Mr Biden, who keeps a notebook with many of the eulogies he has delivered, has visited countless families suffering from grief - from fallen soldiers to the parents of George Floyd - earning him the nickname of consoler-in-chief. In 2015, Mr Biden's son Beau died of brain cancer. There's a hollowness in your chest, you feel like you're being sucked into it,” Mr Biden said following the Uvalde massacre at a Texas elementary school. “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. Mr Biden wrote in Promises to Keep that for the first time in his life he understood anguish so bad that you want to take your own life - but he stuck around for his sons and took his oath of office in their hospital room, both at his side. The family was taken to hospital where Neilia and Naomi were pronounced dead on arrival.īeau sustained a broken leg and Hunter, a fractured skull. She loaded up the children into the family estate car and headed out for the day.Īt around 2.30pm on December 18, 1972, Neilia crashed into an oncoming lorry, launching the vehicle 46 metres into an embankment. The Bidens had so much to look forward to.Ī week before Christmas Day, Mr Biden headed to Washington to set up his new offices on Capitol Hill, while Neilia and the children stayed behind to go holiday shopping and see Santa. ![]() Christmas would be just around the corner and then, in January, the swearing-in ceremony. Two weeks later, on November 20, the young family cut a cake to honour Mr Biden’s 30th birthday. “I owed her so much: my loyalty, my gratitude for the gift of these beautiful boys, and, yes, my love,” she wrote.Joe Biden takes his oath of office from US Senate secretary Frank Valeo in son Beau's hospital room with his father-in-law, Robert Hunter, at his side. In her 2019 memoir, Jill Biden wrote of the family’s annual visits to the cemetery where Neilia and Naomi are buried. Beau Biden, a rising political figure himself, died from a brain tumor at the age of 46 in 2015. Neilia, who married Biden in 1966 and played a key role in his campaigns, was honored five years after her death with the dedication of the The Neilia Hunter Biden Park outside the city of Wilmington.īiden later married Jill Biden in 1977, who became first lady when he assumed the presidency in 2021. ![]() But by focusing on my sons, I found my redemption.” ![]() “But because I had the incredible good fortune of an extended family, grounded in love and loyalty, imbued with a sense of obligation imparted to each of us, I not only got help. “Many people have gone through things like that,” Biden said during a 2015 Yale University commencement speech. Capitol to kiss the boys good morning and goodnight. Throughout his lengthy Senate career, Biden commuted daily from Wilmington to the U.S. ![]() After considering resigning, he ultimately chose to remain in office, and, on January 5, 1973, was sworn in as senator from his sons’ hospital room in Wilmington, Delaware. The future president, who had recently turned 30, learned of the tragedy while interviewing staff in Washington, D.C. Neither driver was found to be at fault for the collision. Investigations revealed the tractor-trailer broadsided Neilia Biden’s Chevrolet station wagon at a rural intersection in Hockessin, Delaware. At the time, Beau was 4 years old and suffered multiple broken bones, while Hunter, who was 3, had a fractured skull. The Bidens’ sons, Beau and Hunter, were also in the car and survived with serious injuries. Just weeks after being elected the junior senator from Delaware, Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, are killed in a car accident while out shopping for a Christmas tree on December 18, 1972, when a tractor-trailer strikes their vehicle.
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