![]() ![]() Given President Trump’s efforts to kick up dust around his loss, objections were anticipated, and the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had asked Raskin to help lead the floor response-a role, and a click of republican machinery, that he relished. It was the day when the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election would be counted. He spent a few days nearly catatonic, “rocking back and forth like a baby.” Then, on January 6, he rode down to the Capitol to try to work. “After searching frantically for my phone-which I had thrown high in the air when I came upon the scene-after dialing 911 and screaming after I tried to resuscitate him and get him to breathe by pressing repeatedly on his hard, beautiful chest…I floated through the house and under the grey winter sky, thinking perhaps I was gone forever, too,” Raskin writes in Unthinkable, his extraordinary new memoir of an extraordinary year. For Raskin and his wife and their two other children, this was the start of a nightmare. The previous Thursday, after preparing a breakfast smoothie, he had gone to the room where his 25-year-old son, Tommy, was staying while remotely attending Harvard Law School and had found him dead, a victim of suicide. Raskin, a Democrat who represents Maryland’s Eighth District, was entering his fifth year in Congress, having first been elected on the same night as Donald Trump. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.In the history of workweeks that start badly, few can compete with the one Representative Jamie Raskin began on January 6, 2021, his first full morning back in the Capitol since discovering the corpse of his son six days before. The family announced last week that they had created the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund for People and Animals in their son’s name.Ī private funeral is planned for next week. The Raskins described how their son donated half of his teaching salary “to save people with malaria by purchasing mosquito nets with global charities” and spent the rest on donations in each of his students’ names to other groups targeting global hunger. “He loved his students and they loved him back,” his parents wrote. He spent last fall as a teaching assistant in a Harvard Law justice course, meeting with his dozen students on Zoom and “finding what was precious in their work and teasing it out.” “Above all, he began to follow his own piercing moral and intellectual insights looking for answers to problems of injustice, poverty and war.” “He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip,” the post said. 30, 1995, the middle child was “a daring outspoken defender of all outcasts and kids in trouble” who spent hours in high school tutoring his peers. “making mischief, kicking the soccer ball in the goal, acting out scenes from To Kill A Mockingbird with his little sister in his father’s constitutional law class.”īorn Jan. The eulogy described Thomas’ youth in Takoma Park, Md. “On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son, Hannah and Tabitha’s beloved irreplaceable brother, a radiant light in this broken world.” The moving post detailed how Thomas began grappling with depression in his 20s, and how the illness was “a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him.”ĭespite a large support network of relatives, friends and doctors “the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy.” “Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind,” his parents wrote. Known to loved ones as “Tommy,” the second-year student at Harvard Law School was remembered as an animal lover and passionate vegan devoted to helping others. “Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me,” said the note, signed: “All my love, Tommy.” My illness won today,” his parents said in a Medium post. In a note left for his family on New Year’s Eve, the day he died, Thomas Bloom Raskin wrote “Please forgive me. Jamie Raskin and his wife Sarah on Monday published a heart-wrenching tribute to their late son, confirming that the 25-year-old took his own life last week after a long battle with depression. ‘World’s oldest man’ dead at 127: ‘He always liked to have a little drink’ ‘Wizard of Oz’ munchkin dead at 91: Betty Ann Bruno was Emmy-winning TV reporter Sheila Oliver dies at 71 while serving as acting governor for vacationing Gov. Pageant queen, 26, dies in crash after posting chilling message ![]()
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