Chapter 35
Everywhere I go—the gym, the grocery store, the beach—I am stopped by people telling me horror stories.
“I’m losing my FEMA job—my whole life has been devoted to saving people!”
“My cancer research lab is closing—all that training, all that work, for what?”
“I can’t afford groceries to feed my family. Eggs are eight dollars!”
“My partner—an upstanding, tax-paying member of our community who’s lived here forty years—is being deported. What do I tell our children?”
What can I say? I hug them. I quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the arc of history bending toward justice.
These are the things I tell myself, too, when I wake up in the middle of the night ruminating on everything I’ve heard, and wondering how the changes will continue to affect my family and all Americans.
The new president has been making good on many of his most extreme campaign promises—rounding up immigrants and sending them to deportation camps in foreign countries, pulling the plug on humanitarian aid around the world, firing swaths of government workers and scientists like the ones I’ve met in the course of my advocacy for women’s health.
How to even keep track of all the changes, much less make any sense of them?
So many people who’d devoted their whole lives to trying to make us safer and healthier are being cast aside.
During the demolition of the East Wing—which had architectural elements put in place by President Thomas Jefferson in 1805, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, and FDR in 1942, not to mention Lady Bird Johnson’s exquisite garden dedicated in 1965 to Jacqueline Kennedy—I received pictures of the destruction step by step from people in DC.
I could barely look. The social offices, gutted.
The military office, flattened. What had been my office, gone.
A major landmark and historic treasure was being treated like an extreme fixer-upper on HGTV’s Property Brothers.
It wasn’t the loss of the blue-and-white-striped drapes, the velvet sofa, the bookshelves filled with memorabilia that pained me—it was the symbolic bulldozing of history and the eradication of institutional memory.
I kept thinking of everyone across the country who took pride in that building. I felt a sense of loss and grief with every blow from the wrecking ball. The innards of the East Wing were spread out for everyone to see, like a rare and precious animal that had been hunted down and killed.
Whenever life became difficult, I longed to sit by the ocean.
For decades, when we went to Rehoboth Beach for a week or so in the summer, we rented a house or stayed with friends.
I’d dreamed of a place of our own by the water that the grandkids would love to visit.
Joe always promised me that one day we’d be able to buy our own place, and in 2017, he made good.
He hung a sign on the front of the house that reads a promise kept.
I loved everything about this house from the moment I first saw it—the kitchen, the fireplaces, even the furniture. The property lot backed a protected park, so we knew that we’d never lose our view. The neighbors were friendly but not too friendly—perfect.
“This is it!” I said on the first day of house hunting.
“What do you mean?” Joe said. “We haven’t even seen any other houses.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I love this house.”
Before committing to it, Joe made me go see twenty-five other houses.
He’d designed our Wilmington home, and he found looking at houses to be a fun opportunity to engage with his love of architecture.
Finally, after Joe had looked at every house on the market, he conceded that the first place was the one for us, and we negotiated to buy the house with all its contents.
The couple who’d owned it basically just gave us the keys, and we moved in.
Since then, I’ve replaced a rug here and there as they’ve worn out, but it’s more or less the same house I saw on that tour, now almost a decade ago.
I particularly love the first light coming through the windows in our top-floor bedroom. I love to see the sunrise, and sometimes I set the clock so that I don’t miss it. Joe will pull down his eye mask and mutter, “Too bright.”
I reply, “But, Joe, it’s so beautiful!” I can see the ocean right from our room. If it’s very quiet, I can even hear the waves.
That final flight away from Washington feels like ages ago even though it’s been almost no time at all.
Willow wakes me up at six each morning purring, and throwing her now slightly plump gray body against me.
She’s definitely enjoying the change of scenery.
She’s filled out here at the beach house, and spends her days prowling around the yard or lying in sunbeams.
Life has slowed down. For years, our friends would come to Washington on Independence Day for epic festivities of marching bands, fireworks, barbecuing, and kids everywhere waving sparklers.
Joe and I spent last Fourth of July weekend at Naomi’s in California.
Because of the fires, the city used drones rather than fireworks.
In her backyard around the pool, we watched the colorful lights flash silently off in the distant sky.
I’ve been trying to see this time as just one more life stage, like having a new baby or becoming an empty nester.
I had been so structured for most of my life, and now there’s no consistent household schedule.
Joe likes to stay up late. I’m often in bed by 9:30, ten o’clock.
He sleeps in; I’m off to an exercise class by nine.
I even lay out my clothes the night before—it’s the teacher in me.
Growing old together as a couple is full of both joys and challenges. Getting older has caused me to ask big questions about our shared life: Who are you now? Who am I? Who are we? Look at these things that we created together. What might be left for us to build?
Opposites really do attract. I love to be by myself and prefer quiet.
Joe loves a crowd, and at home, he has the TV on or he’s on the phone.
When he was in office, Joe’s press team was always trying to rein him in because he would talk to anyone for hours.
He handed out his cell number to people on rope lines and would take calls after dinner to talk about grief or the issues of the day.
Joe would talk to random reporters who happened to catch him on the phone, regardless of the call schedule the team had set up.
It got to the point where he agreed to let them gatekeep because without them, I swear he’d pick up any call that came in, at any hour.
Joe even picks up my phone. If I’m in the other room doing something and my phone rings, he’ll pick it up and chat away until he says, ten minutes later, “Your sister’s on the phone for you!”
If he’s in the shower and his phone rings, I always call out to him, “Your phone’s ringing!”
He will say, “Well, why don’t you answer it?”
I’ll say, “Because I’m not you!”
Beau’s death is always with us. Ever since, Mother’s Day has been hard for me.
How can you be happy to celebrate motherhood when one of your children is gone?
That day still always makes me feel bone-sad.
Yes, in his loss, we found purpose. Yes, we support cancer efforts in honor of his memory, and we cherish Natalie and Hunter, who remind us so powerfully of him.
But some nights before we close our eyes, I still say, “Joe, I miss Beau,” and he says, “Yes, I do, too.”
Joe and the boys were always so simpatico, I don’t think it ever occurred to Joe to develop many other friendships outside the family.
That’s another reason why Beau’s death was so monumental for him and Hunter.
His absence is felt in the loss of one of Joe’s closest friendships as well as the unfathomable loss of a child.
Because of Joe’s age, a lot of his friends are gone.
I keep saying to him, “Call so-and-so! Do this, do that!” But to him, it doesn’t feel natural calling someone and saying, “Hey, are you free tomorrow for lunch?”
One thing I’ve learned from having sisters is that friendships and relationships are important, and you have to work at them.
All through my marriage, all through my life, I’ve always made sure to have good girlfriends.
There’s your book friend who you love, and there’s your gardening friend who you love.
These old friends have been getting me through this uncertain time of life, even if sometimes I look around and say, “Wait, where did all these white-haired people come from?”
One of my good friends recently said she’d joined a mah jong club. I recoiled. “Mah jong?” I said. “That’s for old people!”
I’m seventy-four.
Clearly, I’ve found it challenging to consider slowing down, much less to ponder my own mortality.
Years before Queen Elizabeth died, Joe and I were approached by the national security team in reference to something called Operation London Bridge.
The operation was preplanning the queen’s funeral.
They wanted us to approve a long statement that would be released upon the queen’s death, ending with, “We send our deepest condolences to the Royal Family, who are not only mourning their Queen, but their dear mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Her legacy will loom large in the pages of British history, and in the story of our world.” It felt surreal to be mourning the living, and yet I recently learned that advance planning for Joe’s funeral and mine is underway, too.
Before Joe’s cancer diagnosis, I felt that, in spite of his being almost ten years older than me, I was the one running to catch up with him. He has always been my hero, my rock. The ways in which his illness has caused him to scale back have been a challenging adjustment for both of us.
Still, our work is not done. Joe has been jetting around giving talks and accepting honors.
I’ve been exploring a position that would let me teach GED classes at a women’s prison.
What a fulfilling job that would be, to help women find a new path, one they can follow once they get out.
I believe seeing them turn their lives around would give me hope, too.
Joe has always gone to Catholic Mass, but as a Presbyterian, I hesitated to attend with him because non-Catholics can’t take Communion.
I believe in my heart that Jesus wouldn’t deny me the host, so I prefer to go to services where I’m able to receive it.
Prayers, especially, are a part of how I connect to the people I love and the world around me.
But with Beau’s death, my faith was shaken.
For more than a year, I watched my brave, strong, funny, bright young son fight brain cancer.
Chemotherapy, operation after operation, weight loss…
Still, I never gave up hope. As a mother, you can’t. Despite what the doctors said, I believed he would live. In those final days, I made one last desperate prayer.
It went unanswered.
After Beau died, I felt betrayed by my faith. Broken.
My pastor wrote me emails, checking in and inviting me back to church… I just couldn’t go. I couldn’t even pray. I wondered if I would ever feel joy again.
I credit a moment in South Carolina in 2019 with helping me back to religion. At a Brookland Baptist Church service in West Columbia, at the start of Joe’s presidential campaign, the pastor’s wife, Robin Jackson, sat next to me and said, “I want to be your prayer partner.”
“… Okay?” I said.
I did not know what that meant. I hadn’t heard the term before. But somehow, the way Robin spoke, it was if God were saying to me, “Jill, you’ve had enough time away. It’s time to come home.”
Robin and I arranged a call, and she gave me her number. We began talking once or twice a week, or checking in by text. That’s been going on for six years now. She came to the White House several times with her daughter and grandchildren. I flew down for her birthday. What a gift she has been.
Poetry continues to comfort me, as it always has.
The wise poet Nikki Giovanni wrote, “We love because it’s the only true adventure.
” Falling in love with Joe is what gave me my three children, and gave me this huge, historic life I could never have imagined as a little girl biking around Willow Grove with my sisters.
Even as I feel dismayed by so much of what is happening, I refuse to give up faith in our shared future. To remind myself of how necessary it is to keep going, I find myself repeating Corinthians: “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.”
I look at the circumstances I’m in today. Joe and I are here at our house at the beach, delighting in the rotating cast of visitors—children, grandchildren, sisters, friends. I drag everyone who will go along with me to my morning exercise classes.
There is so much good in the world, and I see it every day, whether I’m biking down to the beach with Little Beau, or sitting out on the deck in the mornings with Willow watching the sunrise.
Most of all, I see goodness shining from the eyes of people I meet—that great majority of people who greet the world, messy as it is, with love and light.
For all the hatred we see in the news, there are angels among us.
I think of students who march across the stage for their diploma, earned against all odds; my fellow teachers who stay late grading papers and find ways to tend the lost lambs in their flock; the parents keeping faith in their children struggling through addiction; the military spouses packing up the household yet again because that’s what their country needs them to do; the people entering lives of public service in order to build a better future.
Whenever I hear about how terrible the world is, I think of the nurses I’ve met in the course of Joe’s cancer treatment.
Every single time we arrived for Joe’s radiation, day after day for five and a half weeks, we were greeted by the same beatific woman, Carly, standing at the end of the hallway, welcoming us with a huge smile on her face, reassuring us that everything would be okay.
Because our country is full of people like her, I have faith that it will.