Still, as the weeks passed, previously invisible fissures appeared and widened. This was especially true in my relationship with Kathleen. Some of those cracks had been there before Beau got sick, created in part by my relapses with alcohol. Without Beau, those issues were magnified. Beau was always an unflagging lodestar for me whenever a problem appeared. Now I felt at sea. Every relationship in the family was rocked to some degree by Beau’s death; every relationship had to adjust.
Beau left a hole that was hard to fill.
Dad was quiet—and sad. We each dealt with our grief in ways that often were incongruent with helping each other. I made myself unavailable for affection, too easily retreating into my thoughts and fears. Dad soldiered on, as he had so many times before. He resumed the business of being vice president, which takes up an enormous amount of time and focus.
Soon after the funeral, the family planned to go away together to Kiawah Island, a white-sand retreat on the coast of South Carolina, about twenty-five miles outside of Charleston. We’d gathered there before, but this time, with the noise and emotion and ceremony of the funeral finally having subsided, we would all see how hard Beau’s death was on each of us.
Then, as so often happened during my father’s decades of high-profile public service, a national calamity rocked our personal agenda. A week before we were scheduled to leave for South Carolina, a twenty-one-year-old white racist opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in downtown Charleston. He murdered nine Black women and men during a Wednesday-night Bible study, reportedly telling the congregants before mowing them down, “Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.” Victims included the church’s forty-one-year-old pastor and state senator, Clementa Pinckney.
Our family arrived at Kiawah the following Tuesday. Dad attended the memorial service three days later, where, from behind a purple-draped pulpit, President Obama brought together the congregation, the victims’ families, and the rest of the country with his tearful rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
I went with Dad two days after that to Emanuel’s regular Sunday service. We never really discussed going. One of us just asked, “What do you think we should do?” and we both immediately thought, “Of course we should go.” Dad had arranged to attend quietly and without notice. He hoped that his appearance, so soon after his oldest son’s death, would be a source of strength for a congregation in such pain and that they, in turn, would be a source of strength and grace for him.
We drove into Charleston early that morning. The church was packed. I love going to AME churches. It’s such a welcoming community, and I always find it to be an uplifting experience. Beau and I had attended countless services with Dad since we were kids, in Delaware and elsewhere across the country.
Dad seemed to know everyone. He had spent a lot of time in South Carolina over the decades and had deep roots in the Black community. Early in his career, he campaigned for a dying breed of white Southern Democrat, like the state’s longtime junior senator Fritz Hollings, as these politicians reversed their positions on civil rights. With alternatives like Strom Thurmond, they served as a transition until a generation of Black leadership, energized by the civil rights movement my Dad saw up close in Wilmington, began to rise. Dad’s friendship with James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress, dates back to the early 1980s, and in speaking about his late wife Emily, the congressman has said that “there’s nobody Emily loved as a leader in this country more than she loved Joe Biden, and we talked about Joe all the time.”
Dad hadn’t planned to speak publicly to the congregation, filled that Sunday with visitors from all over the country. But Reverend Norvel Goff Sr., the pastor who had replaced the murdered Reverend Pinckney, spoke directly to us from the pulpit—about loss and grief and understanding—and then asked Dad to take the pulpit and say a few words.
“I wish I could say something that would ease the pains of the families and of the church,” Dad began, the familiar trace of hurt and empathy in his tone. The crowded church was hushed and rapt. “But I know from experience, and I was reminded of it again twenty-nine days ago, that no words can mend a broken heart. No music can fill a gaping void… And sometimes, as all preachers in here know, sometimes even faith leaves you just for a second. Sometimes you doubt… There’s a famous expression that says faith sees best in the dark, and for the nine families, this is a very dark, dark time.”
The congregation stood as one for Dad after he read a verse from Psalms (“People take refuge in the shadow of your wings”) and stepped down from behind the pulpit.
Afterward, Joe Riley, Charleston’s longtime mayor, grabbed us and led us down to Reverend Pinckney’s tiny basement office underneath the two-hundred-year-old brick church. On one wall was a photo of Reverend Pinckney with Dad, taken just months before. Both of us were moved to tears, though the truth is we had both been crying throughout the service.
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’
