Gary Sinise is learning to live with the grief following his son Mac Sinise’s death, but he does not believe the wound simply disappears.
“I don’t think that little phrase time heals all wounds is really appropriate because it doesn’t really heal the wounds,” the actor and philanthropist told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.
“The hole in the heart is always there,” Sinise said, describing a grief that still catches him off guard. Mac died on Jan, 5, 2024 at age 33 following a long battle with chordoma, a rare spinal cancer, after the disease increasingly disabled him.
“They will jump out at you at any moment,” Sinise said, explaining how grief changes from the raw emotion of the beginning into sudden waves that arrive without warning. He described one recent moment in church when he pictured Mac sitting beside him and felt overwhelmed.
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“I just wanted to connect to him so badly that I don’t even know what I was looking for necessarily,” the actor expressed. He searched through text messages, photos and videos on his son’s phone, and the recordings, made late at night while Mac was confined to a hospital bed, became an unexpected way for his father to hear his thoughts and remain close to him.
Sinise also spoke candidly about what he wishes he had asked while Mac was dying. He had spent years fighting beside his son, looking for doctors, drugs and another option, and feared that a conversation about final days might sound like surrender. He said in the interview that he still wonders whether Mac was scared or had come to terms with what was happening, but he also accepts that his son had stopped taking medication, eating and talking the night before he died.
Music became a bridge through that pain. Mac, who worked with his father at the Gary Sinise Foundation, had been a drummer, but after cancer and multiple spine surgeries made drumming impossible, he taught himself harmonica. The Foundation’s official tribute said he completed Resurrection & Revival before his death, with proceeds intended to support the Foundation’s mission; Sinise said the record went to press the week Mac died.
“There were so many amazing blessings in that last year. Even though there were a lot of difficult things happening that year, throughout all of it, he was working on this music and it was lighting him up,” Sinise reflected. He later said he has kept working on projects connected to Mac, keeping the music close in daily life.
The Gary Sinise Foundation, which Sinise founded in 2011, serves veterans, first responders and their families through programs designed to strengthen and build communities, according to the Foundation’s mission statement. Through that work, Sinise said, he had watched grieving families face loss before confronting his own.
“None of us is alone in it,” Sinise said. He described grief as a bond shared by human beings, one that can be managed better over time but never entirely disappears; the family now supports one another when the waves arrive, he said, grabbing each other and helping each other through.
That is the aftermath Sinise offered Cooper: not a tidy recovery, but a life that carries absence, memory and gratitude together. For Movieguide® readers, his account leaves room for both the ache and the blessings he said kept his family going — an honest picture of love that does not end when a life does.
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