Hunter Biden

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.

Damn.

And so, you know, and I grasped towards one thing that was not in a nefarious, prurient way in any way to someone that was the nearest thing to what my brother was.

And I had to grasp for each other.

And my addiction completely, 100%, fucked that up.

And it was awful.

and um so i do know that uh beau's death didn't make me an addict but um

But by my own actions, by the circumstances that I found myself in, by the depth to which I didn't think that there was a way out, it certainly was a factor in what sent me down a rabbit hole that I'd never gone before, which was completely wanting to disappear from the face of the earth.