Remembering joan rivers - melissa rivers' memories

Twenty-seven years earlier, Melissa's father, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide, not long after the cancellation of Joan's late-night talk show on Fox; he had been her producer.

"When one parent dies," says Melissa, an only child, "it's a comma. When the second parent dies, it's a period." With Joan's passing, Melissa lost her

creative partner as well as her mother. "I was part of a comedy team," she says. "I was the straight man. And now I'm a solo act. That's the hard part. I'm

trying to find my voice. The on-screen duo in 2011. WE Television/Photofest WHY LOSING A PARENT HURTS AT ANY AGE When a parent of an adult dies, some view it as a rite of passage. Some feel

you should take that death in stride, handle loss in an adult manner. What does that mean? Not be sad? Be grateful Dad didn't die when you were a child? That would be underestimating

grief. Loss does not diminish because you are an adult or because your mother or father lived a long life. Here's what most people don't understand: Whether our parents live near

or far, are emotionally close or distant, they anchor us in the world. Even though we know they will die someday, most of us can't fathom a world without them. Can you imagine a world

without a sky? Of course not. It has always been there. Often we lose a parent after a long illness, but sometimes the death is sudden. For some, the call comes on an otherwise idle

Thursday. Out of the blue, our world turns upside down without warning. How can this be? Mom was fine, and now she is not. Dad was here, and now he is not. Sudden death compounds the loss.

That's because there is no preparation, no goodbye, just the loudest absence one could ever imagine. As a result, in sudden death, the denial will be longer and deeper. The more sudden

the death, the longer it may take to grieve the loss. Give yourself that time. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss. But how long do you grieve for your mother of 40

or more years? The answer is simple: You grieve for as long as you need to. _— David Kessler, founder of www.grief.com _ Her new collection of essays, _The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth,

Mischief and Manipulation__ _(which is excerpted at the end of the article), suggests she's on her way. Written with comedian Larry Amoros, who also worked with Joan, it's filled

with family stories, poignant and ribald. "Those blocks of writing saved me, because Larry and I would laugh and laugh," says Melissa, ensconced in a window nook of her immaculate

white kitchen. "I wanted to call the book _Cheaper Than Therapy_." It was at Melissa's request that _Fashion Police_ returned from its hiatus four months after her

mother's funeral. "I was amazed by Melissa's strength and how she held it together," says E!'s Olde. "She felt the best thing for everyone, emotionally, was to

get back to the show they loved. She said that's what her mother would have wanted. I think she wanted to get back to work, too." "Everyone keeps telling me I need to take a

minute and really mourn," says Melissa, who saves evidence of her grieving for an inner circle that includes her boyfriend, talent agent Mark Rousso, and a longtime team of assistants

that she and her mother shared. "I try not to cry in front of Cooper," she says. "He can't handle it." The book allowed her to delve into memories of her mother

under the guise of work. Joan, a sparkling grab bag of contradictions, offered rich material. The woman who made a stand-up bit out of her disappointment in Melissa for turning down a

topless spread in Playboy, and crassly dissed everyone from Helen Keller to Justin Bieber, was also a friend of Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla, one of only four Americans invited to

their wedding. Her go-to expression of frustration was "F--k, sh-t, piss" (Osbourne had a trio of gold rings made for Joan with the epithets spelled in diamonds), but she was a

stickler for manners. "She'd look at me with a different face," says Cooper, "and I would know I was doing something wrong, like I forgot my napkin or left my fork on the

side of my plate." Each year, Joan took him and a friend on a vacation dubbed Grandma Week. They went to gladiator school in Rome, took glassblowing classes in Venice, and when they

discovered a chocolate cake that was "so good it was ridiculous," Cooper recalls, they ordered three pieces each. Earlier this year, Cooper joined his mom in accepting Joan's

posthumous Grammy award for the audio version of her last book, _Diary of a Mad Diva._ The win helped ameliorate the sting of Joan's exclusion from the In Memoriam segment of the Oscar

awards two weeks later. "She was one of the first women directors ever, with _Rabbit Test _[the 1978 feature comedy debut of Billy Crystal], and she had acting credits," says

Melissa. "We changed the awards-show business. Throw her picture up on the screen for 15 seconds!" At the hotel where he took his life, Edgar Rosenberg left a tape recording for

his daughter, then a student at the University of Pennsylvania. "He said goodbye and told me it was my job to take care of Mommy," Melissa remembers. "At the very end, his

primary concern was my mother, he cared for her that much. But who was supposed to take care of me? Suicide is complicated." Joan and Melissa in 1970. I.C. Rapoport/Getty Images In a

sense, Melissa is still carrying out Edgar's wish. On top of juggling her own entertainment projects, including two TV pilots and a role in an upcoming movie, Melissa now oversees her

mother's QVC line and is selling Joan's New York apartment and having her 82,000 joke cards (in which the Smithsonian has expressed interest) digitally scanned. _Fashion Police_,

on hiatus again until September, requires a serious rethink. "We were a family," Melissa says of the cast and crew, "and when the head of a family passes, it throws everyone

into emotional turmoil." Osbourne quit after Giuliana Rancic, another cohost, joked that singer Zendaya Coleman's Oscar hairdo, an elaborate array of dreads, looked like it smelled

of patchouli and weed, a comment that ignited a social media firestorm. Comedian Kathy Griffin took over Joan's seat and was gone after seven episodes. "We came back too

fast," says Melissa. Melissa Rivers and her son, Cooper. Jeff Lipsky Asked if her mother might be looking out for her from another parallel, she laughs: "If she is, she can keep a

little of this f--king chaos at bay! Seriously, if you're supposed to be sitting on my shoulder and making sure everything's OK — chop-chop, get on it! Things are crazy around

here!" "My mother and I each had our own lanes," says Melissa. "She'd work on one thing, I'd work on another, and then we'd come up with the game plan.

Suddenly it feels like the work hasn't doubled; it's tripled. There's a new entity: the estate and the legacy. And there's no map. I don't want to blow it, so

there's a lot of pressure."