[imagesource: Getty]

When Joe Biden spoke to the American people about the pain that has come with the loss of loved ones due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he knew what he was talking about.

Over the years the new POTUS has had to deal with more loss than most of us would be able to handle.

Let’s start at the beginning.

In 1966, he married his first wife, Neilia.

He describes meeting her in his memoir, Promises to Keep, via Biography, when he sneaked into an exclusive beach resort and spotted her by the pool.

“When she turned toward me, I could see she had a beautiful smile and gorgeous green eyes,” he wrote in his memoir Promises to Keep. “She was lit by the unforgiving journey of a full afternoon sun, and I couldn’t see a single flaw.”

Despite her parent’s misgivings about his politics (he’s a Democrat, they were Republicans), and his working-class upbringing, the two married.

As their lives became more complicated amidst Biden’s campaign for election to the New Castle County Council in 1970 (he was successful), she “held down the fort”, and went on to give birth to their three children – Beau Biden in February 1969, Hunter Biden in February 1970, and Amy Biden in November 1971.

Two years after his first political victory, Neilia took on a leading role in Biden’s campaign against Republican J. Caleb Boggs for the U.S. Senate, serving as what her husband called the “brains” of the operation.

Biden, at only 30, became the second-youngest person ever elected to the Senate.

Then on December 18, 1972, Neilia went Christmas shopping.

At approximately 2:30 p.m., Neilia was driving westbound on rural Valley Road in Hockessin, the three children accompanying her in the family station wagon. She pulled the car past a stop sign and directly into the path of a tractor-trailer, headed full-steam along Route 7 to Pennsylvania.

According to reports, the impact sent her car around 150 feet into an embankment. The family was rushed to Wilmington General Hospital, but it was too late to save Neilia and 13-month-old Amy.

The boys were in critical condition.

As Joe recalled in Promises to Keep, he knew something terrible had happened after watching his sister answer the phone at his office that afternoon, a tangible feeling of Neilia’s loss heightening when Valerie suggested they return home because of a “slight accident.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” he responded.

He was in Washington, having just assumed temporary office.

He wrote that in his grief, “he understood how suicide seemed a tempting option”, but didn’t want to leave his sons.

Joe ultimately climbed back with help from his Senate colleagues and support of his sister, though it was his focus on the well-being of Beau and Hunter that enabled all three of them to move on with their lives.

In 1975, he met then University of Delaware student Jill Jacobs (his current wife and the US First Lady). Shortly before their wedding in 1977, he asked her how she could “commit herself to marriage knowing his feelings for his first wife”.

She replied that “anybody who can love that deeply once can do it again”. Biden’s sons saw her as a second mother.

Per Marie Claire, tragedy would strike again in 2015, when Beau died of brain cancer at the age of 46.

“Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known,” Joe said in a statement at the time. Then-president Obama gave the eulogy at Beau’s funeral, saying: “He was a good man. He did in 46 years what most of us couldn’t do in 146.”

Biden decided not to run for president in 2016, in order to process his grief, but won his 2020 campaign.

The former vice president was open about his experiences with grief on the campaign trail, frequently mentioning Beau and speaking intimately with bereaved voters.

In January of 2020, Politico’s Michael Kruse described empathy as Joe’s “superpower,” writing: “There is no person in American politics today whose life has been so shaped by loss and grief. The long arc of Biden’s career is all but bracketed by tragedy.”

He also mentioned Beau in his farewell speech to Delaware just before he took office as the US president.

Head to the one minute mark:

After everything that he’s been through, it’s a miracle that he’s still standing.

His son, Hunter, went on to marry a South African woman in 2019, just six days after they met.

You can read more about Joe Biden’s personal history here and here.

[sources:biography&marieclaire]