“I remember looking up and saying, ‘God,’ as if I was talking to God myself,
‘You can’t be good, how can you be good?”
“I probably shouldn’t say this with the press here, but it’s more important,
you’re more important. For the first time in my life, I understood how
someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he told families at a
grief seminar in Virginia.
“Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had
been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they
would never get there again.”
Standing in front of pictures of soldiers killed in action, he promised “it
can and will get better”.
“There will come a day,” he said “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.”
Speaking of meeting his second wife, Dr Jill Biden, in 1977, he said he felt
“guilty as hell” but urged widows and widowers to seek new happiness after
their loss.