Beau Biden Quotes

He told Beau to go home and live like he had a future. ‘Run for governor. Have a purpose.’ Almost every day after that, I found myself acting on that advice - have a purpose. No matter what came at me, I held fast to my own sense of purpose.

We should not let this disease take over our entire existence. He told Beau to go home and live like he had a future: “Run for governor. Have a purpose.

I was a newly elected thirty-year-old United States senator, excited to be down in Washington interviewing staff, when I got the call that my wife and eighteen-month-old daughter had died in a car accident while out shopping the week before Christmas. Beau and Hunt had been in the car, too.

I’ve always found comfort in the ritual associated with my Catholicism. I find the rosary soothing. It’s almost like my meditation. And mass is a place I go to be by myself, even in the middle of the crowd. I always feel alone, just me and God. When I pray, I find myself not only praying to God, but praying to Neilia and to my mom to intercede with God for me. It’s a way of reminding myself that they are still a part of me, still inside me. And in the first hours after we lost Beau, I began to talk to him, too. It was my way to remind myself that he was still here with me, too.

She saved OUR lives’ with aunt Val standing right next [to you] and never mention her I feel like grabbing the mic and saying she [Jill] may have saved HIS life but Beau and I were pretty happy with Mom Mom [grandmother Jean] and Aunt Val. “Losing Mommy [Neilia] was more like I expect it might be to be born without legs—you know something really really important

Biden’s grandson Robert “Hunter” Biden II handed him a photo taken of the two of them at his father, Beau’s, funeral. He was then nine years old, and Biden had bent down to comfort him with his hand cupping the boy’s chin. Corners of the right wing online had lit up with wild allegations about Biden’s gesture, suggesting Biden was a pedophile. The younger Biden told his grandfather he knew a campaign could be nasty.

But I had made the case that in the aftermath of our loss it was even more important that we continue to do the things that had always meant so much to the family. That we could not let our traditions drift away. That Beau would have wanted us to make the trip. I knew from pas experience that as hard as it would be, it was better to go through it than to avoid it.

I was not consciously aware, however, of how much her loss represented a missing piece of the family puzzle. While that hole was filled with something very special, what was lost was never recovered. It was as if someone had torn a section from a painting and replaced it with a lovely likeness. Our family remained a beautiful if reconfigured composition, one that was born out of tragedy and rearranged by an overwhelming desire to make sure that Beau and I were okay. Yet for me, that original piece was always missing, always gone.

We all filed out of the conference room and walked back down the hall toward Beau's room feeling hopeful, holding on to the idea that he might pull out of this again. But then we heard Howard's voice behind us. 'You've got to come back,' he said, as he steered us again to the conference room. 'You have to tell them the truth.' Howard said to the doctors still assembled. What was happening in Beau's brain was no longer reversible, the doctors said. There was no saving Beau. 'He will not recover.' Those were the most devastating four words I have ever heard in my life. 'He will not recover.' But goddammit, I still wanted to believe-maybe-maybe something will happen.

It was reported that just before he died, with his face partially paralyzed and his mind often unable to find the right words, Beau pushed his dad to make one final run for the Oval Office. The episode renewed Biden’s focus on the question of whether he would run.

A little over a month later, on December 18,1972, I was listening to the radio while driving to campus to take one of my final exams. The announcer broke into programming to say that Joe Biden's wife Neilia, and their thirteen month old daughter, Naomi, had been killed in a car accident earlier that day, on their way home from buying the family's Christmas tree. Their young sons, Beau and Hunter, had been in the car but survived.