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‘We’re always here for you. We always will be’ ‘I could see through my tears he was smiling’
Joe Biden’s life had already been touched by tragedy – with the death of his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash – when, in 2015, he lost his son Beau to brain cancer. Here, in this devastatingly moving extract from his memoir, the man who this week becomes US president recalls the emotional turmoil of Beau’s final weeks
AWEEK before Christmas 1972, when I was a newly elected 30-year-old United States senator, excited to be down in Washington DC interviewing staff, I got a call. My wife Neilia and our 18-month-old daughter Naomi had died in a car accident while out shopping.
Our sons Beau and Hunter had been in the car, too. They pulled through without permanent damage, but not before spending weeks in the hospital.
The pain seemed unbearable in the beginning. I remember vividly, after Neilia died, not being able to open the closet door of the bedroom we shared. I remember the anguish of smelling her scent on the pillows and looking at the empty spot on the bathroom sink where her toothbrush had been.
I wasn’t able to stay in that bedroom; I sold my house and got out. It took me a long time to heal, but I made it through, with a lot of support, and reconstructed my life and my family.
Over the years since, I have found that my presence almost always brings some solace to people who have suffered sudden and unexpected loss. Not because I am possessed of any special power, but because my story precedes me.
They know I have a sense of the depth of their pain.
It amazes me how many people there are who live with devastating loss with nowhere near the support I have had.
So I try to be mindful, at all times, of what a difference a small human gesture can make to people in need, to let them know: I get it. You’re not alone.
In 2014, many years after my own tragedy, I drove to Brooklyn with my second wife
Jill to visit the family of a police officer who had been murdered the Saturday before Christmas.
Wenjian Liu, just 32, and another officer had been executed by a lone gunman while sitting quietly in their patrol car, just doing their job.
At his house, I was met by a translator because Liu’s parents were not comfortable speaking English, preferring their native Cantonese. Liu’s father Wei Tang gave me a hug when we entered and touched my face. He was a small wiry man who was trying hard to be brave.
‘Thank you,’ he said, over and over, while his wife kept her distance and bowed politely.
Liu’s young and beautiful wife of three months, Sanny, was there, too. I gave her my private phone number.
‘When you’re down and you feel guilty for burdening your family and friends,’ I told her, ‘pick up the phone and call me.’
I got the sense she didn’t quite believe I was entirely sincere. But I was. I have a long list of strangers who have my private number, and an invitation to call, and many of them do.
When we left after almost an hour, Liu’s father held on to me tightly, as if he could not bear to let me go. We stood there for a long while, embracing outside the house where he had lived with his only son. Just two fathers.
WHAT I hadn’t told anyone then — apart from President Obama — was that the year before, my own elder son had been diagnosed with a stage 4 glioblastoma tumour.
The median life span after diagnosis of this virulent brain cancer is 12-14 months. Maybe two people in 100, we learned, get to long-term tumour-free remission. But that means some people do beat it, we told ourselves. So why not Beau?
He certainly had a stalwart support system. His wife Hallie was a rock. She would keep their life on track, make sure their two children were well and safe.
His little sister Ashley would be there at his side during treatments, offering unconditional love.
My other son, Hunter, was Beau’s secret weapon. During his whole life, his mission had been to protect his brother. They’d always been there for each other, from the time they were little boys, and nothing had changed. It just was more intense now.
‘You know I’d trade places with you if I could, Beau,’ Hunt told him the day his brother had surgery. And we all knew he meant that, literally.
Beau was determined to fight — odds be damned. Right after the diagnosis, he ran a marathon. And he opted for the most aggressive treatment possible – surgery, radiotherapy, triple the amount of the standard chemotherapy drug.
Meanwhile, I was under strict orders never to betray worry in front of anybody.
At 45, Beau was already a rising star in Democratic politics. He was just about to finish his second term as attorney general of Delaware and had already stated his intention to run for governor in 2016.
I was pretty sure he could run for president some day and that with Hunter’s help as his trusted adviser and speechwriter, he could win. So when Barack and I won re-election back in 2012, I had started thinking hard about stepping aside after the second term and shifting the family’s focus to Beau’s political future.
By the end of 2014, he had already exceeded the average survival time for somebody with glioblastoma multiforme.
He was, however, losing feeling in his right hand. Additionally, radiation and chemotherapy had damaged the part of his brain that controlled the ability to name things, so he was struggling to recall proper nouns.
Then in February 2015, Beau’s doctor called to say the cancer cells were multiplying fast, and in new places. When I got off the phone, Jill and I just stared at each other, and embraced.
There was more aggressive treatment ahead, including surgery, immunotherapy and the injection of a specially engineered live virus to activate Beau’s immune system. He would be the first person ever to have this combined treatment, and the risk was enormous.
I found out only later from the medical professionals that Beau never showed fear and never sagged. He wanted the doctors to throw everything at him they possibly could. He kept reassuring them he could handle it.
At our weekly private lunches in the Oval Office, Barack would often ask me about Beau. As I explained to him that the next procedures were uncharted territory, but our only hope, I looked up and found him in tears.
Barack is not a demonstrative man, in public or in private, and I felt bad. I found myself trying to console him. ‘Life is so difficult to discern,’ he said.
At another of our lunches, I confided in Barack that Jill and I were thinking of taking out a second mortgage on our house to help out because Beau was no longer working.
‘Don’t do that,’ Barack said, with a force that surprised me. He got up out of his chair, walked around behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. ‘I’ll give you the money. I have it. You can pay me back whenever.’
Over the next few weeks, it became ever clearer to me that Hunter was the crucial beam in Beau’s support structure. He was at all the scans, standing at the corner of the MRI machine, so he could rub Beau’s foot and talk to him, keeping him calm.
Whatever Beau asked for — water, fruit, a sandwich — Hunter ran for it, so his brother did not have to wait. He crawled into bed with Beau just to be near him. And he was there to put his arms around his brother in the moments before Beau went into surgery.
That night in bed I said my rosary, and made a special plea to Neilia and my mom: ‘Please. Please. Look out for Beau. And give me the