Biden and Grief

A brief essay on Biden's "superpower"

Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.

It has become conventional wisdom that it is President Biden’s familiarity with grief which allows for him to connect with the American people, particularly in the midst of what Biden himself refers to as our “four crises” of COVID-19, an economic crisis, racial strife and injustice and climate change. It is true that Mr. Biden’s history with grief has taught him important things about life that clearly inform his political profile. But grief is not what makes Biden unique, and if grief was all he had, I would be concerned about his political future. Grief is not Mr. Biden’s “superpower,” as some advisors close to Mr. Biden have been quoted as saying. Mr. Biden’s superpower, in politics and in life, is that he has made it to the other side of grief, to possibility and a future. This is why he is poised for a historic presidency during these “extraordinary times.” It was evident in his speech to the Joint Session of Congress last Wednesday evening.

Grief operates one way when you’re in the political opposition, when you’re grieving the consequences of somebody else’s decisions and leadership. The politics of grief is tricky when you’re the one in charge.

In his address last week, his first address before Congress, Mr. Biden properly acknowledged the pain and loss of recent years, but he quickly pivoted to looking forward. He spoke not only of crisis, but of opportunity. Someone unfamiliar with grief might think such a pivot impolite. Mr. Biden knows that when you’ve suffered real loss, you must look forward, you must put one foot ahead of the other.

It was in the hospital tending to his sons following the car crash which killed his wife and daughter, that Mr. Biden heeded the urging of his Senate colleague Mike Mansfield, among others, to stay in public service. Mr. Biden told Mansfield that he “could not be the father I wanted to be” and serve in the United States Senate. Mansfield, though, would not give up on him.

And so it was Mr. Biden reassuring the nation that “America does not quit.” He celebrated the success of his Administration’s response to COVID, including the distribution of the vaccine, and rattled off the benefits of the American Rescue Plan. This is what America accomplished in the midst of our grief.

But last week’s address was really about marking out the next hundred days of this administration, not just recounting the first. Constantly, Biden pivots from grief to action; from crisis to solutions. He told stories of families waiting in line to get food, but then shared that because of the American Rescue Plan, we’re on track to cut child poverty in half. After years of heightened racial division, he puts forward plans to address racial injustice. After a season in which families have been strained by COVID, in particular, he lays out a vision of a future where access to education is expanded and family care is supported. He mentions the death of his son, Beau, to cancer; and he proposes a national effort to “defeat cancer as we know it.” He decries gun violence and the grief it leaves in its wake, and calls for a response that honors that grief. He recognizes our bitter and divisive fights over immigration that stokes so much insecurity and hatred, and points toward ending the conflict and pursuing common action.

It takes a measure of courage to imagine even getting to tomorrow when you’re grieving today. It takes exceptional courage, outrageous hope, to imagine that things might be better than they ever were some day.

This is what Mr. Biden gestures toward with his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan. There will be significant debate about the specifics of the plan. How robust that debate will be depends on whether Republicans can gain enough coherence within their caucus to not just critique the limitations of The White House’s plans on paid leave and child care, for instance, but to propose a reasonable alternative, a way forward. This is what the president understands: those who grieve want their grief recognized, but then they need a vision for the future.

So much of Mr. Biden’s career has been in the shadow of the Kennedys, but it is in light of the history and mythology of the Kennedys that Biden’s own history and promise becomes clear. The Kennedy lore is one of fantasy, of unfulfilled promise, of a road not taken. Grief humanized the otherwise unreachable Kennedys.

Mr. Biden does not connect with voters primarily on the basis of what he has lost. How many Americans can relate to a loss of such depth? Instead, at the heart of Mr. Biden’s appeal, which is not incidentally what is mocked by many strategists who doubted him and still do not understand him, is that he knows what it’s like to make the daily commitment, on the other side of grief, to take that train ride to Wilmington to be with his boys when their mother could not be. The American people resonate with a father whose desire for his son to know he’s loved outweighs every other consideration. They resonate with a husband, who allowed his family to be stitched back together by the love of his second wife, Dr. Jill Biden, and found love after loss.

Mr. Biden’s understanding of grief was one of his greatest assets in defeating Trump, and it has been crucial during these first hundred days of his presidency. But he’s been through grief before, and he knows that the point of grief is that you must go through it.

There’s a saying Mr. Biden often brings up when asked about grief that exemplifies the point. It’s hard to imagine it when grief is fresh, he acknowledges, but “there will come a time when their memory brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will take time, but that’s when you know you’re going to make it.”

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