Most people know Joe Biden as being the president of the United States but they may not know that he had lost his first wife and infant daughter, causing him to think about the possibility of suicide.
When Biden appeared on the Howard Stern podcast, he sat down to discuss many things about his time in office. He was on the podcast for an hour and Howard Stern also got him to talk about his personal life.
It happened in 1972 when Neilia Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s first wife was killed in a car crash. Their 13-month-old daughter was also in the car at the time and passed away. The other children survived.
This car crash didn’t happen very long after he was elected into the Senate. He was sworn into office at the bedside of his surviving children as they were recovering.
He said that he was down in Washington hiring his staff when he got a phone call saying that his family had been in an accident. He could tell by the tone of the phone call that the news wasn’t good.
He said: “But the call said my wife is dead, my daughter is dead, and I wasn’t sure how my sons were going to make it.”
Biden admitted that he had never had an alcoholic drink because there were too many alcoholics in his family but now he thought about drinking. He also said that he was touched so deeply by the tragedy that he considered suicide.
He said: “I just thought about it, you don’t need to be crazy to commit suicide. If you’ve been to the top of the mountain, you think it’s never going to be there again.”
“I thought, ‘Let me just go to the Delaware Memorial [Bridge] and jump.'”
Thankfully, it didn’t happen and in 1977, he was able to marry his second wife, Jill.