Saying Goodbye to Stephen Colbert (And, Again, to My Mom)

She died while I was working for him. I've never shared the whole story.

Tomorrow, Stephen Colbert will tape the final episode of The Late Show. I’ve been dreading it in a way I couldn’t quite explain since the moment he announced its cancellation last July, until I realized that part of what I’m losing is my mom.

I have photos and stories from across the years that I've mostly kept to myself, not wanting to come across as boastworthy. But this is an elegy for something that created real meaning in my life and the lives of so many others. So here we are, leaving it all on the table.

It was 2005, and I’d been working up the nerve to tell my parents I wanted to apply my brand-new Columbia Journalism degree to producing “truthiness” on Comedy Central (a term, it turned out, I’d witness being coined during the morning writers’ meeting). Before I could, she called. “Beck, I heard Stephen Colbert on Fresh Air today. He’s getting his own show. You should work for him.” She said it so plainly and without hesitation that I laughed out loud, as though it weren’t the longest shot in media jobs. As if this were simply how things worked. But we both recognized something special in him from The Daily Show that we couldn’t quite name yet.

At the 2007 Colbert Report holiday party

Somehow, after months of interviews and twisted story idea submissions, I got the job. The following year, on the last night of our summer hiatus after we’d just come back from the Emmys, she was gone, killed in a car accident miles from the studio. The highest high to the lowest low.

What followed taught me things I’ve never quite put into words publicly. Working at The Colbert Report taught me how to treat people. (And, just as importantly, how not to.) It taught me that culture flows from the top, and that in a relentless industry not exactly known for its empathy, daily television included, Stephen set a tone I’ve tried to carry ever since. He checked in, and he both directly and indirectly made clear that taking care of myself wasn’t optional. He sent me a one-line, hand-written card that cut to the heart of everything weird and painful about fresh traumatic loss. I’ve never written about that before, and frankly, given the scope of his enormous life, I'd wonder if he’d even remember.

On set in 2007, celebrating becoming a field producer

But here’s what I’ll remember: The sight of an unmarked oversized white rental van pulling up to a cemetery in Philadelphia, doors swinging open, colleagues spilling out. The way that even when people didn’t know what to say (which is most people, always, in the face of loss) they still tried. Tanya, who is now The Late Show’s co-executive producer, took me to a John Edwards taping—the psychic, not the senator—a couple of months after my mom died. She didn’t know what else to do, but she wanted to do something. That’s its own kind of love. We got tickets. We sat in those chairs. We were completely serious.

That’s the thing about that place. Even when people were at a total loss, even when they were overextended beyond belief and surviving on craft services on 54th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, they showed up. In unmarked vans. In psychic waiting rooms. However they could.

At The Colbert Report series wrap party, 2014

My mom never got to see Stephen move to The Late Show in 2015. But he was there anyway: in the moments when my dad turned on The Colbert Report to watch him, say, solemnly posing with a portrait of himself posing with a portrait of himself and imagine her giggling on the couch next to him. In the years since, he's been a nearly daily presence on my phone, on my TV, tethering me to the version of myself she believed in.

Classic.

There was always the knowledge, too, that I could get tickets to a taping at any point and walk back into that room, reconnect with that world, feel the thread pull taut again. Losing him as a touchstone feels like another thread cut from what connects me to her. And now, even that option is gone.

I realize it’s a somewhat embarrassing thing to admit that losing a television show feels like losing a mom again. But you can’t be embarrassed by a feeling. Unless it’s being irrationally moved to tears by a particularly well-executed parallel parking job. That one I’ll own.

Hey, old friends: Me, the aforementioned Tanya Michnevich Bracco, and Nicole Savini last week

Last week I sat in the Ed Sullivan Theater for one of the final tapings. Before the show even started, the theater became something else. Old colleague after old colleague materialized to greet me and my friend Nicole Savini, a beloved former producer there—writers, producers, crew, folks I’ve since creatively collaborated with at Modern Loss—and what followed was a cascade of hugs so sustained and immediate it felt less like a reunion and more like a reflex. As many as twenty years dissolved in thirty seconds. The family feeling, it turns out, doesn’t require maintenance. It just waits.

After the show, Stephen grabbed my phone and took a selfie of us on that stage. I am aware that I look unhinged with joy. I was.

I mean.

Watching Stephen work that stage one more time and watch the audience simply gravitate toward his energy, I found myself thinking about what he’d actually built. Not a show about grief. A show where grief could appear without apology. Where a guest could say something true and unfinished and not be nudged back toward the punchline. Where love and loss were allowed to sit together, because he seemed to understand, better than almost anyone on television, that they were never really separate.

That understanding changed me. I carried it out of that building and into the years that followed, and it’s part of what led me to build Modern Loss: the belief that people need spaces where the hardest things can be said out loud without being packaged into something easier to swallow.

He proved it was possible. Over and over again. After the next section are five moments I keep coming back to.

In TIME, today

My latest piece for TIME makes the broader cultural argument about why Colbert's contribution to late night has been so overlooked, what it means that nothing has replaced it, and why grief remains fundamentally at odds with how mainstream media is built. The $64,000 question: What’s gonna happen now?

I’m genuinely proud of this article and learned a version will appear in the printed magazine next week. Ping me if you see it in the wild!

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Five moments (of too many) that didn’t resolve

1. Andrew Garfield on grief as unexpressed love (2021)

Garfield told Colbert he didn’t want to get over losing his mother — that his grief was “all the unexpressed love I didn’t get to tell her.” Colbert went quiet. The audience went quiet. Nothing was resolved.

2. Keanu Reeves on what happens when we die (2019)

As an answer to one of the standard questions in the first-ever Colbert Questionert, Reeves simply responded, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” Colbert shook his hand and ended the interview. Boom. Nothing else needed to be said.

3. Katherine LaNasa on cancer as something ongoing (2026)

The Pitt actor didn’t offer a survival story. She just offered the truth: “Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get the short end of the stick.” It was the rare interview that didn’t ask illness to redeem itself and I watched it over and over.

4. Anderson Cooper and Stephen go deep (2019)

Ok, this one was Anderson’s interview, but whoa. Who doesn’t love these two together? Colbert’s answer that gratitude and grief aren’t opposites and that suffering is part of the gift of existence has stayed with me longer than almost anything I’ve read on the subject.

5. Stephen on the gun violence crisis (2022)

After a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Stephen stopped his show cold and told his audience that prayers wouldn’t end mass shootings. Voting might. “Who running for office has publicly stated that they are willing to do anything and everything in their power to protect your children from the criminally insane number of guns in America?” he asked. He was doing what mainstream television almost never does: using one of the most-watched stages in America to say the uncomfortable, specific, politically costly thing out loud, not as commentary, but as a demand. Hero move.

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And so…

I keep thinking about my mom on that phone call, so certain. She’d love knowing the show ran for another decade after she died. She’d love knowing I was in that room last week, cackling with and being pulled into hugs by the extended family she helped nudge me toward.

She’d probably also take full credit. She’d be right.

To Stephen: Thank you. For the tone you set. For checking in when you didn’t have to. For building something that taught a roomful of people, including one very green researcher from Philadelphia, that loss doesn’t have to be hidden to be survivable.

I have a lot of feelings about the forces that took this beautiful show off that stage. But today, just this.

Always a light in the darkness.