Hunter Biden

And... And I am... All I know is this, is that... It is not...

it has been harder on everybody else than it has been on me.

And... But I think that we're, you know, in a place that's very different now, in which there's been a lot of healing.

But, you know... I take full accountability for that.

I think that what it did is it sent me down the path of addiction.

Anything, I think, I don't know, if your experience as it relates to addiction to people in your life, your own life, is that you don't need much of an excuse to use.

You know, it could be sunny, it could be raining.

You could be up, you could be down.

But what Bo's death did do to me was it sent me down a path of nihilism that I'd never experienced before, in which nothing mattered.

And when it all fell apart.

And in the immediate aftermath of Bo's death,

There was a sense of real, um, purpose.

But then, um, my marriage of 22 years, um, began to falter and I ended up on my own, uh, for the first time in my life, uh, literally in terms of living alone for the first time in my life.

Because remember I, I, I left, I went to college, um, did Jesuit volunteer corps, got married, had a baby, had two more and, you know, and, uh,

And in that period of time, directly after Beau's death, is that I didn't have the availability of my dad for the first time in my life, and that he was so like me.

I mean, grief is a solitary journey in many ways, as much as you try to cling to people.

I think one of the reasons that people, when they lose a...

a child or, you know, a couple, is that they sometimes lose each other.

And for a period of time there, I felt like I'd lost my dad.

I felt like I'd lost the entire structure of my existence.