Making Sense of Sudden Loss

Read: What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say

This election was supposed to be a new start. “The donors are making their preference known,” Larry Rasky, a longtime Biden ally and fundraiser, told CNBC on the night of the Super Tuesday triumph that positioned Biden as the inevitable nominee. That day, March 3, before the country started shutting down, before the field hospitals and the refrigerated morgue trucks arrived, Biden was elated. He had so much to be thankful for. And he was sharing this long-sought success with a handful of loyal friends like Rasky, his ’88 campaign press secretary, who never lost faith in him, even when others did.

Ten days later, Rasky sent a prophetic tweet: “COVID-19. You can’t bomb it. You can’t yell at it. You can’t ignore it. You can’t bully it. You can’t really blame anyone for it. The only thing you can do is solve the problem. That’s one card #DonaldTrump doesn’t have in his deck of magic cards.” In the days that followed, Rasky developed what he assumed was normal back pain, but it grew in severity. Then the cough started. On March 22, he died at the age of 69. Most of America still hadn’t grasped the reality, or the lethality, of the virus. Biden had already lost a friend of 30 years.

Over the past few months, I’ve had long conversations with Rasky’s only child, Will. We’ve talked about his father, and about Biden, and about how—if at all—people can find meaning in the face of profound loss.

Sometimes Will says “Larry” and sometimes he says “Dad.” The father and son shared a love of music, especially the Grateful Dead. A photo on Larry’s Twitter feed shows the duo at a Dead show in Chicago, arm in arm, draft beers in hand. Both have the kind of full-body smiles you can’t fake. After Larry died, Will felt drawn to the song “He’s Gone.” It’s a psychedelic barrelhouse ballad, but its soaring chorus reads like a hymn. Will played it, then replayed it, over and over.

And now he’s gone

Now he’s gone, Lord he’s gone

He’s gone

Like a steam locomotive rolling down the track

He’s gone, gone, and nothing’s gonna bring him back

He’s gone

Larry posthumously tested positive for COVID-19. Will, his wife, and his mother were forced to quarantine, and were unable to be with friends or relatives while they processed the sudden death. With Larry gone, Will was wearing multiple hats: man of the house, family spokesman, grieving son. The night Larry died, Will answered his mom’s cellphone. Biden was on the other end.

“There was something quite bizarre, something akin to an out-of-body experience happening with that conversation,” Will told me. The Biden empathy that he had heard about for decades was now being trained on him. “He really did want us to know how it was going to feel,” Will said. He was struck by the shock in Biden’s voice. On the phone that night, the two of them seemed to be processing the loss together in real time. “He has this innate, intuitive ability to get at what people are feeling,” Will said. “And it’s part of why people like my dad tried to pump him up.” In our conversations, Will’s naturally confident tenor occasionally broke as he spoke about the events of the past year. Sometimes he stopped mid-sentence to cry.