Biden’s prism of loss: A public man, shaped by his private grief

WASHINGTON (AP) — On the night before Joe Biden’s world collapsed, he sat in a picture-perfect scene with his wife by the fireside in their Delaware living room.

Biden, the hotshot senator-elect at just 30, was reflecting on the big things he would do when he got to Washington. It was one week out from Christmas in 1972, and Neilia, also 30, was addressing holiday cards as her husband rambled on. But then she interrupted his musings to share an ill premonition.

“What’s going to happen, Joey?” she asked her husband, in Biden’s later recounting. “Things are too good.”

One day later, Neilia and the couple’s 13-month old daughter, Naomi, were dead. Sons Hunter and Beau, a year and a day apart at 3 and 4, were seriously injured.

While Biden was in Washington setting up his new office, Neilia’s car had been broadsided by a tractor-trailer as she took the kids to pick out a Christmas tree.

When the phone rang, Biden said later, “I knew.”

“You just felt it in your bones.”

Nothing would ever be the same. Biden was instantly transformed into a politician whose career would forever be grounded in tragedy. Loss became central to Biden’s political persona, a history he has often shared — at some points reluctantly, at others readily and on at least a few occasions with inaccuracies in the account. Now in his third bid for the White House, the painful story comes up as point of connection to voters and a personal experience on health care policy.

As it turned out, Biden’s passage through hardship was not to be a one-time journey but a well-traveled path. His life was later rocked by serious illness, political setbacks, and, in 2015, the death of Beau from brain cancer at age 46. There were other, less public, trials, including son Hunter’s struggles as an adult with addiction.

Despite life’s cruelties, though, Biden remarried, added daughter Ashley to his family, spent 26 years in the Senate, eight as vice president and pursued the presidency off and on for more than three decades. He’s now making another run at age 76.

“He is the unluckiest person I’ve ever known personally, and he is the luckiest person I’ve ever known personally,” says longtime friend Ted Kaufman, who succeeded Biden in the Senate. ___

After the accident, Biden had no interest in the Senate anymore. No ambition for anything, really. His world view shrank to taking care of the boys.

“For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he would later reveal.

He debated relinquishing the Senate seat he’d yet to even occupy but eventually agreed to give the job a try for six months. He lasted 36 years.

Over those years, Biden’s personal tragedy shaped his public personal and his private relationships.

Biden makes a point of reaching out to grieving friends and strangers.

Often, these partnersin-grief hear a message of reassurance from Biden that’s drawn from his own experience: There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife “brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.”

They also may come away with his cellphone number.

“I have a long list of strangers who have my private number and an invitation to call,” Biden wrote in his 2017 book. “And many of them do.”

For one family, though, the famed Biden reputation for empathy comes up short.