As we waited for him to return, Beau kept asking if something was wrong. I told him it was nothing, that the doc would be back any minute.
Five minutes passed. Then ten minutes. Then half an hour—at least that’s how long the wait seemed to drag on for the two of us inside that white sanitized room. I didn’t want to leave Beau, but I finally stepped outside and called Dad. In a panic, I told him I thought something had gone drastically wrong, that the doctor had disappeared and that couldn’t be good. Dad chuckled: the doctor was standing beside him. The vice presidential protocol—alerting my dad before anyone else on matters that involved him directly—was followed in such situations and sometimes, like now, it left me in the lurch. The doctor had just given my parents a briefing and said that everything was fine.
It didn’t stay fine for long.
Flown back to Delaware a few days later, Beau had one good night at his house with Hallie and their kids. The next day Hallie called me frantically in Washington to say Beau was unresponsive. I drove to Wilmington and went straight upstairs to his bedroom, where he hadn’t reacted to anyone all day.
Beau looked agonized, out of it. He barely said hello when I walked in. I kissed him and asked what was wrong. He lifted his hands barely a fraction of an inch, shook his head slightly, then rasped, “I don’t know.” I suggested he get out of bed, but he resisted. “You have to,” I told him. “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go sit on the porch.”
It took forever to get him up. He could hardly move—he was clearly in pain and anxious because he had so little motor function in his arms. I carried him gently down the steps, ferrying him more like a young son than an older brother, gliding past Mom and Dad to French doors that opened onto the front porch and looked out over a pond. We sat in chairs set right inside the open doors, just the two of us.
I didn’t say much except to tell him it was going to be okay, that this is what the doctors told us would happen, that injecting the virus would cause a firestorm in his brain before it started to work and the white cells attacked the tumor. I told him it was temporary, that he just had to make it through this rough patch before things turned around. Again, he nodded his head just a bit. I could tell he was listening intently and wanted to believe everything I said.
I don’t know how many minutes passed without either of us saying a word. But at some point, Beau seemed to point at a new watch I was wearing. It took me a minute to grasp what I thought he was getting at. One night when Beau was maybe fifteen, before a high school dance, he sneaked into Dad’s keepsake box in the top drawer of his walk-in closet. There he found a pair of stainless steel cuff links and a 1960s Omega watch, with a leather strap, that Beau believed our Dad had been given by our mommy, the term we both used into adulthood for our mother, Neilia (we called Jill, our stepmother, “mom”).
He thought the watch was so cool. So he wore it that night, without asking Dad. He planned to put it back in the box when he returned home, but he somehow lost it at the dance, to his eternal regret. He never told Dad, and Dad didn’t even notice it was missing until long after. I’d forgotten all about it. But Beau remembered. He felt guilty about losing that watch forever.
Decades later, as we sat together during one of his endless-seeming hospital visits, Beau started searching for another watch to replace it. Finding a replica became an obsession for him during those months when we spent so much time waiting around—at doctors’ appointments for tests and scans, in airports waiting for flights. He and I hunted everywhere, with no success. We looked online on our phones, scrolling through thousands of pictures. It was a way for us to pass the time and focus on something else entirely. I didn’t even remember what the damn thing looked like, but Beau did. He recalled it exactly.
Now he seemed to gesture at my wrist. The watch I wore was an Omega Seamaster, with a metal band. I’d bought it for Beau at some point but knew he wouldn’t wear it. Now it looked like he wondered why I’d gotten it—it wasn’t the one we were looking for. I laughed. It was so comforting to see Beau firing enough to make an offhand observation that had nothing to do with how awful he felt.
We settled into another long, serene silence. We stared out at the landscape that unfurled before us—the green and gold of the Brandywine Valley in all its fresh spring glory, the glassy pond, the colossal red oak believed to be the oldest in the state.
Beau finally turned to me, his voice barely audible.
“Not the watch,” he whispered, indicating that my Omega wasn’t what he had pointed to earlier. Instead, he had been trying to point past me, at the panorama in front of us, but couldn’t lift his hand high enough.
“Beautiful,” he said now, nodding toward the landscape. “Beautiful…”
They were the last words my brother ever gave me.
I carried Beau back upstairs, slipped him into his bed, propped up his pillows, kissed him. I told him I’d be back in the morning.
Before then, however, I got another call: agitated and excruciatingly uncomfortable, he’d been taken by ambulance back to Thomas Jefferson in Philly, where my sister Ashley’s husband, Howard Krein, is a surgeon. Beau’s condition wasn’t getting significantly worse, but he wasn’t getting better, either. A few days later,
