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
