First lady Jill Biden is sharing that the death of her stepson, Beau Biden, caused her to drift away from her faith in God.
The first lady spoke exclusively to Newsmax in an interview that aired Monday about her experience losing her stepson, saying that since his death she has found a new “purpose” in helping families through their “survivorship.”
“Cancer is one of these issues. It’s not a red issue or blue issue. Cancer affects every American family,” Jill Biden told the host of “Conversations With Nancy Brinker.”
The former first lady went on to say: “It’s unifying … Cancer is such a terrible disease, but it is unifying people. They’re all coming together, saying, ‘Yes, let’s work with one another, and let’s reduce the incidents of cancer as we know it, and change the face of cancer.'”
Jill Biden and host Nancy Brinker have been longtime friends, both working to raise awareness about the available treatment and screening for breast cancer and other forms of the disease. Brinker is also a breast cancer survivor and a co-founder of the Promise Fund of Florida.
The first lady spoke about her and President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative, which assists those struggling with grief from a loss to cancer. She said that in helping others they were better able to deal with their own loss.
“We didn’t want other families to go through what we had gone through,” Jill Biden said of her family’s struggle through the loss of Beau Biden to cancer in 2015.
Emphasizing her own experience with loss, the first lady said, “I believed so fervently that Beau was going to live that I just didn’t give up hope ever. Until he took his last breath, I just felt like, Beau is going to survive this.”
“And when he died, it took me a long time to … I was angry. It really shocked me, because I had prayed so hard for him to live,” Jill Biden said, going on to explain the “empty, angry feeling” she experienced.
It was later at a church in South Carolina when a stranger told her that she would like to be her prayer partner: “We started to pray together and we do it to this day. That was several years ago. I felt like it was God’s way of saying to me, OK, Jill, come back… And I did.”
Watch her interview below:
Jill Biden, then the second lady, spoke about her relationship with Beau and Hunter Biden in 2015 shortly after Beau’s death, in an article published by The Washington Post.
According to the article, the death of her stepson refocused the attention of the nation on personal tragedies, reminding the nation of the death of Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and daughter Naomi in a car accident, which occurred shortly after he was elected to the Senate in 1972.
Joe Biden said in his memoir, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics,” which was published in 2007, that meeting his now-wife Jill Biden helped him rebuild: “She gave me back my life; she made me start to think my family might be whole again.”
