Joe Biden on losing his son to cancer
America’s new president, Joe Biden, reveals the heartache of watching his son lose his battle with cancer
THE president’s office rang right on schedule. On that day in April 2015 I grabbed my notes and headed down the corridor to the Oval Office for my weekly lunch with Barack Obama. He and I talked briefly about Tikrit at our lunch, and about what might come next in Iraq, but I think he could tell I was distracted and down.
Barack knew I was just back from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, and he knew I was headed back there soon.
The president had kept up with the general outlines of what had been happening to my eldest son.
“How did it go, Joe?” he asked. “How is Beau?”
The talk at lunch ended up being almost entirely about Beau. I could tell looking at him across the table that the president was genuinely concerned. He liked Beau and respected him and thought, like me, that my son had a big future ahead of him.
I found myself explaining to him what Beau had just been through the previous week and what was coming up, attempting to keep it on a fairly straightforward, clinical footing. Part of that was for my
own protection. I did not want to break down in front of anybody, least of all the president of the United States.
But as I talked to Barack across the table that day I must have started to confide things I hadn’t intended to. I was hurting, and the president could see it.
As I explained to him that the next procedure – the injection of a live virus to attack the cancerous cells in the brain tumour – was uncharted territory, but it was our only hope to save Beau, I looked up and found Barack in tears. He 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. I told him I was debating whether to fly down to Houston later that night, to be with Beau for the injection in the morning, or to fly tomorrow and be there when he woke up.
Barack didn’t hesitate. He said I should be with my son before he went in, not after. Whatever was on my schedule could not be more important.
“Joe,” he said, “you’ve got to go down tonight.”
I knew he was right. That’s what I had planned on doing, but it meant something to me to hear it from Barack. I was in the air, heading to Houston, a few hours later.
BY MID-APRIL our eldest son was holding his own against the cancer. He had come through the injection of the live virus 10 days earlier without a single complication. He was moving well. His appetite was still good. And he was mentally sharp.
But the two fresh, angry scars on his scalp put us all on edge; the entire family was dreading the coming effects of the untested experimental treatment.
Dr Yung and Dr Lang had warned us that Beau would get worse before he got better. Maybe much worse. They said he would likely be at his most vulnerable point in the third or fourth week, when the virus and Beau’s own immune system were at war with the tumour.
The inflammation could be painful and debilitating. There was no predicting how low he would get, or if he would survive the onslaught.
On Sunday 12 April when he and his wife, Hallie, visited us at our home in Wilmington, Delaware, with our youngest grandchildren, Natalie and Hunter, the big story of the day was Hillary Clinton, who had officially announced her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Earlier that week at the president’s urging I’d had a meeting with his trusted pollster. The message I took from that
Chatting with his son during a visit to Iraq as vice president in 2009. At the time Beau was serving as a captain in the US army. meeting was that Hillary’s poll numbers, her money and her campaign organisation were just too formidable. I had no real path to the nomination, so why complicate things for the party?
None of that mattered to Beau. He was reading all he could about the Clinton campaign. He wanted to be ready to pitch in the minute I announced my own candidacy.
Beau believed, as I did, that I was prepared to take on the presidency. That there was nobody better prepared. No matter what people in the outside world said or thought, Beau and Hunter believed we could win.
And if I had my two sons behind me, anything was possible. Beau had a way of instilling courage and calming me.
He was the last person in the room with me before the presidential-primary debates in 2007, the vice-presidential debate in 2008 and the vice-presidential debate in 2012, when it was up to me to put wind back in the Democrats’ sails after Barack’s demoralising performance in his first debate against Mitt Romney.
Beau would always grab my arm just before I walked onstage and pull me back towards him until I was looking into his eyes. “Dad. Look at me. Look at me, Dad. Remember, Dad. Home base, Dad. Home base.”
What he was saying was: Remember who you are. Remember what matters. Stay true to your ideals. Be courageous. Then he would kiss me and shove me forward.
So the 2016 Biden campaign would have a late start. So what? If Beau made it through the next few months and came out alive, I knew we could do this.
IWAS in the office three days when the call came from Houston. My brother Jimmy had made the trip with Beau down to MD Anderson so Dr Yung and Dr Lang could assess the early results of the live-virus injection. The news as it was reported to me was very good. In fact, it was potentially incredible. Beau was in good shape, not yet showing ill effects from the virus, and there was already evidence of tumour destruction. This was something they hadn’t seen in nearly three dozen tries with the live-virus injection.
I hung up the phone and felt like I could take a real, long, deep breath for the first time in months. Don’t get your hopes too high, I reminded myself. Don’t tempt the Fates.
Beau didn’t get out of bed the next day, Thursday, and everybody in the family figured it was just exhaustion from his trip to Texas. But he didn’t get out of bed on Friday, either. He was overwhelmed by fatigue and wouldn’t eat.
He didn’t want to go to the hospital but by Saturday he had no choice. When he was admitted to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, he was badly dehydrated and barely responsive.
This was it now. We were in the worst of it. The effects of the virus were beginning to punish Beau. The swelling in his brain was intensifying and the pain would have been excruciating, so the doctors kept him heavily sedated.
There was a lot of talk in Wilmington about why Beau, who had announced his intention to run for governor, had skipped every crucial political event in the first four months of the year. Beau still wanted to keep his illness out of the public eye. He was admitted to Jefferson under the alias “George Lincoln”.
My Secret Service agents kept going out of their way to ensure Beau’s privacy and to protect his dignity. I would visit when I could sneak in and out without detection, but I made sure to keep up my schedule so I didn’t call attention to his hospitalisation.
Beau held steady for 10 or 12 days, and there was some evidence on the scans that the tumour might be shrinking. He was more responsive.
When he transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington on 5 May 2015, a team was already in place for his rehab. He was courageous and stoic, and just kept fighting, but every time Beau looked to be gaining ground, something would knock him back.
There was fluid build-up in the left ventricle of his brain, and every time the doctors drained it the fluid just came back, which meant he was in pain or disoriented when he was conscious.
One night, at 2am, his breathing suddenly became laboured, which turned out to be a sign of pneumonia, requiring a jolt of powerful antibiotics. When a Catholic priest came to check in, Jill thanked him for stopping by but asked him to please leave. She didn’t want Beau to get the idea he was there to perform last rites.
Jill and I kept reminding each other the doctors had warned us that Beau would get much worse before he got better. We kept telling ourselves that these hard times were to be expected, and he would turn the corner. Could be any day now. There was still hope.
What I felt, most of all, was helpless. I did what I could, which was to just be there whenever I could. I visited early in the morning most days, before I started my official schedule, and again every night when I was done.
Just before I got to his room I would begin to psych myself up. Smile, I’d say to myself. Smile. Smile. Smile. How many times Beau had said to me, “Don’t look sad, Dad. You can’t let anybody see you sad because it will make them feel bad. And I don’t want anybody feeling sorry for me.”
You gotta make the final turn with a smile on your face, I’d think.
I came in one night anxious to tell Beau about the scene at the White House earlier in the day. “Honey,” I said as I sat down by his bed, “guess who was at the office today?” Beau’s eyes were closed, but I could tell he heard me.
“Elton John was there,” I said. “You remember when I used to drive you and Hunt to school? That song we would all sing together, the three of us, as loud as we could? Crocodile Rock?” The boys were four and five when that song was big, when it was just the three of us. After Neilia died [she and their infant daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash in 1972. Their sons were in the car too but luckily survived]. Before I met Jill. I started singing the lyrics to Beau, quietly. The words came back like it was yesterday, but after the first few lines I started to get emotional and wasn’t sure if I could go on.
Beau didn’t open his eyes, but I could see through my tears he was smiling. So I gathered myself and kept at it, for as much of the song as I could remember.
Beau didn’t open his eyes but I could see through my tears he was smiling
SEVEN weeks after the live-virus injection, it looked like Beau was finally starting to climb out of the dark hole. A surgeon did a procedure that appeared to relieve the worst of the pressure in Beau’s skull and the
next day he was strong enough to sit up in a motorised wheelchair.
Barack invited me to play golf that Saturday. He was worried about me, he explained, and hoped to distract me for a few hours. Jill encouraged me to go; it seemed, after all, like things were going to get better for Beau. The worst part is, I can’t even remember whether or not I went.
When I got to Walter Reed on Monday afternoon, Beau looked better than I’d seen him in weeks. Jill and I were able to take him outside in his wheelchair and the next evening, too. But he had a bad night on Wednesday, and by the next afternoon he was barely responsive. No nods. No fist bumps. No thumbs-ups.
The whole family gathered at 10am on Friday in a long, narrow conference room. The doctors seemed fairly united in their message. They did not like what they saw.
What was happening in Beau’s brain was no longer reversible, they said. There was no saving Beau. “He will not recover.”
These were the most devastating four words I have ever heard in my life. “He will not recover.” But goddammit, I still wanted to believe – maybe – maybe something will happen.
Hallie’s parents drove Natalie and Hunter down from Wilmington that evening. They came down the hallways of the hospital smiling, as if it were just another visit. Hallie had her children by the hand, walking them past the nurses’ station, towards Beau’s room.
The Secret Service agents, many of whom had been with our family for more than six years, bowed their heads and stared at the marble floor, or turned away, so nobody would see them weeping as Natalie and Hunter went by.
Nobody left the hospital that night. We waited, all of us, together. Just after 7pm, his breathing became laboured, and then extremely shallow, and then appeared to stop. There was no heartbeat registering on the monitor.
His brother walked over, bent down to kiss him, and placed his hand over his heart. Howard [Krein, the husband of Joe and Jill’s daughter, Ashley] looked at the monitor. “Look,” he said. Beau’s heart was beating again. It didn’t last long. May 30. 7:51 pm. It happened, I wrote in my diary. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy.
WE ARRIVED home on Air Force Two at about 8pm on Sunday, almost exactly 24 hours after Beau passed. Jill went to bed early and I ended up alone in the sitting room off our bedroom, which had just been wallpapered. The room was still in disarray from the job; the furniture was moved aside and mementos were shoved into the middle of the floor in open boxes or piles.
I needed something to do to keep my mind occupied until I could sleep, so I started emptying some of the boxes.
The last box I grabbed held some old family photos. The photograph on top of the pile fluttered out, so I bent down to pick it up; it was a colour photo of Beau. He was probably eight or nine, in sneakers and shorts, wearing a baseball cap.
In the photo, Beau was walking away from me, looking over his shoulder, smiling and waving.
I was suddenly overwhelmed. I had not seen that photo in at least three decades, but it was the age I always pictured him in my mind. Always smiling at me, with that look of reassurance.
My God, it struck me in that moment, I miss him so terribly – already. Beau could always chase my fears away. He saved my life, along with Hunter, 40 years ago, after Neilia and Naomi died in the car crash, and now what was I supposed to do?
I had looked to Beau, as I looked to Hunt, from the time he was a child, as a source of confidence and courage.
“It’s going to be okay, Daddy,” he would say. “I’m not going away.”
How foolish it sounds, I thought, that a grown man, an accomplished man, who spent his whole life trying to communicate courage and fortitude, had to look to his own sons to buck him up.
“Look at me, Dad,” I could almost hear Beau say. “Remember. Rem emb er. Home base.” S