President-elect Joe Biden quietly honored one of the most painful anniversaries of his life. He visited the graves of his first wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter, Naomi, who were killed in a car crash just weeks after Biden had first been elected to the Senate nearly five decades earlier. Biden, who was 78 at the time, attended morning Mass at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Roman Catholic Church in Wilmington, Delaware, alongside his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, their daughter Ashley, and Ashley’s husband, Dr. Howard Krein. Afterward, the family walked together to the nearby cemetery where Neilia and Naomi are buried.
The tragedy of December 18, 1972, is an inseparable part of Biden’s personal story and political biography. At only 30 years old, he had just won his first Senate campaign in an upset victory and was in Washington, D.C., preparing to take office when his life was suddenly shattered. That afternoon, Neilia was driving the family station wagon home from Christmas shopping with their three children — 13-month-old Naomi, 4-year-old Beau, and 3-year-old Hunter — when their car was struck by a tractor-trailer at an intersection near Wilmington. Neilia and Naomi were killed instantly. Both Beau and Hunter survived but suffered serious injuries.
The crash scene, according to news reports at the time, was devastating. Biden’s campaign materials, a Christmas tree, and scattered personal belongings were thrown from the mangled car, which police described as “demolished.” For Biden, the phone call delivering the news was unforgettable. “By the tone of the phone call, you just knew,” he later recalled. “You just felt it in your bones: something bad happened.”
The young senator-elect rushed back to Delaware, leaving behind his transition work, and remained at his sons’ hospital bedsides. In January 1973, he was sworn into the U.S. Senate from their hospital room, choosing to begin his public service without leaving his children alone. In later speeches, Biden admitted that his grief was so overwhelming he questioned his own will to go on. “For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he said in 2012. “Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, but because they had been to the top of the mountain, and they knew they would never get there again.”
Despite the darkness of those years, Biden slowly rebuilt his life. Five years after the accident, he married Jill Jacobs, a teacher who became a steady force for him and his sons. Together they had a daughter, Ashley, in 1981. Jill Biden has often spoken about her husband’s resilience and the depth of his empathy, qualities shaped by enduring so much personal loss. “There are times when I couldn’t imagine how he did it — how he put one foot in front of the other and kept going,” she said during the Democratic National Convention in 2020.
The Biden family’s story of heartbreak did not end there. In 2015, Biden’s eldest son, Beau, died of brain cancer at age 46. That loss once again reshaped Biden’s life and political future, reinforcing his public message of compassion and hope. Dr. Jill Biden has often linked her husband’s empathy to his own grief, describing how it drives his understanding of other families’ pain, particularly as the country faced widespread loss during the COVID-19 pandemic. “How do you make a broken family whole?” she asked at the DNC. “The same way you make a nation whole. With love and understanding, with small acts of compassion, with bravery, with unwavering faith.”
For Joe Biden, the anniversaries of Neilia and Naomi’s deaths remain solemn reminders of how tragedy can shape a family’s bond, deepen empathy, and strengthen resilience. Nearly half a century later, those early losses continue to inform his perspective as a leader, husband, father, and now, President of the United States.
