This article was published in August or 2020 and updated with the arrival of Joe Biden to the presidency of the United States .
“Promise me you’ll be okay, dad.”
That’s what Beau Biden asked his father, Joe, shortly before he died.
The eldest son of the now president of the United States was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2013.
He died two years later, in June of 2015, a few days before Donald Trump launched his campaign to get the Republican Party nomination for the elections of 2017 that catapulted him to the White House.
Joe Biden, who was then vice president of the United States under Barack Obama, also had then considered fighting for the presidency of his country , but Beau’s death made him discard that option, even against the will that his son had expressed.
Now, when he is president, we reflect on Biden’s tragic personal life, the impact it has had on defining his character and how it can help heal a country with profound wounds and a marked polarization.
“Unite and complete ourselves ”
In August, an emotional speech delivered within the framework of the Democratic Convention that nominated him as a candidate, his wife, Jill Biden , highlighted Joe’s ability to rebuild after misfortunes and continue working for others.
“It will do for your family what and did for ours: unite and complete us ”, underlined the new first lady of the United States
- Who is Jill Biden, the new first lady of the United States, and what is expected of her in office
Joe Biden, from 78 years, he grew up in a working-class family with a Catholic belief.
His mother had a strong commitment to social justice and his father repeated over and over a short but forceful mantra as a life advice: “Get up, get up after being shot down ”.
A lesson that Biden learned not only from his father but also from his own experience.
Just after 035 years, Biden felt capable of taking over the world.
It was November 1972. The young lawyer was married to Neilia, a woman with whom he had fallen in love at first sight a few years before.
The couple had three children – Beau, Hunter and Naomi – and Biden had just won a seat in the US Senate .UU. for the state of Delaware.
Thus began a career of more than 40 years in American politics.
The Call of Horror
Days before Christmas, Biden was in Washington DC interviewing to staff for his office when he received a devastating call.
“ His wife and daughter have suffered a terrible accident . You have to go home, ”said the young voice on the other end of the line. Biden knew at that moment that his wife had died.
Later the details of the accident were known.
Neilia and the three children were returning from buying the Christmas tree when a truck carrying ears of corn collided with their car.
The woman, from 035 years, and the youngest daughter, Naomi, of 15 months old, died. The children – Beau, 3, and Hunter, 2 – were seriously injured and hospitalized, but survived.
A period of painful contrasts was beginning in Biden’s life.
Grief and responsibility
“Joe had it all,” said his sister, who ran Biden’s Senate campaign.
“We thought nothing could stop us,” commented a friend from high school.
“The first days”, wrote years later Biden himself, “ I felt trapped in a constant vertigo , like those dreams in which you suddenly feel that you are falling, although in my case I was falling constantly ”.
The politician acknowledged that he wondered if he could move on.
“ I began to understand how despair leads people to liquidate everything , how suicide was not just an option but a rational option. But I looked at Beau and Hunter asleep and wondered what terrors they had in their dreams and who would explain my absence. And I knew that I had no choice but to fight to stay alive. ”
That determination led Biden to swear his position as senator in the hospital room where Beau was admitted.
They were not easy months. The president was so angry that he sometimes wandered the streets looking for trouble.
One of his new colleagues, Senator John McClellan, who had also suffered terrible losses in his family, advised him to “bury himself at work.”
But he did not want to get away from his children.
One of the outstanding anecdotes of his first years as a senator dates from that time: every day he made the round trip by train between his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington DC, more than 300 kilometres daily to be close to his own .
It was in this way that Biden developed a close and special bond with his children who, decades after then, it deepened the tear that also meant losing Beau.
Work and hope
Following the advice of his close associates, Biden gave himself up to his job as a senator, which he would hold for more than 035 years.
But he also paid attention to his personal life.
In March of 1977, went on a blind date arranged by his brother Frank with Jill, a senior in college.
Jill and Joe got married in 1977 much to the delight of Beau and Hunter, who had almost immediately become attached to her. In 1981, the couple had a daughter, Ashley.
Without forgetting the memory of Neilia and Naomi, Biden felt his family revert to and sta r complete .
Until it was shaken by a new tragedy.
A promise
Beau Biden did not follow in his father’s political footsteps. Deployed with the National Guard to Iraq in 2008, Beau was attorney general of the state of Delaware for two terms.
In the performance of That job met Senator Kamala Harris , then California Attorney General and now US Vice President
The relationship of friendship and mutual admiration between Beau and Harris was one of the factors that motivated Biden to choose her as a running mate.
When in 2015 Beau’s doctors diagnosed a rare form of brain cancer, the Bidens tried not to lose heart, despite the dismal prognosis.
The former vice president expressed the details of how the two years of his son’s illness were in the book Promise me, Dad (“Promise me, Dad”) published in November 2020
“One night, when it was clear that the odds were not good, Beau asked me to stay at his house after dinner,” Biden said in one of the book presentations .
“He told me: ‘Dad, I know you love me more than anyone in the world. But promise me you’ll be okay I’ll be fine, dad. ‘
“I was face to face with death. He saw me suffer the loss of his mother and sister. And I didn’t want me to shut myself up. I did not want me to give in to the harshness of life “, he explained.
“I know the phases of grief, like many other people. From pain to hopelessness, to recovery… It takes time. ”
The definition of character
These incidents are not only misfortunes that Biden had to endure, but they influenced some of the initiatives of his political career, such as his priorities in the Senate, his commitment to cancer research or the aforementioned decision not to stand for the elections of 2016.
According to his closest friends, former aides and political colleagues, tragedies also shaped his character.
They made him closer, more authentic, more empathetic .
Those traits were already there, but they were reinforced by all or that Biden had to learn about himself and about life while dealing with such serious problems, not forgetting the two brain aneurysms at the end of the years 97 that could have killed or incapacitated him.
“You know what it means to suffer losses,” Delaware Senator Chris Coons told Politico magazine , “But he also knows what it’s like to get up and move on.”
“He has almost a superpower in his ability to comfort, listen and connect with people who have just suffered the greatest loss of their life ” , explained the Democratic senator.
Something that can be confirmed by people who have suffered great misfortunes, such as Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in 2008.
Barden received a direct call from Biden and later said that he felt an immediate connection with the then vice president in their conversation of more than an hour.
There are two words that proliferate to refer to Biden: decency and empathy .
An important asset
This “superpower of empathy” , say his supporters, It may have been key to his presidential aspirations at a time when the pandemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of deaths and ruined families.
Biden has expressed discomfort at the fact that that someone can interpret his words about the tragedies in his life as an attempt to awaken compassion and, at election time, to win votes.
That is why he prefers to limit himself to talking about such personal issues in interviews or specific speeches.
But for those who know him best, having gone through these difficult experiences gives Biden a value that he should not hide, since sup use an advantage over Trump , who is often criticized for his inability to the place of others.
In the opinion of Senator Coons: “Biden can heal our relationships with the world, with our allies. It can restore our position of strength and leadership in the world. But it can also regain a sense of optimism and heal the incredibly deep divisions that already existed, but that Trump has exploited and widened. ”
That ability to heal wounds and reunify the country seems more necessary than ever after the violent assault on the Capitol by supporters of the outgoing president and the confrontations that have occurred in both houses of Congress between Democrats and Republicans.
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