(EDITOR’S NOTE: Now that he is the President-elect of the United States, every aspect of former Vice President Joe Biden’s life will become fodder for reams of articles in Social Media. Being a native of The Bahamas, my attention was arrested by the following article, which notes that Joe Biden met his first wife while on Spring Break in Nassau. Here’s the relevant excerpt for the story below: “The first Mrs. Biden was born in 1942 in Skaneateles, N.Y. Neilia Hunter was the daughter of diner owners, according to The Independent, and probably pretty prosperous ones, too, as she was able to attend boarding school at Penn Hall. She later studied at Syracuse University, and during her junior year, took a spring break trip to Nassau, where she met a University of Delaware junior named Joe.)
THE HEARTREAKING STORY OF JOE BIDEN’S FIRST WIFE
While Joe Biden seems like such an affable, good-tempered guy, the fact is, he’s had a surprisingly tragic life. Just a few years ago, he lost his oldest son, Beau, to cancer, while his younger son, Hunter, has spent years struggling to free himself from dependence on drugs and alcohol. (Joe himself is famously sober, due to an admitted family propensity for addiction.)
Perhaps his life’s greatest sorrow, however, occurred early on in his senatorial career when he received the kind of phone call every spouse, and parent, dreads. As Biden told Marie Claire, that grim December day in 1972 he learned, “My wife and three children were Christmas shopping. A tractor-trailer broadsided them and killed my wife and killed my daughter.”
Suddenly the young senator-elect from Delaware found himself a single dad with his two surviving kids in the hospital with serious injuries, and he was actually sworn into office at their bedsides. Hunter, in presenting Beau’s eulogy in 2015, noted that being in the hospital was his very first memory. “I was almost three years old,” he said. “I remember my brother who was one year and one day older than me, holding my hand, staring into my eyes, saying, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ over and over and over again.”
Once the kids were out of the hospital, Biden resumed his political career but rode the train back to their home in Wilmington every night from his D.C. office, thus earning the nickname Amtrak Joe (via Marie Claire). See BAHAMAS CHRONICLE for a link to the full story at https://www.thelist.com/237847/the-heartbreaking-story-of-joe-bidens-first-wife/
