Joe Biden has had a surprisingly tragic life.
Just a few years ago, he lost his oldest son, Beau, to cancer, while his younger son, Hunter,
has spent years struggling to free himself from dependence on drugs and alcohol.
Perhaps the greatest sorrow in Joe Biden's life, however, occurred early on in his senatorial
career when he received the kind of phone call every spouse, and parent, dreads.
"The call said my wife was dead, my daughter was dead, and they weren't sure how my sons
were gonna make it."
As Biden told Marie Claire, on December 18, 1972,
"My wife and three children were Christmas shopping.
A tractor-trailer broadsided them and killed my wife and killed my daughter."
Suddenly the young senator elect from Delaware found himself a single dad with his two surviving
kids in the hospital with serious injuries, and he was actually sworn into office at their
bedsides.
Hunter, in presenting Beau's eulogy in 2015, noted that being in the hospital was his very
first memory.
He said,
"I was almost three years old.
I remember my brother who was one year and one day older than me, holding my hand, staring
into my eyes, saying, 'I love you, I love you, I love you' over and over and over again."
Once the kids were out of the hospital, Biden resumed his political career but rode the
train back to their home in Wilmington every night from his D.C. office, a habit that earned
him the nickname Amtrak Joe.
The first Mrs. Biden, Neilia Hunter, was born in 1942 in Skaneateles, New York.
She later studied at Syracuse University, and during her junior year, took a spring
break trip to Nassau where she met a University of Delaware junior named Joe.
Evidently they hit it off, since a few years later, Joe decided to attend law school at
Syracuse, and the two married in August of 1966.
After the couple wed, they moved to Wilmington, Delaware where new lawyer Joe got his first
start in politics by serving on the New Castle County Council.
Soon Joe would take things a step further, challenging Delaware's Republican incumbent
senator J. Caleb Boggs for his seat.
Neilia was said to be the "brains" behind the campaign, somehow managing to engineer
his come-from-behind win while simultaneously mothering three small children.
In her autobiography Where The Light Enters, Joe's current wife Jill Biden describes how
she had the pleasure of meeting Neilia just a month before her untimely demise.
She wrote about her "easy, natural beauty" and her warm smile.
She also wrote about how unfair the situation was.
"To take a mother from her children; to take a daughter from her father.
Joe Biden had had everything, and in a horrible second, it was gone."
According to The Independent, shortly after Biden's victory in the November 1972 election,
Neilia asked her husband,
"What's going to happen, Joey?
Things are too good."
Sadly, she was right.
Just one week before Christmas came the car crash, as a tractor-trailer carrying corn
slammed into the side of the Biden family's Chevy station wagon.
In that terrible moment, as Biden later described,,
"My whole world was altered forever."
He soldiered through, however, not only holding up through a memorial service that drew a
crowd of 1,200, but staying strong to help his injured sons.
As Biden wrote in 2017's Promise Me, Dad,
"The pain had seemed unbearable in the beginning, and it took me a long time to heal, but I
did survive the punishing ordeal.
I made it through, with a lot of support, and reconstructed my life and my family."
Biden has mentioned this profoundly sad event in many speeches he's given over the years,
including a 2012 address to U.S. military service members and how hard it can be to
move on after such an unspeakable tragedy.
He said,
"Keep thinking what your husband or wife would want you to do.
Keep thinking what it is, and keep remembering those kids of yours, or him or her the rest
of their life, blood of my blood, bone of my bone, because, folks, it can and will get
better."