Former Vice President Joe Biden teared up during a CNN Town Hall on Wednesday night while delivering a heartfelt speech about his late son’s final wishes from his death bed. “My son Beau is my soul,” he said, recounting how he struggled through the grief of losing his son to brain cancer and eventually found “hope” and “purpose” again. Prior to Beau’s death in 2015, the former vice president also lost his wife and daughter in a 1972 car accident.

“I've found that there’s that famous phrase from Kierkegaard, ‘Faith sees best in the dark’... For me, it’s important because it gives me some reason to have hope. And purpose,” he said. “But the only way I’ve been able to deal with when my wife was killed and my daughter were killed and that my son died, I’ve only been able to deal with it by realizing they’re part of my being.” Biden then revealed that he starts every day by aiming to make his son proud of him. “Because he asked me when he was dying, ‘Promise me, Dad. … Promise me, you’ll stay engaged,” Biden said. “He knew I'd take care of the family, but he worried what I would do is I would pull back and go into a shell and not do all the things I've done before. It took a long time for me to get to the point to realize that that purpose is the thing that would save me. And it has. And every morning I get up and I say to myself … I hope he’s proud of me.”