This is the story of my journey, from there to here.
CHAPTER ONE
SEVENTEEN MINUTES
We took Beau off life support late on the morning of May 29, 2015. He was unresponsive and barely breathing. Doctors in the critical care unit of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, told us he would pass within hours of their removing his tracheostomy tube. I knew he would hold on longer—that was Beau. So I sat at my big brother’s bedside and held his hand.
A throng of family stood by as well—twenty-four Bidens slipping in and out of the room, wandering the hospital’s halls, lost in thought, waiting. I didn’t leave Beau’s side.
The morning seeped into the afternoon, then into the evening, then late into the night. The sun came back up, its light scarcely leaking through the room’s drawn shades. It was a confusing, excruciating time: I wished for a miracle and for an end to my brother’s suffering, both in the same prayer.
More hours crawled past. I talked to Beau continuously. I whispered in his ear how much I loved him. I told him that I knew how much he loved me. I told him we would always be together, that nothing could ever separate us. I told him how proud of him I was, how fiercely he had fought to hold on, through surgeries and radiation and a final experimental procedure, in which an engineered virus was injected directly into his tumor—directly into his brain.
He never stood a chance.
He was forty-six.
Yet from the moment of his diagnosis less than two years earlier, and throughout those many procedures, Beau’s mantra to me became two words: “Beautiful things.” He insisted that when he got well, we would dedicate our lives to appreciating and cultivating the world’s boundless beauty. “Beautiful things” became a catchall for relationships and places and moments—for everything. Once this was over, he said, we would start a law firm together and work on only “beautiful things.” We would rock on the porch of our parents’ house and look out at the “beautiful things” spread before us. We would luxuriate in the “beautiful things” our children and families became during each incremental passage along the way.
It was our code for a renewed outlook on life. We would never again let ourselves get too tired, too distracted, too cynical, too thrown off course by whatever blindsiding hurdle life threw in our way, to look, to see, to love.
“I love you. I love you. I love you.”
I’ve had a single flash of memory from the earliest and most consequential moment of my life. I can’t be sure how much of it is a composite of family stories and news accounts I’ve heard or read through the years, and how much of it is actual repressed memory finally trickling up to the fore.
But it’s vivid.
It is December 18, 1972. My dad has just won the race for junior U.S. senator from Delaware—he turned thirty three weeks after the election, barely beating the Senate’s age requirement before taking his oath in January. He is in Washington, DC, that day to interview staff for his new office. My mother, Neilia, beautiful and brilliant and also only thirty, has taken me; my big brother, Beau; and our baby sister, Naomi, Christmas-tree shopping near our fixer-upper house in Wilmington.
Beau is almost four. I’m almost three. We were born a year and a day apart—virtually Irish twins.
In my mind’s eye, this is what happens next:
I’m seated in the back of our roomy white Chevy station wagon, behind my mother. Beau is back there with me, behind Naomi, whom we both call Caspy—pale, plump, and seeming to have appeared in our family out of nowhere thirteen months earlier, she was nicknamed after one of our favorite cartoon characters, Casper the Friendly Ghost. She’s sound asleep in the front passenger seat, tucked into a bassinet.
Suddenly, I see my mother’s head turn to the right. I don’t remember anything else about her profile: the look in her eye, the expression of her mouth. Her head simply swings. At that same moment, my brother dives—or is hurtled—straight toward me.
That’s it. It’s quick and convulsive and chaotic: as our mother eased the car into a four-way intersection, we were broadsided by a tractor trailer carrying corncobs.
My mother and little sister were killed almost instantly. Beau was pulled from the wreckage with a broken leg and myriad other injuries. I suffered a severe skull fracture.
The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital with Beau in the bed next to mine, bandaged and in traction, looking like he’s just been clobbered in a playground brawl. He’s mouthing three words to me, over and over:
“I love you. I love you. I love you.”
That’s our origin story. Beau became my best friend, my soul mate, and my polestar since those virtually first conscious moments of my life.
Three weeks later, inside our hospital room, Dad was sworn into the Senate.
Beau was Delaware’s two-term attorney general and father of a young daughter and son when doctors diagnosed him with glioblastoma multiforme—brain cancer.
It likely had incubated inside him for at least the previous three years. In the fall of 2010, about a year after he returned from deployment in Iraq, Beau complained of headaches, numbness, and paralysis. At the time, doctors attributed his symptoms to a stroke.
We monitored Beau’s progress after that. Something seemed off. Beau would joke to friends that all of a sudden he heard music. It wasn’t a joke to me: it was eerie. He couldn’t figure it out, but looking back I’m sure it was the tumor impinging on a part of his brain that caused auditory hallucinations—a growth touching
