‘Unbearable’ Pain: Inside VP Joe Biden’s Secret Tragedies & Breakdowns
Feb. 22 2021, Updated 8:49 p.m. ET
Before he bowed out of the 2016 presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden was suffering extreme grief over the loss of his son Beau to cancer. But his backers may not know that the 74-year-old politician was previously struck by tragedy when he lost his first wife and baby daughter to a fatal car crash in 1972. “The pain had seemed unbearable,” Biden writes in his new memoir, Promise Me, Dad. Now, the VP confesses he is still struggling to cope with his son’s 2015 death. Find out about Biden’s secret heartbreak in RadarOnline.com’s gallery.
Before he bowed out of the 2016 presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden was suffering extreme grief over the loss of his son Beau to cancer. But his backers may not know that the 74-year-old politician was previously struck by tragedy when he lost his first wife and baby daughter to a fatal car crash in 1972. “The pain had seemed unbearable,” Biden writes in his new memoir, Promise Me, Dad. Now, the VP confesses he is still struggling to cope with his son’s 2015 death. Find out about Biden’s secret heartbreak in RadarOnline.com’s gallery.
In his new book, Biden takes a rare moment to reveal his heartbreak over wife Neilia and 18-month-old daughter Naomi’s car crash deaths more than 40 years ago. “The pain had seemed unbearable in the beginning, and it took me a long time to heal,” he writes. “But I did survive the punishing ordeal. I made it through, with a lot of support, and reconstructed my life and my family.”
Many years later, Biden was blindsided by the news that his son Beau had been diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma, a cancerous brain tumor, in 2013. “I put my head down and stared at the floor,” he writes. “I felt like I had been knocked down. I reached for my rosary and asked God to give me the strength to handle this.”
Two months before Beau’s death at 46, Biden admits he “lost hope.” “I was determined not to break down in front of wife Jill, since I knew it would really scare her,” he says.
Biden reveals one of the final exchanges he exchanged with his son. “Give me your word, Dad, that you’re going to be all right,” he claims Beau said. “Promise me, Dad.”
In a heartbreaking diary entry immediately after his son’s death on May 30, 2015, Biden claims he wrote: “It happened. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy.”
Biden says his son “saved my life” after Neilia and Naomi’s deaths. Beau, who was just 4 at the time, and his brother Hunter, then 2, had survived the fatal crash. “It’s going to be okay, Daddy,” Biden says Beau told him. “I’m not going away.”
“Shock creates an initial numbness that wears away," the VP explains. “The pain comes then, and it sharpens. The hurt is a physical presence, and it never leaves you.”
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After Neilia and Naomi’s deaths, “it felt like there was a tiny dark hole in the middle of my chest, and I knew if I dwelled upon its presence, it would grow until it threatened to suck my entire being down into it,” he writes.
Biden says he suffered a breakdown following Beau’s death during a bike ride with Secret Service in South Carolina. “I could feel my throat constrict. My breath came shorter and shorter,” he recalls. “I turned my back to the agents, looked out at the vastness of the ocean to one side and the darkness of the woods to the other, sat down on the sand, and sobbed.”
Biden claims he ultimately decided not to run for president in 2016 due to his unresolved grief. We pay for juicy info! Do you have a story for RadarOnline.com? Email us at tips@radaronline.com, or call us at (866) ON-RADAR (667-2327) any time, day or night.
