No matter what happens, it seems right tonight to share a story about @JoeBiden It was just a brief moment in his life, but it will stay with me always. I’ve told parts of it to some, but all of it to only a very few. (1/many)

We all know he lost his son to a glioblastoma. The same cancer took my wife @thenemergut far too young. All in the midst of our young daughter battling through her own brain tumor.

I was working @DukeEnvironment at the time (a wonderful place), and not long after Diana died, @joebiden came to visit @DukeU. He was there to listen to and learn from some of the extraordinary cancer docs and researchers at the university. To ask what he could do to help.

The @DukeU provost (an exceptional cancer researcher herself) was kind enough to invite me to join a group that would have a chance to meet the then Vice President. The day before that meeting would happen, I told my daughter about it.

She asked why Vice President Biden was coming to Duke and I told her that he wanted to help people with cancer. And I told her that he had lost someone very close to him to the same tumor which took her mom.

Mind you, she was still only six. She paused, and then as his her style, wanted to know much more. Eventually she learned Joe Biden had a granddaughter not much older than her. Another little girl who had lost a parent to cancer.

She was quiet for a time and then said she wanted to write a letter to the Vice President and have it go along with a gift for his granddaughter. I asked what gift. “My extra bracelet” she answered.

There were four such bracelets in the world. Each was identical and showed an outline of the mountain that gave my daughter her name. Each was made just days before Diana died. I wear one, my daughter wears one, Diana the other in her place of rest.

The extra was for when Neva grew. But she said: “I want to give it to the Vice President to give to his granddaughter so maybe she won’t feel quite as sad.” Needless to say I’m pretty much trying not to completely lose it by now.

She wrote the letter, and put the bracelet in a tiny box. The next day, I lined up with a few dozen others to meet Vice President Biden. Like most such events, he was on a tight schedule and none of us were supposed to linger.

So when my turn came, I simply told him thanks for what he was doing, that I’d lost someone special and so appreciated his efforts. Then I began to move aside. But he stopped me.

He reached out, grabbed my shoulder and asked “who did you lose?” I told him quickly of Diana, and of our daughter too, and of how she had written him a letter and sent a present for his granddaughter.

He stood silently for a few seconds, ignoring his staff who were clearly anxious for him to move to the next person. Then he shook his head, and his eyes filled just a little, and he simply said “it’s just not right.” I nodded and tried to leave again. He still wouldn’t let me.

So we talked a bit more. He wanted to know if my daughter was there. He seemed disappointed she was not. He asked if I had her letter. I told him the letter & gift were with his staff. He asked if I could tell him what the gift was. So I did.

Again he just stood for quite some time and held my eyes. What I saw was someone still wracked by his own grief & yet remarkably able to feel, I mean really feel, that of others. A man who truly gave a damn about a person he’d never met. Right down into his bones.

That is what we should seek in a leader, and what we should give back in return. May we somehow, someway find enough of us turning onto that path, not just tonight, not just next week, but through every year each one of us still gets. /fin