Joe Biden tells of anguish after the death of wife and daughter
26,May,Daily Telegraph
Vice-President Joe Biden said he "understood" the anguish that led
people to suicide as he recounted the deaths of his wife and daughter in
a moving speech to the families of fallen US troops.With his voice
occasionally breaking with emotion, Mr Biden recounted the phone call in
December 1972, telling the 29-year-old senator that his wife Neilia and
one-year-old daughter had been killed in a car crash while Christmas
shopping.
"And just like you guys know by the tone of the phone call, you just
knew," he said. "You just felt it in your bones: Something bad
happened."
As he left the US Capitol building to identify the bodies and tend to
his two young sons, who were critically injured in hospital, he recalled
looking up at the building's cavernous rotunda.
"I remember looking up and saying, ‘God,’ as if I was talking to God
myself, ‘You can’t be good, how can you be good?""I probably shouldn’t
say this with the press here, but it’s more important, you’re more
important.
For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could
consciously decide to commit suicide," he told families at a grief
seminar in Virginia.
"Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because
they had been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their
heart they would never get there again."Standing in front of pictures of
soldiers killed in action, he promised "it can and will get better".
"There will come a day," he said "when the thought of your son or
daughter, or your husband or wife, brings a smile to your lips before it
brings a tear to your eye." Speaking of meeting his second wife, Dr Jill
Biden, in 1977, he said he felt "guilty as hell" but urged widows and
widowers to seek new happiness after their loss. |