Tragic Details About Sen. Elizabeth Warren's Life

With a life spent beleaguered by personal battles and waging wars against greedy politicians for the benefit of the common folk — and usually winning most of them — Elizabeth Warren is more than just a Democratic icon. She is an absolute force of nature, one that neither suburban Oklahoma nor Washington ever managed to tame. The obstacles Warren had to overcome to get where she is could fill a memoir — and it actually did, more than once. We're talking about the same Elizabeth Warren whose three words about the Roe v. Wade reversal gave hope to progressive activists out there in their darkest moment, and the same Elizabeth Warren who, in her public spat with Elon Musk, proved that she wasn't afraid of butting heads even with the most powerful billionaires on the planet.

This is the woman who won a debate scholarship to George Washington University at the age of 16 and became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She taught at the University of Houston, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard, where she became the highest-paid non-administrator professor by 1996. She was the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and chaired the committee for TARP from 2008 to 2010. She has written 12 books, over 100 academic papers, and has raised two children. And even now, she shows no sign of slowing down.

If tenacity had a face, it would look something like Elizabeth Warren. But all of these accomplishments appear even more impressive when you consider all the tragedies that she's had to endure over the years — and boy, there are quite a few of them.

When Elizabeth Warren was only 12, her father had a heart attack, and it forced him to leave his sales job at the department store Montgomery Ward. The incident put the Warrens on a collision course with foreclosure, which compelled her mother to look for work. Elizabeth went into her parents' room one morning and found her mom sitting on the bed and repeating to herself, "We will not lose this house" (via Associated Press)

Her mom then pulled on a fancy dress (the same dress that turned into a recurring talking point during Warren's 2020 campaign), walked into Sears, and got a minimum wage job. "And that minimum-wage job saved our house, and it saved our family."

Warren herself also chipped in with babysitting jobs and occasional shifts at her aunt's restaurant during school breaks. In "A Fighting Chance," a memoir published in 2014, she talks about how she and her father found a way to hide their state of near poverty from the rest of her school by parking a few blocks away. "I was sure I was the only kid in the entire school whose parents struggled with money," she writes, per Yahoo! News, so you know that when she talks about minimum wage and the economic hardships of the working class, she's talking from experience.

Elizabeth Warren is also a huge advocate of universal health care, and that, too, might have something to do with the grief she's carried home from hospital waiting rooms. Warren lost her mother in 1995 to an undiagnosed heart disease. "The autopsy showed that she had advanced heart disease," she told Marie Claire. "Never diagnosed, and never treated. No one had any idea." Warren's dad died two years later in 1997.

Both parents had a major impact on Warren and the path she chose for herself in life. Commemorating her father in an Instagram post, she shared a sweet, heartfelt message: "My daddy was a cool guy. He taught me to dream big and fight hard, and I wish I could call him today." Grief over the death of one parent is crushing. One can only imagine what it must have been like to grieve for both, and in a span of two years, no less.

Elizabeth Warren married her high school sweetheart, Jim Warren, when she was 19. They met when she was 13 and he was 17. They dated for a while, then broke up, but then rekindled their romance when Elizabeth was studying at George Washington University. Jim proposed, and Elizabeth said yes immediately, dropping her full debate scholarship to move to Houston, where he worked as a computer engineer for IBM.

The couple had two children, Amelia and Alexander, but their marriage wasn't built to last, and it certainly couldn't support the weight of the woman Elizabeth was becoming. As she explained to Vogue in a 2020 interview, she'd only been "taught what to want," and it was very difficult to succeed at that when it essentially meant "to stay home and build my life around my husband. I understood that many women did, and for a long time I felt like a failure." Elizabeth maintained that she still wanted a family and children, but it took her a while to learn that the two weren't mutually exclusive.

Between taking care of their household, heading to school, and doing research (Warren finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Houston and then earned her law degree from Rutgers in 1976), she was reaching "breaking point" (per The Washington Post), and that's why her mom's sister came to Houston to care for the children. According to Warren, there were no big blowups. The marriage simply unraveled over time as they both recognized it wasn't working. Jim got remarried and later died of lung cancer in 2003.

Elizabeth Warren's oldest brother, Donald Reed, died of COVID-19 at the height of the pandemic in April 2020. The senator shared the news of his death on X and lamented the fact that there was no one there with him during his final moments due to the restrictions in effect then. "It's hard to know that there was no family to hold his hand or to say 'I love you' one more time," she wrote. "And no funeral for those of us who loved him to hold each other close. I'll miss you dearly my brother."

In October 2021, the senator's second-oldest brother, John Herring, died of cancer. Warren described John in a social media tribute as "the sweet one who was soft-spoken, shy, ready to help." John was also the only Democrat among Warren's brothers (the other two, Donald and David, were Republicans), but what makes John's heartbreaking death hit even harder is the fact that his wife, Barbara, also died of cancer 14 years before him.

Her eldest brother Don Reed Herring's first wife, Nancy McKelvain, too, died of leukemia in 1982 after 27 years of marriage. So to say that Warren's life has been haunted by the specter of death is a huge understatement. Loss, especially to cancer, has been a recurring heartbreak in Warren's life.

Elizabeth Warren entered the 2020 presidential race in January as one of the major Democratic candidates. She even garnered some momentum by fall 2019 and came out ahead of both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in some of the polls, but support for her campaign began to slip later that year. Warren had the unfortunate luck of running after Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016, which may have contributed to lingering skepticism about her electability — especially against Trump.

Ultimately, Warren failed to win any of the 14 states voting on Super Tuesday. It was particularly humiliating to finish third in her home state of Massachusetts, but that essentially served as the final nail in the coffin of her White House ambitions. She dropped out on March 5, 2020, with only 65 delegates (Biden and Sanders had 500 each), and with her went the dreams of millions of girls who'd been promised that even politics can be what girls do. "One of the hardest parts of this is all those pinky promises, and all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years. That's going to be hard," she said (via The Boston Globe), referring to her campaign trail ritual of telling little girls "I'm running for president, because that's what girls do" and sealing it with a pinky promise.

Warren may have lost the White House, but if her life story has proven anything, it's that she doesn't stay down for long. The pinky promises remain unfulfilled, but Warren isn't done fighting, not by a long shot.