in some ways, apart from just doing the daily death toll, you know, which is like reading out the baseball scores at some point because you know, they just become numbers, big numbers, unfathomable, incomprehensible numbers, when you think about what we're looking at, in terms of death in India, here, there's 400,000 dead in Brazil, there's 500,000 dead in the US, there's, they're looking at over 400,000 dead in India ant time now. I mean, it is just horrendous, and it is so difficult to understand that, you know, to put this story in greater context, than just simply numbers ticking ever upwards, and the number of infections just keep going up, the number of dead people just keep rising. And because those numbers are so big, it's very hard to understand death on this scale. This is the problem. It's our job as reporters and as journalists, and as anchors to try and explain to people and our viewers, and to get it across that every time that number goes up by one, we're talking about one death but we're talking about devastated families and friends. And it just goes on - lives that have been lost and cut short, and people have died alone in hospitals in the most cruelest, most horrible fashion of all. And we need to explain that to people. But to do that, you have to open yourself up to feel that. And that's where the problem comes. That's when you actually start to feel the story. And it starts to become overwhelming, in a way. But if you don't do that, then I think you're not doing your audience any favors. You're not doing the right thing by your viewers or your readers or your listeners, because they need to understand the real day to day emotional, the toll that this is taking on so many people. If we just do it as numbers, you know, what does it mean?

Michael Liben:

Well, I think you're right. The closest[analogy] I have from my childhood was growing up in the States in the days of Vietnam. Thursday night on network news was death toll night, how many people died this week in Vietnam? And that was that was once a week on a half hour program. You're on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It never ever stops. It never ends. But we get numb to the numbers. It's almost 600,000 in America now, we get 10 times greater than that. This is Vietnam, World War One, World War Two, maybe Korea thrown in for fun.

John Vause:

And that's just the US. The one thing which is, the one time - I've never cried on air, despite all the stuff I've been through, and all the stuff I've seen, except on this story. And it was the most strangest moment when it happened. It wasn't a major story. It wasn't during an interview. We had to do headlines at the bottom of the hour. And there's usually three of them as just a very quick recap of of what's happened. And there was a third headline, and it was about the youngest, so far at that point, the youngest victim in the UK of the COVID virus and it was a little twelve year old boy who who died alone in hospital. And even now, I don't even know who this kid is or was. I, that's all I know is that there was a twelve year old boy who died by himself. And to me, that's just heartbreaking.

Michael Liben:

I think all of us are instantaneously humanized by the death of children.

John Vause:

Yeah.

Michael Liben:

It's something that we have come to think shouldn't happen.

John Vause:

We should protect them, shouldn't we? I mean, it's our jobs.

Michael Liben:

We should protect them, and they should outlive us, that's how we feel about it. Basically, with the advent of better medicine, infant mortality is so low now that we expect our children to outlive us. This wasn't always the case. And so in some sense things like the pandemic, or things like Sandy Hook, or things like war, throw us back into a state where, as humans, we haven't been for a century, when you're reading the news about people dying every day, when it's a child, it just hits you out of nowhere.

John Vause:

Yeah. We have one amazing, great daughter, she's 17 now, she's an adult, but you know, just the thought of anything happening, happening to her, you know, like it's happened to other kids, is just devastating.

Michael Liben:

So I guess for you, you'd say that that boy was the straw that broke your back.

John Vause:

In many ways it was, and also what I think it was, and I've talked about this with my therapist, and yes, I go to a therapist and I have been doing therapy. And I'm quite proud of the fact I do therapy, because I think that if you don't get help when you need it, then you're a fool. But I think that was a moment that basically everything came sort of back, you know, I'd be carrying around a lot of stuff from childhood, from work from all the rest of it, and I haven't been in therapy really, in any serious way. I did end up seeing a therapist from time to time. But after that moment, it just sort of opened the floodgates to all these horrible experiences and all these memories. And I think I just had reached a point where I couldn't handle it anymore. And my mind was telling me, you need, we need help. And that was why. So yeah, I'm very happy to say I get therapy and I'm doing okay.

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Michael Liben:

Mental health is a topic that's uppermost in people's minds, especially since we're dealing with the isolation and fear and everything related to COVID-19. So I'd like to know how people in your profession cope. We've already touched on it that you've been in therapy, is that something that other reporters also find that they need to do?

John Vause:

Increasingly, yes, to CNN's credit, they've been on to PTSD for a very long time, and have always encouraged people to seek help if they need it. And they've had that help available, which is, which is great. There's still, I think, almost a reluctance among some of the older reporters or whatever they, oh, well, you know, even the younger ones as well, that somehow it's a sign of weakness that you can't handle that, you know, tough enough, or something silly like that. But the thing is that when you are seeing horrendous events and experiencing tragedy on a daily basis, there is no way that you can emerge from this unscathed. And eventually, there's a great book called "The Body Keeps the Score" and basically, it's like anything else, the body builds up so much, can take so much of the trauma. And then eventually, you know, it says, "Hey, we've had enough" or whatever, whatever that moment is, it's unique to those people. And then that's the moment when you either start drinking or doing kind of some kind of self-medication with substance abuse, or you try and get help from professional people who deal with this all the time. And that's, that's what you need.

Michael Liben:

I know from my own experience, my limited experience in dealing with news is that there are professional things that professional people can do in the field to sort of ameliorate the problem for the moment. For example, I was filming something very, very upsetting and I found that if I put my camera down, I would be in the moment and cry. But as soon as I put the camera back in front of my face, and was looking through a viewfinder, I was distanced, and the camera mediated me from what I was watching. And I assume that probably happens to a lot of camera people just about anybody in the field. But you come out of the field, if you don't mind sharing with us some of your own treatment.

John Vause:

Yeah. Well, I know that you, for a lot of cameramen, that there is actually a very real experience in the sense that they feel detached or there's a separation or a barrier between them and the events right in front of them, as long as they're looking at it through a viewfinder. And it's already on TV, so it's already someplace else. But you're right once you put that camera down that tragedy, or that whatever it is that you're covering is right there in front of you. And you can't make it go away or you can't detach yourself from it. Um, you know, the funny thing is that with these people is that, you know, the cliche about the alcohol, it's, it's true. It's there for a reason. Because yeah, there's a lot of people to drink and a lot of people who drink because they are suffering from trauma and stress and that kind of stuff. I would get home some nights and polish off two bottles of wine in an hour and a half. And it says, now I don't drink at all. So, you know, but that's what I was doing. And I did that because I didn't want to hurt because I didn't want to have nightmares. I didn't want to dream, I couldn't fall asleep so if I got really drunk, I'd pass out. And I didn't intend to do it, it was just like a glass of wine became two glasses of wine became three glasses of wine became two bottles of wine. And that's when I knew that there was some issues to deal with. I started seeing a therapist who has been great, and has helped me with a lot of issues and dealing with a lot of flashbacks that I have from the earthquake in Sichuan, when they pulled the roof of a building and there were dozens of kids who are dead crushed to death underneath it at high school, and, you know, there are some horrendous things that just I have flashbacks for quite often.

Michael Liben:

Sure.

John Vause:

And the problem I had, though, with this pandemic, with what I saw this little, this kid in my mind, who died alone in hospital is that the stuff I had been doing up to that point, which had been working, stop working. And then the antidepressants that I was taking, just seemed not to be enough and the therapy wasn't enough. And so we started looking for other options out there. And yeah, I was lucky they my my wife really pushed me to go get ketamine treatment.

Michael Liben:

Tell us about that, if you can.

John Vause:

Yeah, it's ketamine started out as a as a sort of anesthesia. They still use it for children. But it kind of was abandoned there for a while and something used as a horse tranquilizer. In the late 90s and the early 2000s, it started emerging on the party scene as a party drug. Because it's a psychedelic hallucinogen, apparently, they call it a CK, cocaine and ketamine. Basically, I wouldn't have, I would get injected with ketamine, which will free your mind from, detach you from what you've been going through, and your patterns of behavior that you had fallen into so that you could look at everything from a different perspective. And I you have a therapy session beforehand, you go through this hour and a half, two hour long, psychedelic experience with the ketamine, the following day, when your mind is open, you then, you have intensive talk therapy. I did this with a group called Field Trip who were amazing and wonderful. And I did this, and I gotta say, it's been a life changing moment.

Michael Liben:

Wow. I'm very happy for you. I'm nervous, whenever we start talking about hallucinogens, I get nervous. If this is what's working, this is what you need then I'm really happy for you that you found it.

John Vause:

It doesn't work for everybody. But it worked for me.

Michael Liben:

How did you find it?

John Vause:

My wife was, because we were fighting and she was like, "You're not the man I married, I don't know who you are, you got to do something about this". And we looked at a bunch of therapies. And this is still experimental. It's still off books for the FDA. She found out about it and she said, you need to do this. And she said,"If you don't do this, you're gonna lose me and your daughter".

Michael Liben:

Wow, your wife is very brave. I think we should have her on the program.

John Vause:

She's a fantastic, fantastic person.

Michael Liben:

Well, it sounds like she cares very much about you.

John Vause:

Yeah, no, she's great.

Michael Liben:

So John, you have all these amazing experiences. Is there a book coming out anytime soon about the things that you've seen and done?

John Vause:

I think the last thing the world needs now is another book by some kind of hack journalists like...so the answer's no.

Michael Liben:

For those of us who want to catch you, can they catch you in the States? Are you on there?

John Vause:

We're on like Hulu Live. We're on DirecTV. Also, we're on Universe, which is also AT&T, and 5 AM in London, 6 AM in Paris, don't miss it.

Michael Liben:

I want to go to Paris just to get up early and watch it.

John Vause:

The great thing about CNNI is that it's very different to CNN in a way that we do this spectrum of international news. So if anybody wants to know in the US anything about the world beyond their borders, tune in and have a look.

Michael Liben:

And that concludes this episode of"Bereaved But Still Me" and I want to thank John Vause for sharing his experiences with us. Please leave a review of our program on whatever platform you're using to hear this episode. I'll talk with you soon and until then, please remember moving forward is not moving away.

Disclaimer:

Thank you for joining us. We hope you have felt supported in your grief journey. "Bereaved But Still Me" is a monthly podcast, and a new episode is released on the first Thursday of each month. You can hear our podcast anywhere you normally listen to podcasts at any time. Join us again next month for a brand new episode of"Bereaved But Still Me".