In the first week of Stephen Colbert's Late Night Show on CBS, there have been many laughs — and now, even a few tears.
Joe Biden, in an interview with Colbert on Thursday, shared how his Catholic faith is helping him through the grief over the death of his son Beau earlier this year.
"How has your faith ... helped you respond to having lost your first wife, your daughter and now your son?" Colbert asked.
The first response the vice president gave was how self-conscious he felt talking about his loss, knowing the number of people who have gone through much the same thing, or worse.
Then he talked about how his faith has blessed his life, despite the tragedy.
"For me, my religion is an enormous sense of solace, ... What my faith has done, it sort of takes everything about my life ... all the good things that have happened, have happened around the culture of my religion and the theology of my religion."
Despite the comfort of going to Mass and saying the rosary, Biden is still very much in mourning. When Colbert practically begged the vice president to run for president in 2016 with the crowd chanting "Joe! Joe! Joe!" in the background, it was clear Biden felt he and his family were not emotionally prepared for a campaign.
According to Russell Berman in The Atlantic, "Biden didn’t actually make any news in the Colbert interview — his doubts about whether he and his family are emotionally ready for a presidential campaign are clearly still there."
Biden's grief and mourning was palpable and raw Thursday night, evident from the way he hung his head the moment Colbert offered condolences for his son, Beau, who lost his battle with brain cancer this May at the age of 46.
Grief expresses itself in many different ways. As the Deseret News National reported in October 2013, "There's no wrong way to grieve, no perfect degree of sorrow. It's a complicated porridge of personalities and relationships. Some people cry easily while others are naturally stoic. A warm relationship can comfort during loss or increase devastation. An aloof relationship stirs different but sometimes equally distressing emotions. The age of the survivor and the person who died; whether death was anticipated, violent or natural; and the individual's support system all carve steps in a journey through grief."
Though grief and loss are expressed in a myriad of ways all over the world, there are some similar areas of support that mourners turn to in their hours — or years — of deep need. According to a study/survey published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health in 2009, 84 percent of respondents said family support was the most helpful thing in dealing with their grief, followed by friend support at 74 percent, and religious and cultural beliefs at 37 percent.
As people experience loss and grief, much like Biden's loss of his first wife, daughter and son, it can be difficult to know how best to comfort and help them. According to Michelle Newman, a mom and blogger who lost her 22-month-old son in a tragic house accident in 2012, there's no simple slogan or salve for the pain of loss that never actually goes away. "Don't wait for someone to get 'better,'" she told the Deseret News in 2012. "It will always be a part of their lives. It's not a straight line."
As for advice, she did share a "what not to say."
"Whatever you do, please don't compare your loved one's loss to someone else's 'harder loss,' " she says. "Every loss is hard."
Email: nsorensen@deseretnews.com
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