Always in our hearts: Bereaved-Americans, Joe Biden, and whatnot
He wasn’t my first choice for president, but I feel an affinity with Joe Biden because we belong to the same ethnic group. I’m not talking about my being Irish (if you hadn’t guessed, I’m not, though I HAVE been to Dublin, Kilkenny, Galway, and Inishmore). I’m saying we’re both Bereaved-Americans-Who-Have-Rebuilt-Their-Lives. Such experiences affect you on a cellular level, perhaps down to the DNA, so yeah, it’s sort of like a special-interest ethnic group. Me, my wife Laura, Patton Oswalt, Katie Couric, and, of course, Joe Biden are card-carrying members.
Yeah, I know. Again with the death stuff? Really, Wes, enough already. I suppose it was inevitable that after my last wholehearted attempt to Write Something Humorous Again, my thoughts would soon turn to more serious matters. These aren’t laughing matters?
Something nobody ever tells you when you’re young is that when you grow older, so much of your time would be consumed with thoughts of people you knew who have died.
It’s been four and a half years since Donna died in that ICU in San Antonio.
My wife Laura’s been through losses, too. In 1997, her 15-year-old daughter Teresa died in a horrible accident when a four-wheeler in which she was riding with a friend fell about 20 feet off a concrete embankment into a drainage ditch. Terry was lovely, smart, artistic, bright, talented. In 2010 her first husband Steve, by all accounts an extraordinarily nice guy with a lot of friends, died when a car ran over him while he was riding a motorcycle in a state park; he was only 50.
I thought of them the other day and tears came. I never knew them, and yet…
When you marry someone you sort of adopt their family, right? So in addition to Donna’s family and my own, I now have Laura’s family. I’m not complaining, mind you; everyone I’ve met has been super nice.
“You’re still processing it,” Laura tells me. And I am; after all, it’s only been four and a half years. It takes a long time. Perhaps the work is never finished, but let us begin.
As for Joe Biden, screw everyone, and by everyone I mainly mean far-left fringe Democrats, who are still moaning about how Biden’s not their ideal choice. There is no ideal choice. As someone who’s endured great personal loss, and as the parent of a special-needs kid, I appreciate very much that Biden gets grieving, tragedy, challenges, and how to move forward (you move forward, never on) in a deep and fundamental way; on a cellular level, perhaps down to the DNA. As a recent New York Times article put it, Biden has long been “an avatar of bereavement in the public consciousness” and as a candidate, has at long last arrived at his moment in history, at a time when the public needs him the most, to be the Grief Counselor in Chief. There are so many of us in need of healing. If you don’t know this, then you just don’t get it, either.
In the words of the late Carrie Fisher, quoted by her friend Meryl Streep: Take your broken heart, and make it into art. Or alternately, one might add, into public policy.
It slays me that for me and Donna to get together, Kirsty MacColl had to die. And that for me and Laura to get together, Donna and Steve had to die. It’s not what we wanted, it’s not what anybody wanted. Nevertheless, it all happened.
“You’re the silver lining,” Laura recently told me. She’s grateful for our marriage, for our blended family. For me, it’s the reward at — let’s not call it the end of the rainbow, but the reward at the end of a long period of suffering and grieving. You never stop missing them, but you also never stop being grateful that, sometimes, things go right.
