5/22/2023 0 Comments Representative raskin son tommyCapitol, where the congressman was present because he believed it was his duty to count the electoral votes and confirm Joe Biden’s presidential victory.Īn invisible burden: I have a disability everyone can see. It took courage for the Raskins to come forward. The family continued to show courage when, the day after Raskin buried his son, the grieving father found himself caught in the Trump-fueled insurrection at the U.S. The president-elect promised “the day would come when Tommy’s name would bring a smile to my lip before tears to my eyes”.The hotline: Finally we can call 988 suicide hotline when we fear that we or a loved one is at riskīecause of the stigma surrounding suicide, many researchers say these numbers are underreported. There was also a call from Joe Biden, three days after Tommy died. It had been a point of pride that Raskin responded to every constituent, but a deluge of condolences made that impossible. Raskin takes some solace remembering the story of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, who died of typhoid fever at the age of 12 in 1862, plunging his parents into depression. Please look after each other, the animals and the global poor for me. These were his parting words: “Please forgive me. Raskin realized that for the last week of his life, his son had made an effort to impersonate someone in perfect mental health, so no one would intervene. The most powerful part of Raskin’s book, the heart-shattering part, is his love letter to Tommy, a “dazzling, precious, brilliant … moral visionary, a slam poet, an intellectual giant slayer, the king of Boggle, a natural-born comedian, a friend to all human beings but tyrants and bullies, a freedom fighter, a political essayist, a playwright, a jazz pianist, and a handsome, radical visitor from a distant future where war, mass hunger and the eating of animals are considered barbaric intolerable and absurd”. Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images Trump supporters clash with police on 6 January 2021. His father described his illness as “a kind of relentless torture in the brain … Despite very fine doctors and a loving family … the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last.” Like so many others with clinical depression, the catastrophe deepened his symptoms. Tommy was a second-year student at Harvard Law School when Covid began. In the state legislature, Raskin helped outlaw the death penalty and legalize same-sex marriage. Jamie Raskin taught constitutional law then ran for the Maryland senate, with Tommy, then 10, his first campaign aide. When Raskin was the only one acquitted, he famously demanded a retrial. In 1968, Marcus Raskin was indicted with William Sloane Coffin, Dr Benjamin Spock and others for conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft. His grandfather, Marcus Raskin, was one of the earliest opponents of the Vietnam war when he worked in the Kennedy White House. His maternal great-grandfather was the first Jew elected to the Minnesota legislature. Tommy Raskin was the fourth generation in a great liberal family. Raskin’s astonishing story of tragedy and redemption, of “despair and survival”, depended entirely on all the “good and compassionate people” like Tommy, “the non-narcissists, the feisty, life-size human beings who hate bullying and fascism naturally – people just the right size for a democracy … where we are all created equal”. “I’m not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021,” he told CNN, less than three weeks after Tommy’s death. He found “salvation and sustenance … a pathway back to the land of the living”. Instead of succumbing to unfathomable grief over the death of his son, Raskin seized a lifeline thrown by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and agreed to lead the effort to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the riot which might have derailed the peaceful transition of power. This is where the superhuman part came in. Never had he felt “so equidistant … between the increasingly unrecognizable place called life and the suddenly intimate and expanding jurisdiction called death”. Raskin suffered “a violent and comprehensive shock to the foundations”. Six days later, a vicious mob invaded Raskin’s workplace, the cradle of democracy, leaving several dead and injuring 140 police officers. On 31 December, his beautiful, brilliant, charismatic 25-year-old son, Tommy, took his own life. When 2020 began, he had no inkling that just 12 months later his country and his family would face “two impossible traumas”. Jamie Raskin is a fine writer, a Democratic congressman, a constitutional scholar and a deeply loving father.
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