Many felt the world had stopped for a moment when Joe Biden sat with Senator John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain and words of heartfelt comfort on the diagnosis were cancer Father.
While McCain’s eyes are dry, the former vice president, whose son Beau had died of the same form of malignant brain tumor that John McCain luchando is talking about, said McCain’s hand, reminding him of his father’s courage in war and civil service.
“One of the things that gave Beau value was John,” Biden said. “Your father,” he said to McCain, “when you were little, your dad took care of my beauty.”
Joe Biden’s first wife and first daughter died in a 1972 fatal car accident that left his younger brother looking good and badly injured.
“Beau talked about your father’s courage,” Biden said. “Not because of the illness, but because of his courage.”
In a world where the mother of Heather Heyer, an anti-racist demonstrator murdered in Charlottesville, had to hide her daughter’s grave to protect her from the neo-Nazis, the time between Biden and her colleague’s daughter was more than just a bipartisan moment: It was like an explosion of pure oxygen in a room full of toxic smoke.
Grief does not care about your postal code or whether your home is a two bedroom villa or Maisonette. It still hurts and loses a father, especially a father who is larger than life with a great personality and a great reputation that you live. We always have the impression of seeing the sun rise and thinking that you will never feel safe again.
These are the things that help us with pain and pain. And moments of kindness and gentle compassion like Joe Biden showed the daughter of his seriously ill colleague: It will finally help us to be together as a nation as soon as we recognize each other’s essential humanity and finally, one day, let’s start healing.