by Joe Biden
Keeping the fluid levels in Beau’s ventricular system in balance and lowering the pressure on his brain was crucial to giving him relief from pain, and moments of clarity. And it was crucial to giving us hope. This was life or death now, and emotions were running high. Hallie, Jill, Ashley, and I all knew how critical it was to keep the cerebral spinal fluid perfectly balanced, and we were watching it almost hour by hour, vacillating between hope and despair. We also knew that because of the experimental nature of the live virus/anti-PD-1 treatment, it was important that Al Yung and Fred Lang be able to oversee the calibration. So the doctors at Reed were draining Beau’s ventricular system every day and doing new scans to send down to M. D. Anderson. But the obstacles to communicating data between medical professionals in different hospitals persisted. As at Jefferson, the technicians at Walter Reed were unable to quickly and seamlessly transfer the scans to M. D. Anderson. So Howard and Hunt had to once again find a way to take video or photographs of the scans with their personal iPhones or iPads and transmit them to Dr. Yung and Dr. Lang. There were times when I found them cursing this heartless system, because especially now, when Beau was really suffering, the loss of a day, an hour, even a minute, was real anguish for everyone in the family. My God, I thought to myself, there had to be a better way. I had to be able to do something about this.
And yet, in spite of this vexing reality, we were still seeing evidence that Beau might be about to turn the corner.
Jill and I were able to take Beau outside in his wheelchair that afternoon and the next evening, too, for a full half hour. The weather was mild for late May; it was eighty degrees in the twilight, with a slight cooling breeze. I knew Beau had to be in pain; I could see it in his eyes. But he seemed better. He occasionally nodded or smiled, or gave a thumbs-up. The sunset was just starting to color the clouds and I found myself remembering Beau as a little boy, sitting out on the balcony off my bedroom, looking out over the trees, watching the sunset. “Lookit, Daddy,” he would say as the sun dropped below the tree line. “It’s disappearing.”
* * *
I was mildly upbeat when I headed out to make a speech early the next afternoon at the Brookings Institution, because Beau seemed to be improving. The subject of my talk that day was Ukraine, which was in trouble. Putin had kept constant pressure on Russia’s neighbor country in the three months since the second Minsk agreement. He was still working hard to destabilize the Ukrainian economy and its government, and he had not pulled back his heavy artillery or his troops. In fact, we knew he had deployed as many as ten full battalions, along with air defense systems, near the border in the Rostov area alone. Two regular Russian soldiers had been wounded and captured in fighting inside Ukraine ten days earlier. The Russian-backed separatists—with Russian soldiers alongside them—had continued making sporadic but deadly attacks. And they gave no signs of backing away. At a meeting two weeks earlier, Putin had brushed aside Secretary of State John Kerry’s reminder that the Russians needed to stop training and equipping separatist forces in Ukraine and that they needed to remove their troops from the border.
Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, was doing his best to keep his soldiers on the front lines from responding to provocations from the separatists and their Russian sponsors on the ground, but the cease-fire never really held. And yet, in the face of Putin’s aggressive campaign to split Ukraine, Poroshenko was managing to hold his government together and move it toward greater transparency. I had been on the phone with either Poroshenko or his uneasy governing partner, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or both, almost every week for the past three months, encouraging them to put patriotism above personal ambition. Working together, President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk had taken the first steps toward important political reforms; the government had already established a national anticorruption bureau and Poroshenko had appointed its first head. We were doing what we could to help. We had, along with our European allies, widened the economic sanctions against Russia, and we had provided the Ukrainians another seventy-five million dollars’ worth of nonlethal military equipment: armored personnel carriers, communications equipment, surveillance drones, and more countermortar radars. But in the last week in May, Putin had still not called off his dogs at Ukraine’s border. He remained in flagrant violation of the agreement he had signed.
News reports on the day of my speech at Brookings suggested that Putin was about to go a step further, putting the resolve of NATO, the EU, and the U.S. to a serious test. A Reuters correspondent had just returned from a Russian military encampment thirty miles from Ukraine, where he had witnessed the arrival of four separate trainloads of military equipment and troops. “The weapons being delivered there included Uragan multiple rocket launchers, tanks and self-propelled howitzers,” the story read. “The amount of military hardware at the base was about three times greater than in March this year, when Reuters journalists were previously in the area.”
The other ominous bit of news was that Putin was about to sign a decree banning the reporting of Russian deaths during “special operations” in peacetime—as it had long been banned in wartime. Putin wanted to bury any evidence of battle deaths in Ukraine, because two-thirds of the Russian population opposed the idea of sacrificing Russian soldiers to grab back pieces of Ukraine. “Some watchers can see only one plausible reason for the change,” noted the Washington Post. “Russia is gearing up for another military push into Ukraine.”
I was not going to pull any punches in this speech, because I knew everybody in the U.S. and in Europe would be paying attention. We had to extend the punishing sanctions on the Russian aggressors. We had to have a real debate about arming Ukrainians with weapons they could use to defend themselves. But more than that, it was time to call out Putin as a bully and to remind everybody that the West stood up to bullies. “We’ve reached another moment in the history of the transatlantic relationship that calls out for leadership, the kind our parents’ and grandparents’ generations delivered,” I reminded the group at Brookings that day, and the world. “I think it’s that basic. I think it’s similar. I believe the terrain, though, is fundamentally in our favor. Not because of the inevitability of any kind of trajectory toward unification or integration or democratic freedoms. Every generation has its demagogues and revisionists, and transitions are full of peril that provides them with many, many opportunities.
“What makes me optimistic is that President Putin’s vision has very little to offer the people of Europe—or, for that matter, the people of Russia—other than myths and illusions, the false promise of returning to a past that, when examined, was not too good a past to begin with. A sleight of hand that presents the bullying of civil societies, dissidents, and gays as substitutes for strong leadership and functioning institutions. The propaganda that conflates aggression with strength.”
That evening when I got back to Walter Reed, Beau still appeared to be improving.
* * *
He had a bad night on Wednesday, and by the next afternoon, Thursday, he was barely responsive. No nods. No fist bumps. No thumbs-ups. We all prayed it was just another temporary setback, and Beau would come out of it—with a little extra ground to gain back. Somebody from the medical staff came into Beau’s room to arrange a meeting for the next morning, when the doctors would give the family their assessment of Beau’s condition and his prognosis. There would be new scans to look at by then. I thought the images would probably show more buildup of the cerebral spinal fluid. Once they drained it, Beau would be back in the game.
The whole family was gathered at ten o’clock Friday morning in a long, narrow conference room. The doctors from Walter Reed sat on one side of the table and the family on the other. There was a speakerphone in the center, so the team from M. D. Anderson could weigh in also. The doctors, including Doc O’Connor and Ashley’s husband, Howard, had clearly been talking among themselves, and they seemed fairly united in their message. The physicians did not like what they saw. The scans looked far
worse than they had just two days earlier. But the doctors couldn’t be sure if it was the virus at work or the tumor.
I was still looking for a way through it, out to the other side, with Beau alive. And I think the rest of the family felt the same way. After about forty-five minutes, one of the doctors from Walter Reed finally said it might be worth waiting for another twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and see what happens. We all filed out of the conference room and walked back down the hall toward Beau’s room feeling hopeful, holding on to the idea that he might pull out of this again. But then we heard Howard’s voice behind us. “You’ve got to come back,” he said, as he steered us again to the conference room. “You have to tell them the truth,” Howard said to the doctors still assembled. What was happening in Beau’s brain was no longer reversible, the doctors 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 asked Howard if she should bring the kids down on Monday, and he told her, no, Hallie, you have to bring the kids here now. 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, toward 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. Hunter’s wife and daughters came to be with us. My sister Val, her husband Jack, my brother Jim and his wife Sarah were there with us. My niece Missy, who had grown up with Beau, came to be with us, too. And we waited, all of us, together. Hunter and Howard left the floor briefly, just after seven o’clock that night, to pick up food for the family. And not long after they walked out, Beau’s breathing became labored, and then extremely shallow, and then appeared to stop. There was no heartbeat registering on the monitor. Hunt and Howard raced back, and when they arrived they found the rest of us gathered around Beau. Hunt walked over, bent down to kiss him, and placed his hand over his brother’s heart. Howard looked at the monitor. “Look,” he said. Beau’s heart was beating again.
It didn’t last long.
May 30. 7:51 p.m. It happened, I recorded in my diary. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy.
* * *
Jill and I arrived home in Delaware on Air Force Two at about eight o’clock on Sunday night, almost exactly twenty-four hours after Beau passed. General Frank Vavala, the commander of the Delaware National Guard, in which Beau had served, was waiting to greet us on the tarmac, his wife by his side. By the time we reached them, the general and his wife were both in tears, and they could not stop crying. “We loved Beau,” he said. Jill and I were on the tarmac for almost five minutes trying to console them, and when we finally got in our car and pulled away I saw the general standing there, ramrod straight, saluting. And sobbing.
Jill wanted to go to our dock as soon as we got home, so we took Champ down the slope of the hill and walked out over the edge of the lake. This was one of the longest days of the year, so there was still light in the sky when we sat down, and Jill spotted a white egret at the far edge of the water. She said it made her feel more connected to Beau, being here at a place he loved so deeply. She told me that at one point, in the final hours, she had leaned in and whispered to him, “Go to a happy place, Beau. Go to the dock, with Hunter.” We watched the egret for twenty minutes, until it finally took flight. The two of us sat in silence as the egret circled overhead repeatedly, slowly gaining altitude, until it finally headed away to the south, beneath the clouds, and gradually disappeared from sight. “It’s a sign from God,” Jill said. “Beau being at the lake one last time, and heading for heaven.”
Jill went in to bed not long after 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 books and mementos were shoved into the middle of the floor in open boxes or piles. I asked a couple of Secret Service agents to help me move Jill’s desk and my credenza back into place, but that didn’t take long. I needed something to do to keep my mind occupied until I could sleep, so I started emptying some of the boxes and replacing the books—methodically, by subject matter—on the shelves. The last box I grabbed held some pages from scrapbooks and some old family photos. The photograph on top of the pile fluttered out, so I bent down to pick it up; it was a four-by-six color photo of Beau. He was probably eight or nine, in sneakers and shorts, wearing a baseball cap and a jacket, walking through the hedgerows at the Station, the house I bought soon after Neilia died. The boys and Ashley had grown up there. 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, forty years ago, after Neilia and Naomi died in the car accident, 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. Remember. Home base.”
* * *
I have been a public man for almost fifty years, which means my children and grandchildren have been part of a public family their entire lives. They knew without my ever saying it that the way we conducted ourselves over the next week, the way we said good-bye to Beau, mattered enormously. He, too, was a public man—a loved and respected figure in Delaware—so he would have to be celebrated, and mourned, in public. There was a schedule already taking shape. On Thursday, we would all be driving down to the state capital of Dover, with the body in a flag-draped coffin; Beau would lie in honor during a four-hour ceremony in Legislative Hall. Then we would fly back to Washington that evening for Maisy Biden’s eighth-grade graduation. Friday morning was Beau’s daughter Natalie’s fourth-grade graduation in Wilmington, then the private family mass at our home parish, St. Joseph’s on the Brandywine, followed by a public wake at St. Anthony’s, in the heart of Wilmington. Saturday was the memorial service, the Mass of Christian Burial, also at St. Anthony’s, followed by the interment in our family plot at St. Joseph’s. All through the planning, I was mindful of concentric circles of obligation—obligations to Beau, to his wife and children, to my wife and my other children, to my other grandchildren, to my brothers and sister, to my extended family, to my friends, but also to everyone who came to the wakes or the funeral, or watched the proceedings on television, some of which were to be broadcast live across the country. I believed it was my public duty to demonstrate to those millions of people facing the same awful reality that it was possible to absorb real loss and make it through. My family and I had an obligation to show perseverance and grace.
Hallie and my sister Val and Hunter and I planned out almost every step of the days to come. We made charts and diagrams of where we would walk and sit and stand. But as we bent to the task, I noticed that Hunter, determined to honor Beau’s wishes, took the lead. He knew how his brother would want to be remembered—as a husband, a father, a public man who meant to serve all, and a soldier—and he was determined to infuse the proceedings with the vital red blood of Beau’s life. He called Protestant ministers, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim cleric and invited them to be on the altar along with the Roman Catholic cardinal and
priests; he made sure Beau’s National Guard brigade had a place in the ceremony and arranged for a horse-drawn hearse to carry Beau’s casket through the streets of Wilmington, which would be lined with a military honor guard and the police Beau had led as attorney general. Hunt selected an African American choral group to bring joyful music to the service and bagpipers to add the mournful, plaintive wail of Irishness.
The final touch was a special gift from Hallie to the children. They had been riding in a car one afternoon when a Coldplay song came on the radio. “That’s Daddy’s favorite,” nine-year-old Hunter said. Hunter had taken possession of his father’s iPod by then, and Hallie noticed that he kept playing “’Til Kingdom Come” over and over. So Hallie called Beth Buccini, whose husband Robbie was Beau’s best friend, and who had a way to get a message to Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin. Martin agreed to fly in from London to perform the song at the mass, and Robbie Buccini generously agreed to pick up the tab for all of his travel expenses.
Barack had offered to do the main eulogy for Beau—an offer we accepted. And Beau’s overall commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, also agreed to speak. The general, now chief of staff of the U.S. Army, had called two days after Beau died to ask if he and his wife could attend the funeral. “I really expected Beau would be leading our country one day,” he said to me. I thought it best that Ashley and Hunter speak for the family, that they should be the ones to stand up and eulogize their brother. And they agreed. But despite the meticulous planning, when we all stepped out of our home together for the first public event, nobody in the family was under the illusion that this would be easy.