Did You See VP Biden's Son's Funeral On The News?

President Obama was visibly distracted.

“He was just staring out the window, and it was clear he wasn’t paying attention,” recalled David Axelrod, who was serving as a White House senior adviser at the time.

It was May 2010 and Vice President Biden’s oldest son, Beau, had just suffered a stroke. “ ‘I don’t know how Joe’s going to go on if this doesn’t work,’ the president said,” Axelrod recalled. A week later, when Biden returned to the West Wing, Obama sprinted out of his office to welcome him back.

Five years later, as Biden dealt with the prospect that Obama dreaded, he asked the president to deliver a eulogy for his son, to take on the task of giving voice to the intense private grief of a family that has spent decades in the public limelight.

Biden’s request underscored just how much the personal relationship between the two men has evolved in the seven years since they first forged their political partnership.
Joe Biden had one final bit of advice, a warning, really, for these very successful students. No matter how accomplished their lives turned out to be, they would not be able to control their fates.

“Reality has a way of intruding,” the vice president told thousands of graduating Yale University students two weeks ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/beau-biden-vice-presidents-son-dies-of-brain-cancer-at-46/2015/05/31/4198da78-07c6-11e5-9e39-0db921c47b93_story.html



Biden spent the next several minutes unfurling a story he had told hundreds, if not thousands, of times before: his improbable 1972 Senate victory, the car crash that took his wife and daughter, the weeks spent coaxing his two young sons toward recovery.