by Joe Biden
I have found over the years that, although it brought back my own vivid memories of sad times, my presence almost always brought 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: I was a newly elected thirty-year-old United States senator, excited to be down in Washington interviewing staff, when I got the call that my wife and eighteen-month-old daughter had died in a car accident while out shopping the week before Christmas. Beau and Hunt had been in the car, too. They pulled through without permanent damage, but not before spending weeks in the hospital. The pain had seemed unbearable in the beginning, and it took me a long time to heal, but I did survive the punishing ordeal. I made it through, with a lot of support, and reconstructed my life and my family. When I talk to people in mourning, they know I speak from experience. They know I have a sense of the depth of their pain.
One thing I have grown especially attuned to over the years is just how many people are quietly and uncomplainingly suffering psychic and emotional pain at any given time. Consider the simple fact that as I sped along a highway at the far edge of America in the last few days of 2014, more than two and a half million of our fellow citizens had perished in that single year. A fifth of those people had died of cancer, which meant they had likely suffered long, harrowing, and painful deaths as their families looked on feeling helpless. A population twice the size of my hometown of Wilmington had died in some form of accident. Here and healthy one day; gone forever the next. Almost forty-three thousand adults and teenagers had committed suicide in 2014. Alcohol-related deaths numbered more than thirty thousand; drug-related deaths were at nearly fifty thousand and climbing every year. The majority of drug deaths were men and women under forty. Gun deaths were close to thirty-four thousand in 2014, and two-thirds of those were suicides or accidents. As in most years, nearly 1 percent of our fellow citizens had died. The simple statistics tell so little of the real and complicated human story. These were not mere numbers. These were people like Rafael Ramos, whose death had blown a gaping hole in the lives of the family I had just seen, and who would never have the chance to use his new chaplaincy to make hundreds of lives, if not thousands, a little better.
Consider that almost everybody who died had left behind at least one or two people who were deeply and profoundly wounded by the loss; some left a dozen bereft, others a score. It amazes me how many people there are who endure and live with devastating loss with nowhere near the support I have had, who get up every single day, put one foot in front of the other, and simply carry on. They continue to do their jobs, run their daily errands, and raise their children as single parents—and often without complaint. There is an army of these soldiers. By my estimation, at any given moment, one in ten people in our country is suffering some serious degree of torment because of a recent loss, and I’m not just citing statistics again. I see them at the rope lines at any political event I do, standing there, with something behind their eyes that is almost pleading. Please, please, help me. It’s always more practical to simply pass them by, to avoid any extraneous personal entanglements, to not get thrown off the schedule. We all spend so much time on the move, racing to keep up with the imperatives of modern life and personal ambition. So I try to be mindful, at all times, of what a difference a small human gesture can make to people in need. What does it really cost to take a moment to look someone in the eye, to give him a hug, to let her know, I get it. You’re not alone?
* * *
There were nine officers in dress uniform standing guard outside the Liu house when we arrived. The NYPD had also called in a translator because Liu’s parents, though they had come from China twenty years earlier, were not comfortable speaking English and preferred to speak in their native Cantonese. They had depended on their son. Wenjian had been twelve when the family arrived, so he had been well schooled in the English language and American culture. He grew up an only child helping his parents navigate their new world, and he was still doing it at the time of his death. He had even brought his parents along on his honeymoon three months earlier.
The younger Liu was an immigrant success story. The first souvenir he bought in New York was a sticker of the Statue of Liberty. He had gone to college and studied accounting, but after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, he was determined to become a police officer. He was newly married at the time of his death, a homeowner, and a seven-year veteran of the police department, doing the job he most wanted to do. But it wasn’t just about what he had accomplished, but what he looked forward to doing. Wenjian Liu was the future of that family, and he and his new wife were already talking about having children. His sons and daughters would have started on solid ground, with a father who could help them navigate toward whatever they wanted in life, and I could sense that lost future when I walked up the little outdoor steps and into his home.
About twenty of his extended family members were seated in the kitchen so that his wife and parents could comfortably receive Jill and me in the living room. Liu’s father 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. “Thank you,” Wei Tang Liu said, remaining close. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Officer Liu’s wife, Pei Xia Chen, was so young and so beautiful. She went by “Sanny.” English was not her first language, but she was fluent, so she did the speaking for the family. Her welcome was quiet and halting. I could tell she was not only distraught at the death of the man she called the love of her life, her best friend, and her hero, but also a little intimidated to have the vice president of the United States and his wife in her home. But it didn’t take long for her to relax, and soon she told us she had something she would like to show us in the bedroom she had shared with her husband. Jill was always shy to invade people’s personal spaces, but Sanny insisted. She took us by the hand and the three of us went into the bedroom.
What Sanny wanted us to see was a picture of the two of them outside, embracing, on their wedding day three months earlier. I was struck by the size of the portrait, how happy they both looked, how proud they must have been to hang it in plain sight, and how sad she was now while looking at it. I had been there, right where she was. I could remember vividly, after my wife Neilia died, not being able to open the closet door of the bedroom we shared. I could recall 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. And I found myself wondering how Sanny would handle it, and sorry that she had to.
I pulled her aside to offer some counsel about what she was facing. I shared some of the best advice I got after Neilia’s death, from the most unexpected sources. There was a former governor of New Jersey who called me out of the blue to tell me about losing his wife. For the longest time he thought things were never, ever going to get better. Six months after his wife died, he would think of her and he would be just as miserable as the day he got the news. He was terrified it would never get better, and he knew I was probably feeling the same way. He told me to get a calendar, and every night, before I went to bed, put down a number on that day’s date. One is as bad as the day you heard the news, he said, and ten is the best day of your life. He told me not to expect any tens, and he said don’t spend any time looking at that calendar, but mark it every day. After about six months, put it on graph paper and chart it. What he promised me turned out to be true: the down days were still just as bad, but they got farther and farther apart over time.
I also told Sanny in more detail what I try to tell everybody: There will come a time when you’ll go riding by a field that you both loved, or see a flower, or smell the fragrance of his suit when he took it off and hung it in the closet, or you’ll hear a song, or you’ll look at the way someone walks, and it will all come back. But someday d
own the line, God knows when, you’ll realize it doesn’t make you want to cry. It makes you smile. “The time will come when the memory will bring a smile to your lips,” I would tell everyone in that situation, “before it brings a tear to your eyes.” That will happen, I assured her. And that is when you know that you’ve turned a corner.
The last thing I did before we left the bedroom was to give her my private phone number. “Right now, you know, everyone is going to be there for you,” I explained. “Everyone will surround you with love and you’ll be busy and have things to keep your mind off the worst. And then in six weeks, or maybe twelve weeks, everybody else’s life is going to start to get back to normal. But your life isn’t going to be normal again. As a matter of fact, as you probably understand already, it’s going to get harder for you. And after a while you’re going to start to feel guilty because you’re going to be going to the same people constantly for help, or just to talk. And as their lives get back to normal, you are going to start to worry about leaning on them too much. There might come a time when you think, I’m asking too much. I’ve got to stop complaining.
“So when you’re down and you feel guilty for burdening your family and friends,” I said, “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. “Just call me when you want to talk,” I told her. “Sometimes it’s easier to pour your heart out to somebody you don’t know well, but you know they know. You know they’ve been through it. Just pick up the phone and call me.”
* * *
We were at the little house in Gravesend for almost an hour, and near the end of the visit I started to notice that Wenjian Liu’s father had rarely left my side. Occasionally he would lean into me so that his shoulder touched my arm. “Thank you,” he kept saying. “Thank you. Thank you.” I did not pull away, but leaned in so that he could feel me there. When our advance team came to pull us out of the house, Wei Tang Liu insisted on accompanying me back outside, into the cold, wearing nothing but a cotton turtleneck, slacks, and open sandals over his socks. He seemed oblivious to the cold and remained right at my shoulder, as if he were desperately trying to convey something I needed to know. Wei Tang would call the day he lost his only son the saddest in his life. Wenjian had been an exemplar of Confucian filial piety, he would tell other mourners, a respectful, obedient, and caring son. He would tell people how his son always insisted on taking him to the doctor whenever he felt sick, or stopped by the garment factory to help him finish his piecework before driving him home, or called him every day before he finished his shift to assure him that he was safe and coming home. “You can stop worrying now,” Officer Liu would tell his father.
But I didn’t know any of that at the time. He didn’t have the English to express it to me, and I didn’t have the Cantonese to understand him. When Wei Tang gave me a final hug in front of his house, in front of the line of policemen standing guard, he held on to me tightly, for a long time, as if he could not bear to let me go. We stood there for a long while, embracing on the little sidewalk in front of the house where he had lived with his only son, just two fathers. I understood all that he wanted me to know—or thought I did.
CHAPTER FOUR
Trust
The call came right on schedule, at twelve thirty in the afternoon on the first Monday of the New Year, 2015: “Excuse me, sir, the president is ready for you.” I grabbed my small card with notes about the issues I wanted to discuss that day and set off on the forty-five-second walk from my office to his, for our weekly private lunch. Sometimes on the walk down I would think about the first time Barack Obama and I ever talked about having a meal together. It was exactly ten years earlier, back when Obama was a forty-three-year-old newly elected senator just trying to get his bearings in Washington; he wanted to be on the Foreign Relations Committee. I was the top Democrat on the committee, and senior enough that I could determine who got an open seat, so he asked to come see me.
It was clear Senator Obama would be a great asset on the committee. He seemed to have a breadth and depth of intellect, a willingness to work hard, and a sense of America’s role in the world—both the possibilities and the limitations—that was similar to my own. Beyond that, his speech at John Kerry’s Democratic National Convention the previous summer had really impressed me, as it had everyone who heard it. When he talked of the “true genius of America, a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles,” he sounded like a guy who sang from the same hymnbook I did. “People don’t expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.”
When Barack came to my office to pay his respects on that cold winter day ten years earlier, I told him I’d be happy to have him on the committee and I would make sure it happened. We didn’t have much time to talk, and I suggested we meet again, get to know each other a little better. I knew his family was still back in Chicago and he was commuting, as I was, so I told him if he ever wanted to grab dinner together some night I’d be happy to do that. I could stay down after Senate business was done and we could go to a local Italian restaurant just off the Hill. “Nothing fancy,” I said.
“Oh, we can go to a nice place,” he said, explaining that his book royalties had set him up just fine. “I can afford it.”
“I can afford it” rang in my ears as a strange comment, bordering on arrogant. It only occurred to me later, as I got to know him well, that Barack was not the sort to talk about what he could afford, and that he might have been offended that I had taken him for a man of limited resources. Just as it probably did not occur to Barack at the time that I am a man of limited resources. We never did have that dinner, but he and I had an awful lot of lunches in the years after that.
Barack Obama first called me about being considered as his running mate in June 2008, not long after he had secured enough delegates for the nomination. I was riding home to Wilmington on the train when my phone rang. He asked my permission to vet me, and I said no. “I’ll help you any way I can,” I told him, “but I don’t want to be vice president.” I obviously didn’t say this lightly. I was honored to be asked, but I had been a United States senator for thirty-five years, a job I loved, in an institution I revered. I had gained respect as a formidable legislator and had seniority. I was my own man, and I enjoyed what I was doing. I also believed I could make more significant contributions as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee than I could as vice president.
He insisted that this was not just an exercise and gave me the impression that I was already his leading candidate. “This is real,” he said. “But I need an answer now.”
“Then the answer is no.”
“Do me a favor, Joe. Go home and talk it over with the family first.”
I agreed to do that, and when I hung up I called Jill and asked her to call a family meeting. The five of us sat down that evening to talk.
My family’s response surprised me. They were all for it. Beau and Hunt argued that I could help Obama win key states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, and my foreign policy experience would help the ticket.
Jill was actually relieved by Barack’s call. She had been afraid, based on all the well-placed Democrats suggesting it to her, that Obama was going to recruit me to be his secretary of state and I’d live the next four years on airplanes and in foreign capitals. Being vice president would be a new challenge for the entire family, she said. There was also something appealing to Jill about having the vice president’s official residence as a base in Washington, which would mean we would have one home just a few minutes away from Hunt and his three daughters, and another a few minutes from Beau and his two children. It would eliminate the four-hour commute I had been making every day the Senate was in
session for the last thirty-five years and it would give me more access to my grandchildren.
The other compelling argument was this: even if my participation was just a footnote, I would have had a part in helping to elect the first African American president of the United States—and a man I believed could be a great president. My ninety-year-old mother, who had watched my lifelong fight for civil rights and racial equality, put it this way at a larger family meeting the next day: “So let me get this straight, honey. The first African American in history who has a chance to be president says he needs your help to win—and you said no.”
The decision, even with the family’s encouragement, was still difficult. I had been in Washington long enough to watch eight different vice presidents, and I knew the history. The office itself has a long and storied career—as a punch line. Benjamin Franklin suggested the vice president be referred to as “His Superfluous Excellency.” Richard Nixon was the victim of what might be the only joke Dwight Eisenhower made in his eight years as president. Eisenhower was asked during Nixon’s hard-fought campaign against John F. Kennedy if he could delineate for reporters some of the major decisions his vice president had helped to shape. “If you give me a week,” Eisenhower replied, “I might think of one.”
When Calvin Coolidge took the job, his predecessor, Thomas Riley Marshall, sent a brief note: “Please accept my sincere sympathies.” Marshall was a man who brought a towering humility and a bright sparkle of humor to the office. A vice president is a “man in a cataleptic fit,” he once said. “He cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; he is perfectly conscious of all that goes on, but has no part in it.”