Joe Biden’s grief will heal America
Three weeks after my fifteenth birthday, I watched my father take his last breath. He was kind, and decent, and a devoted public servant with a heart so large it engulfed his whole community. He was the type of leader who did not stride forth unchecked, but who walked beside you and held your hand. He was a man of faith — and I don’t just mean God, I mean the faith of truly believing in the goodness of people.
Not all grief is the same, but all grief changes you. It takes you to a place that can only be understood by others who have been there, regardless of the path they took to arrive. So while I can’t claim to know Joe Biden’s path to grief, I do know that the same rare tumor pressed against my father’s brain took the life of his son Beau. I know that through the joy of his win, he is feeling the edge of his grief — suffocated by the things he can’t tell Beau, the memories they’ll never share, the milestones to come dripping with uncertainty save for the one sure thing in this world: that his son won’t be there. I know that the pain I experience in periodical waves nearly a decade later — the type of pain that you choke on — Joe Biden understands with an intimacy that is inexplicable to those on the outside. To people like Donald Trump, whose agenda has never kept the beautiful, destructive pain of life and death at any sort of focal point, who instead leads a life unphased by it, detached from the essence of humanity itself.
In this age of staggering national loss, we need a President with not just political preeminence but lived experienced. We need someone who embodies a manifestation of hope which understands grief, because grief births empathy — the kind of empathy that leads me to write this now, knowing it could solicit judgement but knowing equally that sharing our stories is how we make others feel less alone, how we overcome the solitude of individual anguish and unite in our compassion.
Grief births hope. Grief births the light that exists not in spite of the darkness, but because of it. And Joe Biden is going to lead with that light, because he has the credibility to say that he’s buried a piece of his soul in this Earth, and has come out on the other side. He has the credibility to tell us, with conviction, that it’s going to be okay.
The manner of thinking of politics is most often rooted in action or lack thereof — what did or didn’t Congress, or the President, or your local city council member do. Joe Biden understands the critical piece of this narrative that both parties are often guilty of rushing through: listening. He knows that while we fight for big structural change that will benefit America’s families for generations to come, we can’t forget that these families are here right now, sitting at their kitchen tables, wondering how they’re going to get through today. And he’s going to be the type of President who stops, sits down, and asks “How can I help?”
I had the privilege of meeting Vice President Biden a week before he became President-elect Biden. After I introduced myself, he said with a light in his eyes: “Good to see you.” I thought it significant that he chose to say “see you” and not “meet you.” Because, just like he doesn’t have to have taken the same path to grief as your own struggles walked, he doesn’t have to know every word of your story to know you’re a person worth fighting for.
We’re a culture dripping in Instagram filters, face masks, and to-do lists. But sometimes, a piece of my story that I’d rather not reread comes bursting through, and I find myself paralyzed on a sunny Thursday afternoon, weighed down further by the guilt of feeling like I’ve failed by not moving on in the ways I feel expected to. In Joe Biden’s America, I don’t feel like I need to include an asterisk to explain my grief, like it’s a secret that must be shoved so far down that no one else can accidentally cut their hand on it. He wrote in his book, Promise Me, Dad:
“The hurt is a physical presence, and it never leaves.”
And then he went on to become President of the greatest Nation in the world. Because Joe Biden’s grief is his strength. And if he can let it not cripple him, but power him, then so can I.
As a Nation, we’re experiencing a collective grief and trauma that we’ve barely begun to process. The good news is, we have a President who will lead with his love of country, who will walk beside us, and who has unrelenting faith in the goodness of people and the goodness of America.
