During CNN’s Monday night town hall with former Vice President Joe Biden, the current Democratic front runner was asked about how he connects with people who have experienced tragic losses in their lives.
Biden was asked the question by anchor Carol Burnett, who noted that Biden lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972 and his son Beau four years ago to brain cancer. The question was an obvious giveaway to let Biden show his personal side, but his response was comforting to those who have experienced personal grief.
“You know, a lot of people have suffered more than I have,” Biden said. “And I’ve been really – sounds bizarre to say – lucky in the sense that I’d had an incredible family. When I lost my wife and daughter I had my best friend in the world, my sister and my brother; they moved in to help me raise my kids. My mom was there when I lost Beau. I had my son Hunter who was a great comfort and my daughter Ashley.”
“Everybody’s different, but what I found is the way you overcome enormous tragedy is you’ve got to find purpose in your life,” Biden added, suggesting a good way to find purpose is to get involved in something the person one lost cared about.
But it was one of his closing lines that really stuck out:
There will come a time, if any of you are going through it, where the thought of the person you lost will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. That’s when you know you’re going to be able to make it. That’s when you’ll know. But it’s hard.
Biden has suffered perhaps more loss than any other presidential candidate in the current election. In 1972, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter died in a car crash after Neilia drove into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer. Biden’s two young sons, Hunter and Beau, were also in the car, but survived. It appears Neilia may have looked the wrong way at a stop sign and may not have realized that the road she was crossing did not have a stop sign, leading to the crash.
For nearly a decade, Biden claimed the truck driver had “drank his lunch” that day, yet prosecutors had said there was no such evidence to back up the claim. In 2008, while running as Barack Obama’s vice-presidential candidate, the daughter of the truck driver asked Biden to apologize for the way he had lied about her father. It does not appear as if Biden has done so. The driver’s daughter said that even though her father lived another 27 years after the crash, he avoided celebrating Christmas because the crash happened on December 18 and haunted him the rest of his life. He had tried to help Neilia and her daughter after the crash.
In 2015, Beau Biden died of brain cancer at the age of 46.