VEEP

Biden Talks Suicide

Shares his tale of grief after wife’s and daughter’s deaths.

Vice President Joe Biden told families and friends of military personnel killed in action that he knew firsthand how grief might push a person to suicide after the deaths of his wife and daughter nearly 40 years ago. Speaking at the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors’ 18th annual survivor seminar, Biden said that people commit suicide not because they are “deranged” or “nuts,” but “because they’d been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they’d never get there again, that it was never going to get—never going to be that way again.” Although this is the first time Biden told this story in public, he addresses it in his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep.