It is easy to count the dead, harder to count the grieving. One has to estimate. Every year, almost one percent of the American population dies. The most recent available official count, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System, is for the year 2017: 2,813,503 registered deaths. Looking at the numbers for 2014, Joe Biden calculated that each of those people “left behind at least one or two people who were deeply and profoundly wounded by the loss; some left a dozen bereft, others a score.” These bereft are the people who “get up every single day, put one foot in front of the other, and simply carry on.” If Biden has a natural constituency, it is to be found in this sad census of those who mourn. “There is an army of these soldiers,” he wrote in 2017, in his memoir of his vice presidency and of his own son’s death. “By my estimation, at any given moment, one in ten people in our country is suffering some serious degree of torment because of a recent loss.” The calculation conjures a great democracy of grief:

I see them at the rope lines at any political event I do, standing there, with something behind their eyes that is almost pleading. Please, please, help me. … So I try to be mindful, at all times, of what a difference a small human gesture can make to people in need. What does it really cost to take a moment to look someone in the eye, to give him a hug, to let her know, I get it. You’re not alone?

It is a shifting mass, this constituency, but all of us at some point join it.

To show my cards, I wish Biden were not running for president. His re-entry into politics makes all of us breathe stale air. The three matters most fully exhumed in advance of his announcement in April were his old stance on racial integration and busing in the 1970s (he opposed busing), his Senate committee’s vile treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings of 1991, and his role in the “tough on crime” legislation of the 1990s. Biden evokes a past that is both close and far: far because these things were decades ago, close because they echo painfully, as if we have suddenly returned to that past or, worse, never left it. He will be called a “moderate Democrat,” a “centrist,” but beneath those misleading labels are specific and bitter issues we’ll have to parse, again, ad exhaustum. For such exhaustion to be worth it, one would have to believe that only a Biden presidency, above all others, would deliver us from political disaster. I am not convinced that it would. Nor would it deliver us from environmental collapse, the greatest disaster of all.

Biden’s “baggage”—an evocative shorthand for ideology, like it’s a suitcase we lug from train to train—is not unique. What is distinctive about him is not his politics but something more elusive: the chords of grief and mourning that he plays in the culture and that the culture hears in him. To show my cards again: Criticisms aside, I am moved by those chords. Few are so associated in the popular political imagination with intimate grief, and few have so fully claimed its territory. Biden’s entrance into and exit from national politics were marked by family tragedy. He was elected to the Senate in 1972, and a few weeks later his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident. In 2015, nearing the end of his vice presidency, one of the two sons who survived that crash, Beau, died from cancer. Biden named grief as the reason he did not seek the presidency in 2016. Grief and mourning shape his current campaign, too, in ways that are not easy to grasp. I suspect Biden himself has not fully grasped this mournful predicament. Nor has the great grieving public.