From the Magazine
December 2017 Issue

Why Joe Biden Didn’t Run . . . And Why He’s Not Ruling Out 2020

In a cruel twist, Joe Biden’s planned 2016 presidential campaign was upended by the death of its foremost booster, his 46-year-old son, Beau, from brain cancer. Will the former vice president make a run in 2020? With the publication of his book Promise Me, Dad, recalling that tragic period, Biden opens up about the emotional—and political—challenges he faces.
Former vice president Joe Biden at his home in McLean Virginia.
Former vice president Joe Biden at his home in McLean, Virginia.Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Joe Biden, the former vice president, was four minutes and forty seconds into discussing his new book, Promise Me, Dad, when he got snagged on a memory. We were sitting in the den of his vacation home, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It was a hot day in late summer, and while his wife, Jill, and his sister, Valerie, milled around nearby in casual workout gear, Biden was smartly attired in a checked dress shirt, charcoal trousers, and black tassel loafers worn without socks—as if primed for an afternoon of shirtsleeve campaigning. In his genially raconteur-ish Uncle Joe way, he recalled how eye-opening it was, 25 years ago, to read Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, a chronicle of the 1988 presidential election that is considered a modern classic of political nonfiction. Biden was one of six candidates whose campaigns granted Cramer nearly unfettered access. When the book came out, in 1992, Biden told me, he spent four hours discussing it with another of the ‘88 race’s also-rans, Senator Bob Dole: “I said to him, ‘You know, I looked at it, and there’s things in there I don’t like, but I can’t say they’re not true.’ ”

Writing Promise Me, Dad, to be published by Flatiron Books on November 14, forced another of these reckonings—only, this time, Biden found, he had to be his own Cramer, confronting truths about his life that he had heretofore blocked out. “I realized,” he said, “how I engaged in the willing suspension of disbelief. How, until I had to write it down, I could not let myself think about the really bad parts about Beau—illness.”

Beau. Illness. This is where the snag happened. Biden’s eyes suddenly flashed and reddened, as if he was seeing something in his mind that he didn’t like seeing, and he bowed his head for a moment. The reason I know the precise timing of this is that I instinctively did the same and, in so doing, caught sight of my recorder on the coffee table, its L.C.D. readout blinking 4:40. Joseph Robinette Biden III, the firstborn of Joe Biden’s four children, known as Beau, died of brain cancer on May 30, 2015, at the age of 46. More than two years later, and less than five minutes into an interview, his father’s grief was still quick to surface.

But not for long. Biden paused briefly, swallowed, looked up, and calmly resumed talking. Finishing his thought, he described how his second-born son, Hunter, helped disabuse him of the magical thinking that was fogging his writing process. At some point, Biden said, he had mentioned to Hunter some words that Beau had spoken to him two weeks before he passed away. “And Hunter said, ‘Dad—Beau couldn’t speak for two months before he died! He had a tracheotomy!,’ ” Biden said. “I knew that. But I had put it out of my mind. I could not let myself think about my boy in pain.”

In Promise Me, Dad, Biden faces Beau’s trials head-on: the early uncertainty over what was ailing his son; the brutal diagnosis of the tumor as a glioblastoma (“the Monster,” as Biden’s own White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, called it); the hopeful period when Beau was responding well to treatment; the racking, last-ditch experimental procedures that Beau stoically endured after his symptoms took a turn for the worse; and, ultimately, the death of a man who was not only beloved within his close-knit family but also a political comer, a popular, charismatic figure in his native Delaware. From 2007 to 2015, Beau served as the state’s attorney general. He was also an officer in the Delaware Army National Guard and spent a year on active duty in Iraq. Before he got sick, Beau had planned to run for governor of Delaware in 2016. Given his impressive résumé and widespread appeal—Beau, his father writes, “had all the best of me, but with the bugs and flaws engineered out”—he might have gone farther still.

Biden and his wife, Jill. They ask themselves, says Jill, “What would Beau want us to do?”

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Surprisingly, given its central subject matter, Promise Me, Dad is a brisk, often uplifting read, a consequence of its author’s congenital jollity and irrepressible candor. The book is fashioned essentially from three narrative strands braided together: about Beau’s illness, Biden’s ongoing deliberations over whether to pursue the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2016, and the serious responsibilities, mostly in the foreign-policy arena, that he was juggling in his capacity as vice president. The action takes place over a span of two years, from the summer of 2013, when an M.R.I. scan first revealed the presence of a lesion on Beau’s brain, to the aftermath of Beau’s death, in 2015, when Joe finally decided against running for president.

It’s a glimpse into a chunk of the past that is recent but feels impossibly distant, when the daily business of the federal government’s executive branch was conducted with sobriety and comity, the sitting vice president was sufficiently well versed in international affairs to advise Iraq’s new Shia prime minister on how to build a coalition with the country’s Sunni and Kurdish factions, and the biggest criticism that Biden could muster of the man then in the Oval Office was that he was “deliberate to a fault”—too reluctant to act on his gut.

True to his informal persona, Biden usually refers to Barack Obama in the book not as “the president” but as “Barack,” and portrays their relationship as an initially uncertain alliance that developed into a genuinely warm and deep friendship. One of the few people outside the family privy to the severity of Beau’s condition, Obama served as Biden’s confidant and grief counselor, and even made an offer (never taken up) to assist the family out of his own pocket if the going got tough for them financially during Beau’s ordeal. Biden has never been a wealthy man; he is that rare creature in Washington who earned his living from a government salary the whole time he served, for 36 years as a senator and 8 years as vice president.

I asked Biden why he chose to write this particular book, a relatively slender volume (250-odd pages) about a relatively narrow band of time, rather than collect his thoughts and produce, down the road, a memoir of his years in office. He replied that a big part of his motivation was to pay tribute to Beau—the book takes its title from Beau’s insistence, as he came to realize that he might not make it, that his father pledge “that no matter what happens, you’ll be all right”—and to help others who have suffered unimaginable loss understand that “one of the ways to get through tragedy is to find purpose.” But he also said, firmly, “I’ve got too much more to do to write an autobiography. For real. I don’t consider my attempt to contribute to the public square finished.”

The Sheriff

Had Beau Biden never fallen ill, Joe Biden would have run for president. “No question,” he told me. “I had planned on running, and I wasn’t running against Hillary or Bernie or anybody else. Honest to God, I thought that I was the best suited for the moment to be president.”

Is this uncouth, to bring up what-might-have-been political scenarios in the same breath as his son’s death? Not in the eyes of Biden, because the foremost booster of his 2016 candidacy was none other than Beau. At the time of his second swearing-in as vice president, in January 2013, Biden was all but certain of his plans. But that year Beau started to experience dizziness and auditory hallucinations while out on his runs, and then, on a vacation, he suffered a stroke-like episode that landed him in a Chicago hospital. That’s when doctors first spotted a tumor. There was hope initially that it might be benign, or that perhaps Beau had lymphoma, which is often curable. But a few days later, by which time Beau had been transferred to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, the family was informed that Beau’s tumor was a glioblastoma, Stage IV. The median life span after such a diagnosis, they learned, is 12 to 14 months.

This news upended any certainty that Biden had held about the future. Over Thanksgiving weekend in 2014, as his own resolve was wavering, Biden broached the subject of 2016 with Beau and Hunter, articulating his feeling that, given what the family was going through, it probably wasn’t the best idea for him to run. He was surprised by the vehemence with which his sons rejected that notion, Beau’s in particular. “At one point he said it was my obligation to run, my duty,” Biden writes in Promise Me, Dad. “Duty was a word Beau Biden did not use lightly.”

Video: Joe Biden’s Top Ten Moments

Beau’s sense of duty was forged early, under tragic circumstances. On December 18, 1972, six weeks after Joe Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and his 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident while they were out Christmas shopping. Beau and Hunter, not quite four and three years of age at the time, were also in the car, and sustained injuries that kept them hospitalized for weeks. Biden was sworn in from their hospital room.

At Beau’s funeral mass, held at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, in Wilmington, in June 2015, Hunter recalled that his earliest memory of his older brother is in that hospital room, clasping his hand, looking him in the eye, and saying the words “I love you” over and over again. Whether it was the loss of his mother that imbued him with this trait or an inherent part of his character, Beau bore a sense of responsibility beyond his years. His childhood nickname was the Sheriff. “Beau was that child who always took charge of everything,” I was told by Jill Biden, who entered the boys’ life in 1975 and married Joe in 1977. (The boys embraced her immediately and grew up calling her “Mom”; they were joined in 1981 by a sister, Ashley.) Jill, now a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College, remembers the young Beau as preternaturally poised and principled—a boy who, before he even turned 10, offered to fix a flat tire for one of her friends, and took umbrage at the inappropriate tone with which a gas-station attendant addressed his stepmother as “Honey.”

“I always knew that Beau would follow in his dad’s footsteps,” Jill said. “He loved politics; he loved the campaigns, the picnics and coffees and parades.” Follow he did. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he went to the same law school as his father, at Syracuse University, and then eased into public life, working as a federal prosecutor and in private practice before pursuing office in 2006. By that time, he had been married for four years to the former Hallie Olivere and was the father of a girl and a boy.

In January 2015, Beau completed his second term as Delaware’s attorney general. With his own political ambitions on hold, he became deeply involved in planning his father’s potential presidential run. In February, he, Hunter, Joe, and the senior Biden’s chief of staff and chief political strategist—respectively, Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon—gathered in the library of the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the vice president, to discuss a 22-page memo that Donilon had prepared. The upshot of the memo was that the 2016 election was Biden’s to lose. He was the right man to connect with middle-class voters about their frustrations and their aspirations, the argument went, plus he was endearingly real in a manner that seemed to fit the mood of the electorate. As Biden notes in the book, “My reputation as a ‘gaffe machine’ was no longer looking like a weakness.”

Donilon had a plan completely laid out, with speeches in strategic states and a formal announcement in April. But Biden couldn’t commit to moving so fast. In that very meeting at the residence, Beau seemed weaker and more quiet than usual—a consequence, perhaps, of his increasingly evident aphasia, which sometimes rendered him unable to summon the words he wanted to say. (Through his friend Mark Kelly, the retired astronaut and navy captain, Biden arranged for Beau to work with a speech therapist who had treated Kelly’s wife, the former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, after she survived being shot in the head.) What’s more, Beau was soon to return to M. D. Anderson for another round of brain scans.

I asked Biden if, by that point, the act of considering a presidential run was mainly an exercise in keeping Beau optimistic or something he was genuinely invested in. “Quite frankly, more of the former than the latter,” he said. “Because Beau, it’d be a play on words to say it would have killed him, but it would have bothered Beau a great deal if I’d not run because of him.”

Other factors weighed on Biden’s decision. Shortly before the Donilon meeting, Hillary Clinton had paid her own visit to the Naval Observatory, to deliver the news in person that she was going to run for president. She asked Biden if he would also be doing so. He told her he was undecided, but that if he did he would not run a negative campaign against her. Biden writes that she promised the same. “Although some of our supporters can get out of hand at times,” he quotes her as saying, “it would not be me.” In the same period, Obama, too, had been trying to suss out Biden’s intentions, at their weekly one-on-one lunches at the White House. The president, in Biden’s telling, dropped heavy hints that, for the good of party unity, the vice president should stand down; Clinton’s political organization was formidable, and it was her turn. Obama further cited the excitement with which he personally was anticipating life after holding high office, and asked Biden, “Joe, have you focused on that? How do you want to spend the rest of your life?”

All of these considerations fell by the wayside when Beau, after a final rally in late May, died on the Saturday following Memorial Day. Biden acknowledges this event in the book by reprinting his succinct, heartbroken diary entry from that evening:

May 30. 7:51 p.m. It happened. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy.

A week later, at the memorial service at St. Anthony’s, in Wilmington, President Obama, Hunter Biden, Ashley Biden, and General Raymond Odierno of the U.S. Army delivered eulogies. For the homily, Joe Biden enlisted a family friend, Father Leo O’Donovan, the former president of Georgetown University. O’Donovan’s words were arresting in their stricken bluntness. Beau, he said, was “gone, gone, gone. It was—is—like the night of Good Friday. The one we hoped in, counted on, thought our future, has been taken from us.”

“I very clearly intended the parallelism between Jesus and Beau,” O’Donovan told me recently. “I didn’t want to overstate it, but people had such great hopes for him. What is that like? It’s like losing someone like Jesus.” And yet, O’Donovan said, reflecting back on that June weekend, “I lived for a year on the grace of those days—the undeniable presence of God in the midst of that sorrow.” What struck him most about the vice president, he said, was his fortitude. A day before the funeral, at Beau’s wake, Biden stood by his son’s coffin for nearly eight hours, greeting the ongoing stream of visitors who had come to pay their respects. “He changed his role entirely and became the comforter rather than the bereaved,” O’Donovan said.

This is a role for which Biden has found himself uniquely suited. Having experienced unthinkable tragedy at the beginning of his public life, he was marked early as a survivor, a man to whom others can express their grief because they know he has lived it. In Promise Me, Dad, he describes how he explains to people in mourning that their sadness will last a long time, and that the smallest sensory cue—a song, a scent—may bring forth, in sudden and painful fashion, a vivid memory of the departed. And yet, he tells them, the time will come when the memory “will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes.”

Biden found himself playing a new variation on his consoler role this past July, when he learned that Senator John McCain had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma, the same kind of tumor that killed Beau (and also, in 2009, Biden and McCain’s Senate colleague Ted Kennedy). Though they belong to opposing parties, and, indeed, faced off on opposing tickets in the 2008 presidential election, the two men have long been close friends, dating back to the 1970s, when McCain, not yet a senator, served as a navy liaison to the Senate. McCain told me that Biden had quickly gotten in touch after the diagnosis went public, downloading all that he had learned from Beau’s experience about the best doctors and the most cutting-edge treatments—“a lot of good information and recommendations,” said McCain. “And also, we had some wonderful conversations. When you have dear friends like that, it’s always very important, but the fact that he had just been through what he had just been through was particularly meaningful.”

It is not true, as has been reported, that Biden also called McCain to lobby him to vote against the “skinny repeal” health-care bill that the Republican leadership was rushing to the floor that month—the one that was defeated after McCain dramatically cast the deciding “No” vote in the wee hours of July 28. But, McCain said, Biden did call him after the fact, “and he told me he thought it was a pretty laudable act, the thumbs-down.” McCain added, “If we’re going to really solve the health-care issue, it’s got to be done on a bipartisan basis, with hearings and amendments and votes and bringing it to the floor.” Two days after our conversation, McCain declared publicly that he would not support the Graham-Cassidy proposal, the latest G.O.P. effort to repeal Obamacare.

Late Entry?

Biden spent the summer of 2015 in a peculiar state of simultaneously grieving and mulling a late entry into the presidential race. This emotional high-wire act reached its climax on September 10 of that year, when he appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and laid bare his ambivalence, telling Colbert, “I don’t think any man or woman should run for president unless, number one, they know exactly why they would want to be president, and, two, they can look at the folks out there and say, ‘I promise you, you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy, and my passion to do this.’ And I’d be lying if I said that I knew that I was there.”

Colbert, going out on a limb, all but pleaded with Biden to toss his hat into the ring. “I know that’s an emotional decision you have to make,” he said, to the studio audience’s applause. “But it’s going to be emotional for a lot of people if you don’t run. Sir, I just want to say that I think that your experience and your example of suffering and service is something that would be sorely missed in the race. . . . I think we’d all be very happy if you did run.”

Biden, his grandson Hunter, his son Beau, and Jill, at the Naval Observatory residence, in Washington, D.C., October 2011.

Official White House photo by David Lienemann. Hair, makeup, and grooming by Juanita Dillard; set design by Mary Howard; for details, go to VF.com/Credits.

Part of what animated the draft-Biden movement was the joylessness of the 2016 crop. Whereas Biden is known for his wide smile and personal warmth, few of the candidates exuded optimism about America or seemed to enjoy relating to actual human beings. Donald Trump liked speaking before hangars-ful of supporters, but he painted a dystopian picture in which the U.S. economy was a “disaster” and foreign powers were always “laughing at us.” Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio spoke in only slightly less apocalyptic tones.

As for Hillary Clinton, Biden writes that he felt a “twinge of sadness” for her as she departed the Naval Observatory the day of her visit. “The sage political analysts would say she was probably on her way to a historic victory—the first woman to win the White House,” he writes. “But she did not evince much joy at the prospect of running. I may have misread her entirely that morning, but she seemed to me like a person propelled by forces not entirely of her own making.”

I asked Biden to elaborate on this passage. “Everyone thinks it was just raw ambition on her part,” he said. “I think she was sort of a prisoner of history. First woman who had a better-than-even chance of getting the nomination. First woman, relative to the Republican field, who had a better-than-even chance of being president. But there’s a lot of baggage, fair and unfair, and there was no illusion on her part—this wasn’t going to be a Marquess of Queensberry fight. And so I never got the sense that there was any joy in her campaign. Maybe it’s me, but I find joy in doing this.”

To be fair to Clinton, Biden noted that Barack Obama is not the most natural press-the-flesh schmoozer, either. “Barack would rather speak to a million people than speak to 30,” he said. “But I think I can do both. I really, really enjoy what I do.”

All that said, a few weeks after his Late Show appearance, in October, standing in the White House Rose Garden flanked by his wife and President Obama, Biden announced that he would not be running. “I realized that I just wasn’t ready,” he told me. For one thing, he was not so naïve as to believe that he would be treated with kid gloves just because he had recently buried his son. “It was clear that there was a lot of negative research being done on me, coming from my own party,” he said, citing reports that the pro-Clinton political operative David Brock was gathering oppo materials on him.

“The other thing,” Biden said, shifting to the grieving process, “is that the second year is harder than the first. That’s a fact. Anybody I know who’s gone through serious tragedy, the first year, there are so many people around you, propping you up. But after a year, your family, your close friends—I mean, it’s normal, they’ve got to get back to their lives. But then the reality of it sets in, in a profound way.”

The shocking outcome of the 2016 election has led to some recriminatory moments over the last several months. In March, at the launch of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a new foreign-policy and national-security incubator affiliated with Beau’s alma mater but based in Washington, Biden criticized Hillary Clinton’s campaign as the first he could recall “where my party did not talk about what it always stood for, and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.” Clinton took issue with this comment in her recent memoir, What Happened, writing, “I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class.”

Still, Biden insists that his support for Clinton was genuine, noting that he made 83 appearances on behalf of her campaign. And even if he had challenged her, there’s no telling—in an election year that defied polling forecasts and the societal norms of advanced civilizations—what might have happened. He might well have been whomped by Hillary. Then again, he might have turned out to be the old white man whom much of America was evidently looking for, the suspension bridge between the Trump base and the Bernie base. The point is, he didn’t run.

“I Mean, Jeez!”

Which brings us to 2020. Is it too late? Is Biden too old? He will turn 75 on November 20, and will turn 78 shortly after the next presidential election, which would make him, were he to be the candidate and victor, the oldest first-term president ever—older than Ronald Reagan when he left office after two terms. But Biden, when I met with him, appeared conspicuously, emphatically healthy—tan, slim, vigorous. It’s not that he didn’t look 74, but, rather, that he is one of those fit older people who have redefined what 74 can look like. It probably helps that he is a teetotaler, a choice he made as a young man, having been disturbed by the effect that alcohol had on members of his family. As Lorne Michaels once said admiringly of the stamina and 24-7 work ethic of a protégé, the writer-comic John Mulaney, “He doesn’t drink—which means that he also has his evenings.”

Asked for his current state of mind about 2020, Biden ruled nothing out. “I haven’t decided to run,” he said, “but I’ve decided I’m not going to decide not to run. We’ll see what happens.” He is behaving very much like a probable candidate, having formed a political-action committee, American Possibilities, in June, and writing opinion pieces in recent months for The Atlantic and The New York Times about Donald Trump’s illiberal conduct and the need to reclaim traditional American values.

When one is with Biden, his words about current affairs are less measured. If he gets riled up, the midcentury Irish-Catholic locutions of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he spent the first 10 years of his life before moving to Delaware, come to the fore. “We are so well positioned to own the 21st century—Jesus, God!—if we just get out of our own way,” he said. “The rest of the world is not a patch on our jeans. I mean, jeez, we have problems, but holy mackerel!”

Trump, he went on, is not only “self-referential and uninformed” but also a threat to the very foundations of America. “This sounds corny,” he said, “but everything the founders did was to erect institutions that made it more difficult to abuse power. That’s why they have three different branches of government. And what really worries me about this administration is the frontal attack on those institutions that, if they were lost, makes the abuse of power so much more available.”

There are plenty of reasons to believe that Biden would be a viable candidate. He is inherently likable and uncommonly joyful for a politician. He is an experienced foreign-policy hand who has forged relationships with leaders the world over. He represents an old-fashioned ideal of bipartisan cooperation that many Americans crave, maintaining amicable, ongoing relationships not only with John McCain but also, he says, with Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, and Rob Portman. And for someone who has worked in Washington for virtually the entirety of his adult life, he is resolutely un-bought: not a “swamp creature” but a wage-earning public servant. It was only as Biden was walking me to my car that I learned that the house in Rehoboth Beach is a new acquisition, purchased this year with funds from his book advance. He had pledged to Jill years ago that they would someday get a beach house, he explained. Above the front door is a sign that reads, A PROMISE KEPT.

But the list of prospective Democratic challengers to Biden is long. From the Senate alone, there are such contenders as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Al Franken, and Chris Murphy, to say nothing of the various governors, congresspeople, and private-sector wild cards like Oprah Winfrey and Disney’s Robert A. Iger, who have positioned themselves as potential candidates.

And grief has no timetable. The process of getting over Beau’s death, Biden said, “has lasted longer for me than the first time,” alluding to the 1972 accident. He finds himself still concerned about his ability to regulate his emotions and is acutely sensitive to any perception that he is milking Beau’s death for sympathy and political advantage. In May, he attended a financial conference in Las Vegas that was organized by, of all people, Anthony Scaramucci, prior to his ill-fated cameo as White House communications director. At a private banquet that took place after the conference, Biden lost his temper when he construed a remark of another attendee, the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, to be a comment on his penchant for talking about Beau. Having held the floor for a period, Biden cut himself short, saying words to the effect of “I’ve said enough.” This prompted Ackman to respond, “You’ve never held back before!”

Biden was not amused. “I said, ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I’m going to knock you on your ass!’ In front of a crowd,” he told me, with a mix of sheepishness and pride. Through a spokesman, Ackman stated that he has enormous respect for Biden and would never make light of anyone’s death, and that his comment was, in fact, an attempt to lighten the mood at the table after an intense group conversation about President Trump, not Beau—a version of events supported by others who were present. But Biden makes no bones about having been angry. “The governor on my anger,” he said, was that, in the moment, he thought Ackman was alluding to Beau.

Moving Forward

Biden is also aware that, as a candidate, every aspect of his life would fall under close scrutiny. “It’s hard,” he said. “You don’t run by yourself. Your family is totally implicated. They become news; they become fodder.” For the extended Biden clan, this is a thorny proposition; in the time since Beau died, his widow, Hallie, and his brother, Hunter, have become a couple, and Hunter and his wife, Kathleen, have divorced. (Hunter Biden declined a request to be interviewed for this story.)

For her part, Jill Biden told me that, these days, she and her husband are focused on moving forward. Part of doing so, she said, is considering the question “What would Beau want us to do?”

“He wouldn’t want us to grieve forever, although you do,” she said. “So, moving forward, what would Beau want Joe to do? You can probably answer that question.”

I countered by noting that they have a nice new beach house and seem to be relishing their taste of private life; she had just mentioned how thrilled she is to be driving her own car again. I asked Jill if, in her capacity as Joe Biden’s wife, she is ever inclined to say to her husband, “Take care of yourself. Enjoy life. Maybe dial it back.”

She fixed me with a knowing look. “Do you understand,” she said, “what ‘Enjoy life’ means for Joe?”