A neighbor told Raskin that when her son was in middle school and depressed, Tommy was the only kid who tried to spend any time with him, and that he always tried to make him smile. “He wanted everybody not just to have enough food he wanted everybody to be happy and laughing, including himself.” A memorial fund has already raised a quarter of a million dollars. “He really did feel every little bit of pain and suffering around him in the world and he wanted to act on it, but he was also an enormously fun-loving and comical person,” Raskin told me. Due to the pandemic, he was temporarily living in the basement apartment at his parents’ house. At the time of his death, Tommy was attending Harvard Law School, as his father had in the 1980s. It was more than a standard obituary it was an intimate, soulful look at Tommy’s kaleidoscopic life: soccer player, poet, playwright, pianist, anti-war activist, animal lover, brother, cousin, son, and, in recent years, person with depression. Two days before the attack at the Capitol, Raskin released a 1,700-word tribute to his son. And people tell us it’s normal, it’s natural-but ultimately it’s unresolvable and inscrutable and futile.” “When you lose a child under these circumstances, you’re plagued with thousands of questions about things you may have done differently, missed clues, alternative ways you may have dealt with this or that situation,” he said. Occasionally I could hear the voices of his family members in the background. Raskin spoke fondly of Tommy for long, uninterrupted stretches of time. “But every day we’re able to disentangle them more, so that we can experience the love more purely and the pain more purely, and it doesn’t hurt to love him.” “My wife captured it perfectly: She said that there is so much pain and so much love, and it’s all mixed together,” he said. I asked if speaking about the loss makes it easier. Over the previous seven nights, Raskin and his wife, Sarah, had stayed up late talking about their son. There was unmistakable exhaustion in his voice, but he was both lucid and candid. Thursday morning and was running on fumes-members of Congress “were living off of Skittles and Cheez-Its.” We spoke first in the early evening and then again late last night. “There has been nothing like this since the Civil War.” “The president is a lethal danger to the American republic and the American people,” Raskin told me. I reached out to Raskin yesterday because he had been through more in one week than most people experience in a lifetime: He lost his son to suicide, he and his daughter survived a rampage, and, in the hours before we talked, he began working with two colleagues to prepare articles of impeachment against the president of the United States. Read: Scenes from an American insurrection “I asked her to protect them with her life, and she did,” Raskin told me. Tagen stood guard next to the blockaded entrance, clutching a fire iron. A group of rioters repeatedly attempted to enter the room. Raskin’s chief of staff, Julie Tagen, led Tabitha and Hank to an office, where they hid beneath a table while insurrectionists overtook the building. Raskin and the others on the House floor evacuated the building and made their way to a secure location, but spectators had to seek shelter inside the Capitol. Raskin’s mind flashed to Tabitha, 23, who, along with her sister’s husband, Hank, was seated in the second-floor gallery. He and his colleagues were instructed to retrieve their gas masks. Raskin heard what sounded like a battering ram slamming against the door. Minutes later, voices echoed through the Capitol’s marble hallways. On the House floor, Raskin quoted Abraham Lincoln, reminding his fellow lawmakers that they were there to carry out the will of the people, not the orders of one man. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. The day before, Raskin had buried his 25-year-old son, who on New Year’s Eve left his family a note: Please forgive me. His fingers lingered over a torn black cloth affixed to the lapel of his gray suit jacket. He peered around the room, patting his heart in gratitude. * on Wednesday, he received a bipartisan standing ovation.
When Raskin, the congressman from Maryland, rose to address the chamber around 1:45 p.m. Rather than stay home, he proposed another idea: What if she came along? “This is an essential constitutional moment,” he had told her. ET on January 13, 2021.Ī s the mob seized the Capitol, Jamie Raskin thought not of himself, but of his younger daughter, Tabitha, who had asked him not to go to work that day.
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