‘Waiting is unbearable’: Biden consoles Surfside families

SURFSIDE, Fla. — President Biden drew on his own experiences with grief and loss to comfort families affected by the Florida condo collapse, telling them to “never give up hope” even as the search for survivors paused early Thursday, a week after the building came down.

Addressing some of the families touched by the tragedy, Biden spoke in deeply personal terms as he offered his prayers and support in the private meeting.

“I just wish there was something I could do to ease the pain,” he said in a video posted on Instagram by Jacqueline Patoka, a woman who was close to a couple and their daughter who are still missing. .

Few public figures connect as powerfully on grief as Biden, who lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car collision and later an adult son to brain cancer. In the first months of his term, he has drawn on that empathy to console those who have lost loved ones, including the more than 600,000 who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a quiet voice freighted with emotion, Biden on Thursday described his own despair at having to wait to find out about how family fared after a crisis like the one experienced in Surfside. He spent more than three hours privately speaking with those grieving, addressing the group first and then moving family to family to listen to their stories. Biden spoke of wanting to switch places with a lost or missing loved one and lamented that “the waiting, the waiting, is unbearable.”

“The people you may have lost — they’re gonna be with you your whole life,” he told the families. “A part of your soul, a part of who you are.”

Biden told the families that it can be “harder to grieve in public than it is in private, so I know there’s an extra burden on you all.”

“But I promise you: I still believe in prayer,” he said. “You’re in my prayers.”

The president, whose remarks were translated into Spanish, urged the families to “never give up hope,” even as the search and rescue operation paused early due to structural concerns with the remaining portion of the building.

Attendees could be seen with tears in their eyes as Biden closed out his remarks, and he and wife, Jill, spent the next few hours visiting privately with the families. He later told reporters that he was amazed by the families’ “resilience, their absolute commitment, their willingness to do whatever it took to find an answer” as to what happened.

He said the families asked him the most “gut-wrenching” questions, including whether there was any hope of finding survivors or whether they would be able to recover the bodies of loved ones.

Recalling the car accident that killed his wife and daughter and badly injured his two sons, Biden spoke about his boys’ uncertain fate, saying “it’s bad enough to lose somebody but the hard part, the really hard part, is to not know whether they’ll survive or not.”

Biden, responding to what appeared to be the deadliest single-day calamity of his young presidency, also met first responders hunting for survivors in the rubble in Surfside before the pause in the search.

The Bidens arrived in Florida a week after the collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South beachfront condominium killed at least 18 people and left 145 missing.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3dzwnlS