President Joe Biden was a single dad for five years after his wife, Neilia, 30, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash a week before Christmas in 1982.
The young politician’s sons, Beau and Hunter, ages 4 and 3, were critically injured.
In April, Biden about his struggle with intense grief following the loss of Neilia and Naomi.
“I used to sit there and just think, ‘I’m going to take out a bottle of scotch,’” he recalled. “I’m going to just drink it and get drunk.”
At one point, Biden said he contemplated suicide.
“I thought, ‘Let me just go to the Delaware Memorial (Bridge) and jump,” he told Stern.
At a 2012 event organized by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), .
“There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye,” Biden said. “It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner or later. But the only thing I have more experience than you in is this: I’m telling you it will come.”
In 1975, Biden, then a Delaware senator, met his future wife Jill Biden after they were fixed up by his brother Frank. before they tied the knot in 1977.
“After all that his two sons, Beau and Hunter, had lost, I knew that if I said yes to Joe, it had to be forever,” . “Eventually, I realized that my love for Joe and the boys outweighed any fears I had.”
Biden and Jill completed their family in 1981, when they welcomed daughter Ashley.
Read on to learn more about Biden’s four children:
Naomi Biden
Naomi and her mom, Neilia, were killed in 1972, after their station wagon was broadsided by a tractor-trailer. Naomi’s brothers, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured, but survived the crash.
The toddler and Neilia are both buried at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Cemetery, in Delaware.
“To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. There’s a hollowness in your chest, you feel like you’re being sucked into it,” . “It’s suffocating. And it’s never quite the same.”
Beau Biden
Joseph “Beau” Biden III was 46 when he died of died of a glioblastoma brain tumor in 2015. He is survived by wife Hallie, 50, and their two children, Natalie, 19, and Robert, 18, who often goes by Hunter.
A former Delaware attorney general and member of the Delaware National Guard, who was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Iraq in 2008 and 2009, Beau was diagnosed with brain cancer in August 2013.
Beau was the acting attorney general when he went to serve in Iraq, and he later refused a bid to run for his father’s seat in the U.S. Senate to handle his obligations as attorney general.
“Beau was in the middle of prosecuting one of the largest child abuse cases in American history and felt that his duty to see that case through to the end was more important than his personal ambition,” . “That kind of character is just extraordinary, and that’s the kind of person Beau was.”
Biden announced his son’s passing in a touching .
“His absolute honor made him a role model for our family. Beau embodied my father’s saying that a parent knows success when his child turns out better than he did,” Biden, then vice president, wrote in part. “In the words of the Biden family: Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.”
, he compared Beau to Biden.
“Like his dad, Beau was a good, big-hearted, devoutly Catholic and deeply faithful man, who made a difference in the lives of all he touched — and he lives on iour hearts,” Obama wrote.
Hunter Biden
Robert “Hunter” Biden, 54, is an attorney and businessman.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Georgetown University, and earned his law degree at Yale Law School.
Hunter shares three daughters with ex-wife Kathleen Buhle: Naomi, 30, Finnegan, 23, and Maisy, 22. Hunter married South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen in 2019, and the following year, they welcomed son Beau Jr., 4. He is also dad of Navy Joan Roberts, 5. .
In Hunter’s book, “Beautiful Things,” he wrote about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction.
“I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, D.C., and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig. In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.”
When Hunter appeared on the the , he shared that he is sober and that he paints eight hours a day as a form of meditation.
“If I had my druthers, I would be an artist and then, you know, life interrupts those kinds of dreams for some people,” Hunter told Moby.
Hunter was indicted by federal prosecutors on three counts tied to . that carry a combined maximum penalty of 17 years in prison.
Ashley Biden
Ashley, a social worker, graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice.
In 2012, she married Dr. Howard Krein, a otorhinolaryngologist and plastic surgeon.
Ashley prefers to stay out of the spotlight.
“It took about two years to get into the groove of being in this position,” she told in 2023. “I’m doing my work as I always have been, but kind of figuring out the role as first daughter, and how can I use it in the most positive way, where it’s not about me, it’s about Americans. And what I’ve learned is, I want to tell the story of others — I want to lift up organizations and share this information.”
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