4 Minutes With Jill Biden Grieving with the First Family.

[George II]

By Olivia Nuzzi

She died just as I arrived at the wrong hospital. It was Wednesday afternoon, February 24, and the First Lady, Jill Biden, was making her first official trip outside Washington to tour the labs of the Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. My brother called again. At a different hospital 900 miles away, doctors could not revive our mother. She was gone before I could find the parking garage. She was 59.

In the auditorium, the First Lady talked about her friend Winnie. In 1993, the same year my mother had me at age 30, not much older than I am now, four of Dr. Biden’s friends were diagnosed with breast cancer. “Three of them survived,” she said. “Winnie did not.” I’m sure I’m not the first daughter consumed by the brutal irony of this disease; the very parts of my mother that sustained my life helped end hers. Winnie had three children. “As the Gospel of John says, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it,’?” the First Lady said. It was Winnie’s death, she added, that led her to found the Biden Breast Health Initiative. “Out of sorrow, we found purpose.”

If other politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose, Joe Biden does both in eulogy. For five decades, his pain has been a most unusual political asset, a cynical gift disguised as a curse. Looking back, it seems obvious it would deliver him to the presidency at our darkest moment. His inauguration on January 20 felt like a memorial. With no crowd behind the gates at the fortress of the Capitol, and a gulf of six feet between each chair, it was still and silent as he swore the oath of office on the site of the January 6 insurrection, inheriting an America in the grips of sickness and mourning. The five weeks of the Biden era have been a never-ending wake, presided over by a spiritual leader of a secular government, a foremost authority on sadness.

To know the new president and his family, you must know loss. Theirs is no less devastating for being, by now, familiar. Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash just before Christmas in 1972. His eldest son, Beau, who survived that crash with his brother, Hunter, was killed by brain cancer in 2015. Jill Biden was 26 years old when she married a widowed freshman United States senator with two motherless boys. She became Mom, while Neilia remains, forever, Mommy.

This is a long essay, well worth reading it through. Jill Biden is an amazing woman.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jill-biden-encounter.html

[yardwork]

1. Bookmark to read later.

[BobTheSubgenius]

2. Has there ever been a First Family that wear their hearts on their sleeves like this First Family?

If so, it must have been a long time ago, and not talked about by historians, for whatever reason. Sure, some have had moments, or even extended moments like that, but to actually live it?

The sometimes fiery rhetoric or stoicism of other Presidents is looked at resolute strength, but I think it must take an awful lot of strength to live the way the Bidens do.

[movingviolation]

4. They walk the walk.

Yeah, I can't remember either, but Kennedy and Carter come close though. Such a relief from the bigoted greed demon party.

[niyad]

3. Bookmarking.

[Lonestarblue]

5. Most people can relate to the Bidens because they have shared their losses and grief.

It’s one of the reasons I will never understand Donald Trump’s appeal because he so obviously cares nothing for anyone else, even members of his own family, as his cheating his niece out of millions shows.