Dealing with Grief
Joe Biden is no stranger to grief. He lost his first wife and their baby daughter in a car accident. So when he writes “I knew from previous experience that grief is a process that respects no schedule and no timetable” he is not speaking in the abstract about a third-person sort of relationship with a subject as politician often do. The death of a second child so many years after the first—even when the child is an adult—is the kind of emotional wallop that strikes hard at any parent, regardless of their social status or position. The book becomes part of the process of dealing with that grief, an essential component of the system.
Personal Politics
The death of his son Beau has political implications for Joe Biden and, in turn, the consequence of those implications expands outward to impact the entire country. And from the country to the rest world and so on, of course. The natural successor to Barack Obama at the end of his second term as President would be his Vice President, who just so happened to be Joe Biden. It is almost an unbroken tradition that the VP of a outgoing two-term President runs for the office himself in the next cycle and usually wins his party’s nomination.
This infamously was not the case in the 2016 election in which it was Obama’s Sec. of State Hillary Clinton who was the Democrat’s nominee. This stemmed in large part from Biden’s decision to deal with a personal tragedy by making the political decision not to run for President. Considering the outcomes of both the 2016 and the 2020 elections, Beau’s tragic death may have been much more than a personal tragedy.
The Importance of Purpose
Biden lays out a major theme that will be covered throughout the text very early and very explicitly. Chapter Two is subtitled “Have a Purpose” and the concluding lines of that chapter assert that almost every day “I found myself acting on that advice.” Over and over, stories ranging from family anecdotes to overviews of significant points in his career are punctuated with affirmations like “It gave us purpose. And we all need purpose.”
