An Excerpt
December 2017 Issue

Why Joe Biden’s Thanksgivings Will Never Be The Same

In this exclusive excerpt from his searingly emotional new memoir, Promise Me, Dad, the former Vice President recounts his last Thanksgiving with late son Beau.
Joe Biden photographed with his family and inset of book Promise Me Dad.
Biden, his grandson Hunter, his son Beau, and Jill, at the Naval Observatory residence, in Washington, D.C., October 2011.Official White House photo by David Lienemann.

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The Biden tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving on Nantucket started in 1975. By 2014, the year after Beau’s brain-cancer diagnosis, the gathering had grown to include our three children—Beau, Hunter, and Ashley—their spouses, and our five grandchildren.

Beau kept to himself our first day in Nantucket. His Secret Service detail had become really good at walling him away. He was easily fatigued and increasingly shy about interacting with people. He was losing feeling in his right hand, and it wasn’t strong enough for a good firm handshake, and he had been wrestling with a condition called aphasia. Radiation and chemotherapy had done some damage to the part of his brain that controlled the ability to name things. He had been going from his home in Wilmington to Philadelphia most days for an hour of physical therapy and occupational therapy and then an hour of speech therapy, all above and beyond his regular chemo treatments.

It was slow going, but he never showed frustration. Nobody in the family, or among his friends, or among his staff at the attorney general’s office, saw him angry or down. It just took a little patience, and a few extra words when he couldn’t recall “mayor”: “You know, that guy who runs the city.” Or “dinner roll”: “Pass the, you know, the brown thing you put the butter on.”

We got up Thanksgiving morning and did our annual Turkey Trot—a 10-mile run (for anybody who felt up to it) to the other side of the island. I rode the route on a bike with some of the grandchildren. We spent part of the day tossing a football around the beach. I showed young Hunter, Beau’s son, the bluffs where his father and his uncle used to jump off and catch passes when they were about his age. Beau and Hallie and their kids made sure to get some nice pictures of the four of them together on the beach. And for our annual family photo we went over to the little saltbox house above the dunes at ‘Sconset Beach that we called “Forever Wild,” after a carved wooden sign on its porch bearing that inscription. Jill and I first saw the house in 1975, when it was for sale. The asking price then had been too rich for a senator’s salary.

Listen to Joe Biden read an excerpt from the Audible version of Promise Me, Dad below

This year, the lot was ringed with yellow police tape. The house was gone, a victim of rising ocean tides that had been washing away three or four feet of the ‘Sconset Bluff every year for the past 20. Bad storm years might take out 10 times that in certain places. “Forever Wild” had finally run out of safe ground, and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic. The only thing left behind was a piece of the foundation.

We went back to town the day after Thanksgiving, making sure to be at the right spot around dusk, to watch the annual lighting of the Nantucket Christmas tree. Beau had proposed to Hallie at the tree lighting in 2001, and they were married at St. Mary’s church, in the heart of downtown Nantucket, the next year. Hallie always suspected it was Beau’s way of locking them into Biden Family Thanksgivings for all time. And it worked. They were celebrating their 12th anniversary at the end of the week, and Hallie had never missed a Thanksgiving. Even the year Beau was stationed in Iraq, she insisted we all keep the tradition and go to Nantucket.

While we did our family stroll, I found myself mulling an issue that was beginning to weigh on me. I was getting a lot of questions, from a lot of different quarters, about running for president in 2016. Even President Obama had surprised me by asking directly about my plans at one of our regular lunches a few weeks earlier.

At some point on the streets of Nantucket that day, I brought up the question of 2016 with my two sons. I had a feeling that they didn’t want me to make the run, and I said as much. Beau just looked at me. “We’ve got to talk, Dad,” he said. So when we got back to the house that evening the three of us sat down in the kitchen and we talked.

I knew there were plenty of good reasons not to run, and uncertainty about Beau’s health was at the top. And I really suspected that my sons, whose judgment I had come to value and rely on, did not want me to put the family through the ordeal of a presidential campaign just now. “Dad, you’ve got it all wrong,” Beau said. “You’ve got to run. I want you to run.” Hunter agreed: “We want you to run.” The three of us talked for an hour. They wanted to know what I would do to get ready and when the right time to announce would be. Hunt kept telling me that of all the potential candidates I was the best prepared and best able to lead the country. But it was the conviction and intensity in Beau’s voice that caught me off guard. At one point he said it was my obligation to run, my duty. “Duty” was a word Beau Biden did not use lightly.

When we boarded Air Force Two for the trip home that Sunday, everybody seemed happy. The five days had been a success in all ways. It was a family tradition to make our Christmas lists over Thanksgiving, and Jill had the completed lists stowed away for safekeeping. She and I arrived back at the Naval Observatory that afternoon and went up the sweeping central staircase to the second floor to settle into the casual living quarters we used when it was just the two of us.

I sat down on our couch, in the one place in the house that felt as though it truly belonged to us, to relax and reflect. But there was an image I could not get out of my head. I kept seeing the little “Forever Wild” house, undermined by the powerful indifference of nature and the inevitability of time, no longer able to hold its ground; I could almost hear the sharp crack as its moorings failed, could envision the tide washing in and out, pulling at it relentlessly and remorselessly until it was adrift on the water, then swallowed up by the sea. No Thanksgiving would ever be quite the same. I pulled out my diary and started to write. I did have one big item for my own Christmas list that year, but I was keeping it to myself:

NavObs, November 30, 2014, 7:30 p.m.

Just home from Nantucket. I pray we have another year together in 2015. Beau. Beau. Beau. Beau.

Adapted from Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, by Joe Biden, to be published this month by Flatiron Books; © 2017 by the author.