As a man marked by loss, Joe Biden sets a powerful—and influential—example

In the midst of a fraught political and economic season, with the holidays approaching and a little over a month until he ascends to the highest office in the land, Joe Biden spent Friday, December 18th, grieving with his wife and family.

48 years ago on this day, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and his infant daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident as the Biden family ventured out for Christmas shopping. It was a devastating tragedy, one in which Biden’s two sons, Beau and Hunter, were also injured. Adding to his present sense of loss, Biden, at the time of their deaths, had just been elected Senator.

Today, he visited Neilia and Naomi’s graves, located at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic church in Wilmington, Delaware, and later attended a morning service with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, their daughter Ashley, and their son-in-law, Howard.

As a devout Catholic and an old-school straight-shooter, a man of powerful feeling whose life has been marked by loss, Biden cuts an interesting profile. In addition to the traumatic deaths of his first wife and daughter, Biden also lost his son, Beau, to brain cancer in May of 2015. Beau’s death was frequently cited as the reason Biden refused to run for President in 2016. At the time of Beau’s death, Biden called his son “the finest man any of us have ever known.”

When he takes over in January, Biden will not be the first man marked by a profound grief in office. In 1924, after a recreational game of tennis on the White House courts, Calvin Coolidge’s younger son, Calvin Jr., developed a blister on his toe that turned septic. Within a week, Coolidge had lost his favorite son and 16-year-old namesake. Already a man of few words, Coolidge was said to have been crushed by the weight of grief. Similar to Mr. Biden, Calvin Jr’s death was said to have played a role in Coolidge’s decision not to seek a second presidential term in 1928, a race that was ultimately won by Herbert Hoover. “When he went,” Coolidge wrote of his son in his autobiography, “the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.”

As a pandemic rages, and with fear and anxiety clouding the country’s hopes for holiday cheer, Biden serves as a powerful example of grief, one that honors the weight of a tragedy several decades later. Even in the best of times, the holidays are hard for grievers, as the rituals of gathering remind us of those we’ve lost. Families who decide to play it safe and avoid large gatherings may feel the weight of loss all the more so this year.

And yet, if there is reason for optimism among those seeking progress in the field of grieving, it is in the hope that Mr. Biden, as someone who makes time to honor a loss and access his darkest and most difficult emotions, can be an impactful influence. The moral authority of the “bully pulpit”—felt in decidedly different ways these last few years—could go a long way to legitimizing the grieving process as the weighty, necessary journey that it is, particularly for men of a certain generation.

(Some credit also must go to Dr. Jill Biden, there at the President-Elect’s side, grieving a woman whom she did not know, an admirable example of how to offer support to one’s partner in such times.)

To bolster these hopes for positive change, it may be fitting to lend your signature to a petition going around that asks the incoming Biden administration to establish a White House Office for Bereavement Care. “The death of a loved one is a shared human experience that transforms our lives, health, and prosperity,” its authors write. “We cannot accept that bereaved individuals and families should cope with little to no help, rights or policy protections.”

But even if it’s simply following Mr. Biden’s lead—by taking time to honor the loved ones you’ve lost, and making space for the emotions this season brings up—those, too, are steps in the right direction.

— Bryan Kelly