I don’t know about you guys, but this last year has left me feeling pretty raw inside. The constant psychic stress of Donald Trump’s presidency alone has been enough to set me – and a lot of other people – constantly on edge.

Combine that with the ear-bleeding cognitive disturbance of watching one of only two major political parties in the US start to play footsie with neo-Nazis and a president willing to support an alleged pedophile for a Senate seat, and yeah, this last year has been a bit of a rough go.

I think this may be why I and so many other people felt like the world stopped for a moment on Tuesday when Joe Biden sat down with Senator John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain and offered sincere words of comfort regarding her father’s cancer diagnosis.

As McCain dabbed her eyes, the former vice-president – whose own son Beau died of the same form of malignant brain cancer against which John McCain is struggling – spoke soothingly, held McCain’s hand and reminded her of her father’s courage in war and public service.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Biden speaks with Meghan McCain.

“One of the things that gave Beau courage was John,” Biden said. “Your dad,” he said to McCain, “when you were a little kid, your dad took care of my Beau.”

Biden’s first wife and his daughter died in 1972 during a violent car accident that left Beau and his younger brother gravely injured.

“Beau talked about your dad’s courage,” said Biden. “Not about illness, but about his courage.”

In a world where the mother of Heather Heyer, the anti-racist protester killed in Charlottesville, has had to hide her daughter’s grave to protect it from neo-Nazis, the moment that passed between Biden and his colleague’s daughter was more than a moment of bipartisan unity: it was like a blast of pure oxygen in a room filled with toxic smoke.

I have never been a fan of Meghan McCain and her efforts to put a friendlier, more modern face on a political party that wants gay men like me, my friends of color and my Puerto Rican husband to stay in our place as second-class citizens and not get too uppity.

But as a person who has lost a parent to cancer, I felt all of that melt and disappear watching her sob the same kind of hot, terrified tears I cried for four years while my mother was slowly taken from me.

I may be about as diametrically opposite the privileged Republican daughter of a US senator as you can be, but life and 12-step recovery have showed me one very important thing. You can be absolutely gut-level miserable in the nicest house in town. No amount of money or power can stop death. No amount of luxury can take the burn out of the aching emptiness where your beloved parent or child or spouse or 15-year-old German shepherd once was.

The defeat of Roy Moore in Alabama is a rare moment to lift the spirits | Jonathan Freedland Read more

Grief doesn’t care about your zip code or whether your house is a mansion or a two-room duplex. It still hurts and losing a parent – especially a larger-than-life parent with a big personality and a big reputation for you to live up to – still feels like watching the sun go out and thinking you’ll never feel safe or warm again.

I’ll probably never meet Meghan McCain, or if we do meet, it’ll probably be screaming at each other across a barricade at a protest with me in a pink pussy hat and her in a Paul Ryan 2020 T-shirt.

But in spite of all this, I want to tell her: “I see you. I know this ache. Yes, it will get worse. Yes, you will have to be very brave and very strong. Your dad is a superhero. My mother was, too. Seeing them weak, hurting, confused, it makes it feel like the world is on fire and upside-down. But it will pass.”

And I remember keenly that in those times of intense pain, there would be these explosions of beauty. I’d get stopped in my tracks by a sunrise like a blazing fire in a pastel-colored candy store. I’d taste a cup of coffee so good it gave me goosebumps. I’d stumble into deep, vivid conversations with people in my family I’d barely known except to say “hey” to at family reunions.

These are the things that sustain us through pain and grief. And moments of kindness and gentle compassion like Joe Biden showed the daughter of his gravely ill colleague – those will be what ultimately help us come back together as a nation, when we recognize each other’s essential humanity and finally, someday, start to heal.