Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  Being inside Emanuel that day was an emotional, uplifting, beautiful thing. The outpouring of love and shared grief that Dad and I received and returned was indeed a source of strength. There was an enormous amount of cross-commiseration: it seemed as if every single parishioner came up and gave us both a big hug and a kiss and a cry. As was true of those who came up to us during the week between Beau’s death and his funeral, listening to others’ heartbreaking stories only underscored that loss is not unique.

  There were moments when I felt guilty for being extended so much sympathy, especially when I knew so many of the people extending it had experienced tragedies far worse than mine. It staggered me to think about how so many of them had faced their losses without the love and resources available to me.

  There were also times, I have to admit, when I felt as if no one else could understand my pain. It seemed narcissistic even to contemplate. Yet that didn’t make it feel any less true. Believing that your pain is exceptional doesn’t lessen anyone else’s.

  Pain is our universal condition. People can go through life without finding love, but no one lives for long without experiencing real hurt. It can connect us or it can isolate us. I vacillated between the two.

  Those were thoughts that overwhelmed me on that sad, triumphant day in Charleston, then the epicenter of America’s pain.

  * * *

  I continued to experience bouts of hopefulness and hopelessness. My dad and I struggled, neither of us knowing quite how to put our finger on what we wanted to say. When I looked into his eyes I saw what struck me as insurmountable sadness—as well as concern for me. It wasn’t just that Beau was missing. The question that lingered was bigger than that, and one we hadn’t yet answered for ourselves: If we weren’t the three of us anymore, what were we?

  At one point, I remember telling Dad, “I don’t know if I should be grateful or angry at you for making us all love each other so much.”

  He took it the way it sounded, which was as a pretty spectacular compliment. And it was, in one way. Yet I also meant it in a more literal sense. I just felt so much pain, as I know he did and still does.

  I tried to keep my focus on my kids and family and the things that gave me a real sense of meaning and motive.

  I then allowed one moment, and all the underlying anger and confusion it unleashed, to give me the excuse to drink again. It was an almost instantaneous reaction, at once impulsive and short-sighted and, perhaps, inevitable.

  Virtually everything I did afterward, for the next four years, resulted in me stumbling, then sliding, then racing downhill.

  * * *

  On July 2, Kathleen and I took our traditional anniversary walk: one mile for each year we’d been married. The twenty-two-mile trip that warm, overcast day started in Georgetown, looped past the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, then crossed the Potomac River and followed a rolling towpath nearly to Mount Vernon. We then retraced our steps back home.

  Along the way, we discussed our marriage: past, present, and future. There was plenty to talk about. We were on rocky ground. If you’re married to someone for twenty-two years, there are twenty-two million reasons to get a divorce. To my mind, however, there are not many good ones.

  Kathleen had said, “Tell me everything; let’s get everything out in the open that we can.” I owned up to all my shortcomings—every grievance, every secret, every sin. We talked about our lack of intimacy, my being consumed by work and keeping up with our crushing bills, my past bouts with drinking, and how I was addressing those problems now. I hadn’t had a drink in months. Some things were more troublesome than others, but I didn’t think any of them rose to the level of ending our marriage. I was committed—recommitted—to making it work.

  The next day we met with a couples’ counselor whom we had worked with together for a while and who more recently I’d been seeing alone. She was aware of our anniversary tradition and asked how it went. I responded enthusiastically. I said it had been cathartic and felt that we’d come to a better understanding of where we stood. I said it left me feeling hopeful.

  Then Kathleen answered. It was as if we had walked twenty-two miles in opposite directions. Her take, basically: “Cathartic? Who are you kidding? You can say that you’re sorry for the rest of your life and it wouldn’t matter. I’m never going to forgive you.”

  I was floored. In that moment, everything we’d said to each other the day before seemed for naught—seemed like utter bullshit. It felt like Kathleen had made the decision that we were over on the day Beau died and that the conversation we’d had driving home after his funeral really had been the end.

  I snapped. I did the kind of counterproductive thing that every good alcoholic knows how to do in times of deep frustration: I set out to prove her right.

  I walked out of the session, bought a bottle of vodka, and drained it.

  Within weeks I was back in rehab.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to burden my dad with the problems of my marriage, with my doubts and loneliness. I only wanted to project to him a sense of well-being. Not only was he dealing with Beau’s loss while continuing to perform the duties of his office, but he was also in the midst of deciding whether to run for president in 2016.

  The only recourse to salvaging my marriage and returning home was to enroll in another rehab program and stay 100 percent sober. Kathleen made that clear: I wasn’t permitted back into the house until I met those criteria. I didn’t think it was the best thing for me, my problem, or my kids, but I didn’t think she knew what else to do.

  I became an outpatient for about a month at a facility at the University of Pennsylvania, living during that period in my uncle Jimmy’s house in Philadelphia. Therapists prescribed two drugs for me, one to lessen my cravings, another to make me feel sick to my stomach if I drank. I didn’t test the effect of the latter. The effect of the first drug was middling.

  I spent the following month at an inpatient program on a rural mountaintop about seventy miles west of Philly. I enrolled there under an assumed name, Hunter Smith, which in itself made it difficult to share the realities of what I was going through. There were times during group sessions when it almost felt like I was playacting—performing a facsimile of my story rather than confessing it. The greatest value to being in rehab is the opportunity to be honest with yourself and the other patients there, most if not all of whom are strangers. Yet for me to talk as “Hunter Smith” about the loss of someone as close to me as my brother felt less than authentic, particularly when so many had seen me give his eulogy on TV less than two months before.

  I’m convinced that depriving someone for a month or more at a time of the most important relationships in his or her life—in my case, my three daughters—is too often a critical failure in how addicts are treated. I felt only one thing there: alone. Yet to have any chance of returning home, it’s what I had to do.

  That fall, I moved into an apartment in Washington, a second-story two-bedroom in a new building on the corner of Eleventh Street and Rhode Island Avenue, near Logan Circle. It was across the street from a skate park and catty-corner to a liquor store. It was the first time in forty-six years that I lived by myself. Instead of going home every night to be embraced by three children I adored, I returned to a strange, silent space. I slept only on the couch; the idea of sleeping in a bed by myself heightened my gnawing sense that Kathleen already knew she was never letting me come back.

  I went to therapy three days a week and met with a sober coach. I toted around a portable Breathalyzer with a built-in camera, blowing into it four times a day as it fed a live image to a remote counselor, making sure I didn’t sneak a drink. I attended yoga sessions six times a week, and at my therapist’s urging went two nights a week to a self-realization program in Aberdeen, Maryland, a ninety-minute drive each way. Throughout all that, I maintained my consulting business, downsized as it was.

  I still went to my daughters’ soccer games and other extracurricular activi
ties outside the house, and Naomi was now attending Penn. I was also able to spend more time with Beau’s kids, Natalie and Hunter. A shared-travails bond began to form between Hallie and me. She became someone to confide in—at that point, nothing more. My anger, some justified, some not, served for me as its own counterintuitive motivation: I was going to get sober and get better, dammit, but no longer beg Kathleen to be her husband.

  That October, my dad announced he would not run for president in 2016. He talked publicly about the impact of Beau’s death on him and our family, and the need for more time to recover. He didn’t talk about the other dynamic in the equation: the prevailing attitude among Democratic Party influencers that it was Hillary Clinton’s turn, a dividend she’d earned from her narrow primary loss to Obama and her service afterward as secretary of state. For Dad to compete, it would have been an uphill climb from the start.

  I don’t know if my relapses figured into his calculation. They certainly couldn’t have helped, but that’s not something Dad would ever say. I encouraged him to run. My dad saw how hard, if choppily, I was working to get sober. More than anybody, he knows this one thing: adversity brings our family closer together.

  By then, the fall air had turned cooler and the light angled lower. All the old daily rhythms that revolved around Beau seemed off. I no longer called him, or answered his call, three times a day, like clockwork, arguing almost as much as we laughed. I no longer walked into my parents’ house to find him already there, half joking about the expired jar of mayonnaise in the back of the refrigerator.

  Everything I drove past, it seemed, triggered his memory: the Amtrak station where we basically were raised; the railroad tracks we hiked up and down as kids; the Charcoal Pit, where we ordered triple-thick black-and-white milkshakes, cheesesteaks, and well-done fries. Even seeing a duck fly by—Beau loved those damn ducks.

  This strange new normal quickened during the holidays. My girls were traumatized by Beau’s death and confused by their family seeming to disintegrate before their eyes. I kept telling them, “Your mom and I, we’ll figure this out. Don’t be mad. It’s not your mom’s fault. It all revolves around my drinking or not drinking.” But that was bullshit. It felt as if everyone was waiting for me to lose it and prove their point.

  Which I did, beginning the week before Christmas.

  * * *

  Each year on December 18, our immediate family, along with a handful of longtime friends, gather for the anniversary of my mommy’s and baby sister’s deaths. We’d meet in Wilmington for 7 a.m. mass at St. Joe’s, then head to my parents’ house for coffee and Danish or bagels. Dad and Beau and I would visit the grave sites to lay a wreath topped with three white roses. Now, Beau rested fifteen feet away.

  In past years, Kathleen and I would come up the night before with the girls, who were out of school by then, so we could all go to the service in the morning. We’d then stay in Delaware through Christmas morning, when we’d all fly to Chicago to be with Kathleen’s family at their lake house.

  This anniversary, however, Kathleen called to tell me the girls weren’t coming to Delaware until Christmas Eve, and that she didn’t want me accompanying them to Michigan City for Christmas.

  I was shattered. I see now that what she was trying to do was to protect our girls. As much as it hurt me, I was the threat that she needed to protect them from. It’s a hard-earned wisdom—as an addict, you often force the ones closest to you to make the tough decisions, things that can break a relationship beyond repair. But those same actions can save the innocents around you from a far greater pain. Kathleen was brave in these moments, and I’ve only come to appreciate that now.

  I wasn’t thinking about any of that back then. Hours after Kathleen’s call, I started drinking secretly, though I backed off enough to prevent it from becoming a full-blown binge. My daughter Naomi’s birthday is on December 21, another day we usually spent at my parents’, and I couldn’t see her then, either; I’d already missed Finnegan’s and Maisy’s birthdays in August and September because I was in rehab.

  Christmas followed in no time. The girls left with Kathleen. Mom and Dad flew to the Caribbean with Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Val, like they did every Christmas. Hallie and her kids headed to Florida with another family.

  Beau was dead.

  Alone, depressed, angry, my brain humming with an alcoholic’s illogic, I bought a bottle of vodka, retreated into my DC apartment, and drank. I did that practically every day, all day, from Christmas until the end of January.

  * * *

  I would turn on the TV, sit on the couch, drink, pass out. Even drunk—especially drunk—I never slept in my bed. I’d watch the TV nearly comatose, staring at it without really being aware of what was on. Other times, I’d cry for hours without realizing I was crying. I hardly ate.

  I phoned it in at work, with the five employees in my office taking up the slack. I sat in on some conference calls, canceled meetings, didn’t go to the office. I scratched all business trips. The only calls I took were from my daughters and my dad, who called incessantly. He’d ask how I was. I’d say fine, hang up, pass out, wake up, drink more.

  I would drink like that for twelve to sixteen hours. When I finished a bottle, I’d trek across the street to Logan Circle Liquor, a sagging storefront filled with racks of booze and a clerk who worked behind a bulletproof plastic window. I’d order a handle of Smirnoff vodka—about a half gallon—in a tremulous voice and pay for it with shaky hands. Usually I’d head straight home, but sometimes the block-long trip proved to be too much: somewhere between crossing the street and climbing the stairs to my apartment, I’d unscrew the cap and sneak a swig.

  I wouldn’t realize that whole days, even weeks, had passed. Each one bled into the next, while simultaneously crawling by at a glacial pace. Before long I began to wake up with debilitating withdrawal symptoms. It became a chore just to raise my head off the pillow. If there wasn’t a last swig left in the bottle, it took a Herculean effort to put on my boots and jacket and stumble back to the liquor store. The short walk soon felt like a marathon; then, like I was crawling over broken glass.

  I had never drunk like that before. I’d drunk to excess, to the point where I knew it was no longer smart to keep drinking—that’s how it was when I decided to get sober in 2003 and again in 2010. But I’d never been in such pain that I couldn’t go out, that I almost couldn’t go on. I lost twenty pounds. I didn’t eat anything much beyond what was available at the liquor store: Doritos, pork rinds, ramen noodles. Eventually my stomach couldn’t even handle the noodles.

  I was drowning myself in alcohol.

  * * *

  I pulled out of the free fall just once. Three weeks in, unshaven and shedding weight, I saw on my calendar a commitment I’d made months earlier that I couldn’t back out of: a weeklong trip to the Middle East with a U.S. delegation for the World Food Program USA. It was too important; lives literally depended on it. So, as I’d done plenty of times before, I pulled out the drunk’s hole card and did what to others might seem impossible: transformed myself into a functional alcoholic. I showered, shaved, packed, and boarded a plane for Beirut.

  Our first visit was to a refugee camp in Lebanon, next to the Syrian border. On the other side, 700 men, women, and children were stranded in a windswept no-man’s-land with barely any assistance. They were pleading to join the 80,000 other Syrians housed in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, a teeming but well-organized shelter that we also would soon visit, talking with families housed in metal shipping crates that dotted a treeless, unpaved stretch of sand. Following those sojourns, I would head to Amman to lobby King Abdullah II, one-on-one, for their entry.

  I’d been dropped into desperate spots around the world for the WFP many times before. Each left an indelible mark.

  For instance, in December of 2013, I flew to the Philippines a month after it was lashed by Typhoon Haiyan, whose winds as high as 190 miles per hour wiped out whole swaths of the country. More than 6,000 peop
le were killed and 4.1 million displaced. At the time, it was the largest typhoon in recorded history.

  When we landed on the southernmost tip of Samar Island, in Guiuan, it looked as if someone had taken an industrial-sized scythe and cut every tree in half for as far as the eye could see. What Haiyan didn’t demolish, storm surge washed away. The town’s mayor, standing in an office with no walls and no roof, called the typhoon delubyo—Armageddon.

  Yet those who survived were nothing short of astonishing. Throngs of kids swarmed us, so many of them smiling. A two-year-old clambered into my arms and wouldn’t let go, clinging to me as I toured the devastation. Everyone told survival stories: clutching a tree, hiding under a hut, carrying neighbors on their shoulders through rising floodwaters.

  The WFP had mobilized pre-positioned food supplies within hours of the typhoon’s landfall—rice from Sri Lanka, high-energy biscuits from Bangladesh—and everyone we met was appreciative and energetic and incredibly generous with one another. Amid all that loss, it turned out to be one of the most inspiring trips I’d taken to a place where people had just experienced their darkest moment. Their hope and perseverance were infectious.

  More common was the kind of heartbreak prevalent during a visit in 2011 to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, near Somalia. More than 200,000 refugees and asylum seekers had fled drought, famine, and conflict to settle at a complex set in the middle of a semi-arid outback. It is the third-largest such encampment in the world.

  Starvation and malnutrition were inescapable. Mothers told me harrowing accounts of crossing the Somali desert with five children and arriving in Dadaab with only two—the others were killed by lions. Established in 1991 in response to what relief workers hoped would be a temporary crisis, the camp now spanned generations.