by Hunter Biden
I had no idea then how many dead-end detours I’d take before I could finally keep those promises.
The twenty-four Bidens still roamed the halls. Some had gone home to shower or change or catch a quick nap, then hustled right back. Others dropped into Beau’s room, said their own words to him, or conferred with the dozen or so doctors and nurses and staff who’d been so kind to us through it all.
Beau continued to breathe barely perceptible breaths. I kept holding his hand.
My aunt Val and uncle Jim, Dad’s sister and brother, who practically raised Beau and me after the fatal car crash, came in and told me to get some fresh air, take a break, go for a walk. I declined. I didn’t want to be anywhere but beside my brother.
Finally, almost a day and a half after doctors had given Beau hours to live, Dad insisted I go with my brother-in-law Howard to pick up some pizza. The Bidens were hungry. I feared what might happen but went anyway. Ten minutes later, as we stepped inside the restaurant, my phone buzzed. It was Dad.
“Come back, honey” was all he said.
The family was crowded inside the room along with friends and doctors and nurses. Dad stood over Beau, holding his oldest son’s left hand in both of his and pressing it against his chest. My mother was beside him, while Hallie and her children huddled tearfully nearby. The lights were off, but the early evening’s last rays of sun slipped through half-open shades.
The heart monitor fell still. Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Dad’s White House doctor, stepped forward and solemnly announced time of death:
“Seven thirty-four p.m.”
The sea of loved ones that surrounded Beau—his kids, my three daughters, our wives, in-laws, a small colony of aunts and uncles and cousins—parted to form a narrow lane for me. I stepped through the opening straight to Beau. I took his right hand, across the bed from my dad. I pressed my cheek against my brother’s forehead, then kissed it. I reached out for my dad’s hand as it still held Beau’s. I bent and rested my head on my brother’s chest and wept. Dad ran his fingers through my hair and wept with me. He then bent down to put his head close to mine and we cried together even more.
No words. Our sobs were the only sounds I heard.
Then, amid this unbearable despair, I felt my brother’s chest expand just slightly. Next, I felt a heartbeat. I looked up at Dad, his eyes raw and red, and whispered, “He’s still breathing.” I turned to the doctors to say the same thing. They looked back at me with a mixture of concern and pity. One responded gently, “No, Hunter, I’m sorry, but your brother is—”
The heart monitor interrupted him. It started back up. No one else in the room really reacted; I’m not sure most of them recognized what was happening, they were so lost in their grief.
Understand, I didn’t think Beau had miraculously recovered. I believed he’d come back for only a moment—as if he’d forgotten his wallet or his car keys—so that we both could move on. He’d returned long enough for me to tell him what he already knew, and what I’d already said, just once more.
That I loved him. That I would always be with him. That nothing could ever separate us, not even death.
Then he took a last shallow breath, and left for good.
Dr. O’Connor pronounced the time of death once more:
“Seven fifty-one p.m.”
CHAPTER TWO REQUIEM
We buried Beau seven days later.
Mourners sat shoulder to shoulder inside St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church, in Wilmington’s Little Italy. The church was built by its parishioners, many of them recent immigrants and highly skilled artisans, and the main building’s last stone was set down in 1926. St. Joseph on the Brandywine, our home church, built a mile away by local powder-mill workers, wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone. Yet even at St. Anthony’s, guests were herded into an overflow room.
Among those attending: President Barack Obama and his family; Bill and Hillary Clinton; former attorney general Eric Holder; and Senator John McCain, who would die three years later from the same cancer that took Beau.
Army chief of staff General Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq during the time Beau served there, presented my brother with a posthumous Legion of Merit medal. Chris Martin of Coldplay, one of Natalie and little Hunter’s favorite musicians, performed the band’s “ ’Til Kingdom Come.” The only accompaniment as he sang alone and played acoustic guitar on the altar: the church pipe organ.
Thousands more had paid their respects at public visitations during the previous two days. The first was held at the state capital, in Dover, where Beau’s flag-draped casket rested inside the Legislative Hall. The second was inside St. Anthony’s. Lines snaked for blocks around each building while my family and I stood for hours without a break at each location—the only way we could meet with everyone. We hugged, held hands, and listened to memory after memory of Beau and the meaning that he’d given to people’s lives.
The crowds represented all of Delaware and beyond: white, Black, brown; Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Greek. Some came swaddled and cradled in their parents’ arms, others were wheeled in by their adult children and caregivers.
The throngs included everybody, it sometimes seemed, that Dad, Beau, or I had ever gone to school with, worked with, or campaigned with. There were folks we’d bumped into regularly on the street or who had served us a blue plate special at a local restaurant. There were barbers who’d given Beau and me our first haircuts. There were pediatricians who’d given us physicals and dentists who’d put on our braces. There were nurses who’d worked at St. Francis Hospital from the day we were born to the day I broke my wrist for the third time, playing football my freshman year of high school.
There were teachers and teamsters, longshoremen and autoworkers, state senators and city council members. There was a woman, now in her nineties, who had supported Dad when almost no one else did at the beginning of his quixotic first run for the U.S. Senate. There were others who’d helped with that same campaign, and then each campaign that followed, knocking on doors and passing out literature every six years for almost four decades.
There was the young worker from the state building with Down syndrome whom Beau had stopped to talk with every day. There was the family of the guy who captivated Beau and me every summer at the asbestos workers’ union picnic by gulping down a live cricket (I still have no idea why). There were the people whom Beau became close to while he accompanied me to AA meetings; they came because they were Beau’s good friends, not because he was my brother.
Virtually everyone who shuffled and sniffled through those receiving lines had a personal story to tell or affection to pass on.
Most touching to me were the words from folks I recognized but couldn’t quite place. They’d recount stories of how our families’ lives intersected in such unlikely and profound ways, often with my dad at the center.
One man told me how Dad had once picked him up hitchhiking on the side of the road at midnight when he’d run out of gas. A woman remembered how Dad had called her after a death in her family, just to give his condolences. She wanted to repay his consideration. A married couple was still moved by the memory of Dad talking to them after they’d lost a son to a drunk driving accident, and they told how his words continued to give them hope and the will to go on.
The outpouring reaffirmed the singular bond born of the public tragedy of my mother’s and sister’s death. The consequences of that crash impacted the entire state. Republican, Democrat—it didn’t matter. Delaware’s residents placed their sorrows and their hopes in a dashing young widower suddenly left with two toddlers. Our survival became a source of statewide pride. Beau and I became everyone’s cousins, nephews, adopted children.
Now Beau’s death at so young an age, before he could fulfill his immense promise, became another call for them to huddle around us and provide whatever comfort they could.
I can’t even count the number of prayer cards and medals that were pressed into
my hands, each accompanied by an explanation or a directive. One older woman gave me a medal for Saint Bartholomew, who she said was the patron saint of taking the place of another. “You have to carry your brother’s life forward,” she told me, her grip tightening. It was a recurring sentiment. (I later learned Bartholomew is also the patron saint of butchers, bookbinders, leather workers, and those afflicted with nervous disorders.)
Then there were the families who told us how Beau had counseled them while prosecuting sex crimes, a priority during his eight years as state attorney general. That focus was highlighted by the horrific case of serial child molester Earl Brian Bradley, a pediatrician who violated more than one hundred children, including a three-month-old. Beau took the case so personally that it was one reason he declined to run for my father’s former seat in the U.S. Senate in 2010. He was determined to pursue Bradley’s prosecution on what grew to more than five hundred counts.
On June 23, 2011, Bradley was convicted on all counts, then sentenced to fourteen consecutive life prison terms—plus another 164 years—without parole.
Yet Beau’s reach in that area extended far beyond the courtroom. A longtime friend of ours, a tough forty-something union guy, came up to me and confided, “Your brother made it possible for me to think about not killing myself.”
I asked him, gently, what he was talking about. He stood stunned for a moment, believing that Beau surely had disclosed his story to me. He then related how he’d been molested repeatedly by a priest thirty-five years earlier. The priest had since died, but Beau was the only person he’d ever told. The guy knew what everybody else who’d ever confided in Beau knew: he could be trusted with anyone’s deepest, darkest secrets, and he would never judge them.
Talking with all those people in those receiving lines provided me and the rest of my family with an incredible uplift at the most awful time. If ever there was a question about the impact of a life well-lived, it was answered, loud and clear, by the legions who poured past Beau’s casket during those two days.
* * *
Our family did what our family always does in a crisis, whether it’s political or personal: everybody took a role.
Dad and I dealt with parts of the planning together, from making decisions about who would speak at the service and when to fielding the calls of dignitaries from all over the world. Dad sat on his porch for hours and took one call after another from current and former leaders from every hemisphere and every country. They all had affection for him; not just respect, but true affection. So each conversation became more than just passing along condolences. It included a story about when “you brought Beau and Hunter to Berlin,” or how “I was so impressed with Beau when he came back to speak about corruption in Romania when he was attorney general,” or “I don’t know if you remember when my niece died, but you were there for our family.”
Most of the time I was encamped at Beau’s house in Wilmington, less than a mile from Dad’s. I handled condolences and well-wishers there and greeted friends who stopped by to see Hallie and her kids.
Our time became so swallowed up or interrupted by others that Dad and I never really sat together to have a heart-to-heart, to talk about what we were going through. We both cried a lot—I saw Dad cry, on his porch, after almost every call. There were moments when we simply held each other, as if holding each other up, soundlessly, realizing it was all we could do, that there were no words to take away the pain. Words almost felt risky. I was scared to death of what Beau’s passing was going to do to him, and he was scared to death of what it was going to do to me.
Each of us, in our way, dreaded the impending doom.
In the midst of it all, I worked on Beau’s eulogy. The thought of writing it amplified the emotions I’d been experiencing, and the prospect of delivering it to such a large, divergent audience only made Beau’s loss more acute.
Yet once I began, those concerns receded and then blew clean away. Despite the enormity of this public address, I realized I was preparing it for an audience of one: my brother. Hell, I knew he’d be fine with anything I came up with—again, that was Beau. So I would write passages and read them back to him aloud. He and I would then edit them and hone them together—at least that’s how it felt. I was amazed at how easily it all came.
I went through a number of significant milestones in our lives, beginning with where it always began: waking up to him in the hospital. I wanted everyone else to understand the immensity of our connection, but I also felt a responsibility to recognize just how many others claimed an enormous connection to my brother as well. The personal responses we received that week underscored that.
Writing his eulogy was at once heart-wrenching and cathartic. That’s the effect I hoped it would have on others. That’s the effect I hoped it would have on our dad.
When I finished, I didn’t read it to Dad. I wanted him to hear it for the first time inside St Anthony’s.
* * *
The first eulogy was delivered by General Odierno, his chest blooming with medals. He spoke to Beau’s character and selflessness while serving in Iraq, and then about his moral and ethical roots while serving as the state’s attorney general. He brought up Beau’s “natural charisma” and how others, soldiers and civilians alike, “willingly wanted to follow him.”
He then voiced a sentiment expressed by practically everyone who ever met Beau.
“He was committed to his community, to his home state,” the four-star general emphasized, “and to a nation that I believed one day Beau Biden would lead.”
When he finished, General Odierno stepped before Beau’s casket, stood ramrod still for a long moment, then honored it with a slow, deliberate salute.
President Obama followed. Framed by an altar splashed with white roses and hydrangeas and backlit by the soft glow pouring through the sanctuary’s rose window, the president eulogized Beau for nearly twenty-five minutes. He spoke from notes with the same calm solemnity that had carried him through the last seven long years. He made even those relegated to the overflow room feel as if he were speaking directly to them.
So much of his eulogy, however, was directed at my father, even referring to him at one point as a “brother.”
Beau and I admired the president immensely, not only for the way he treated our dad but for the way he treated our family. (He was my president first and foremost, and he was also my daughter Maisy’s basketball coach.) But it was complicated, though none of that was going through my mind right then. The infighting and internal politicking natural to any White House sometimes spilled over to my dad. I took it personally—maybe too personally—whenever I learned that some aide in the administration had tried to undercut him. So I didn’t hang around the White House much; I didn’t want to be in the position of walking into a barbecue on a Sunday with the president and the White House staff after reading about someone throwing my dad under the bus. I knew I couldn’t control my temper and keep my mouth shut.
Kathleen, however, had become close with Michelle Obama, and our daughter Maisy and her daughter Sasha had been good pals since the second grade at Sidwell Friends, where they both went to school. Kathleen and Michelle worked out together at the gym and often had evening cocktails at the White House, at both formal and informal events. I had relapsed two years after the election and didn’t feel comfortable around that scene at all, and often got the impression that there were people who didn’t feel comfortable around me.
But Beau’s service was personal and not political, and the president was all in that morning for my dad, my brother, and the rest of our family. I was nothing but appreciative.
The president opened by quoting the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh: “ ‘A man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men.’ ” Beau, he then said rightly, was an original, “A man who loved deeply, and was loved in return.”
He talked of the accident that took our mother and sister, and how it shaped Beau’s life—all of our live
s.
“For Beau, a cruel twist of fate came early,” he said. “But Beau was a Biden. And he learned early the Biden family rule: if you have to ask for help, it’s too late. It meant you were never alone; you don’t even have to ask, because someone is always there for you when you need them.”
The president noted my dad’s tender yet purposeful reaction after that tragedy, how he carried on in public service (Mike Mansfield, longest-serving majority leader in the history of the Senate, convinced Dad not to resign the office during those days between the crash and taking the oath), how he eschewed “the parlor games of Washington” and instead commuted home to Wilmington every day to see us kids off to school and kiss us good night.
“As Joe himself confessed to me,” the president put in, “he did not just do this because the kids needed him. He did it because he needed those kids.”
President Obama followed that with a litany of Beau’s many accomplishments, calling him “a soldier who dodged glory,” a prosecutor “who defended the defenseless,” and that “rare politician who collected more fans than foes.”
He summed him up, to appreciative laughter: “He even looked and sounded like Joe, although I think Joe would be the first to acknowledge that Beau was an upgrade—Joe 2.0.”
“Beau was… someone who charmed you, and disarmed you, put you at ease,” the president continued, providing a lighthearted inventory into the essence of both the public and the private Beau. “When he’d have to attend a fancy fundraiser with people who took themselves way too seriously, he’d walk over to you and whisper something wildly inappropriate in your ear. The son of a senator, a major in the Army, the most popular elected official in Delaware—I’m sorry, Joe—but he was not above dancing in nothing but a sombrero and shorts at Thanksgiving if it would shake loose a laugh from the people he loved.
“And through it all, he was the consummate public servant, a notebook in his back pocket at all times so he could write down the problems of everyone he met and go back to the office and get them fixed.