Jamie Raskin's Year of Grief and Purpose
Last edited Tue Dec 7, 2021, 10:40 AM - Edit history (1)
Jamie Raskin’s Year of Grief and Purpose
A son’s suicide, an attack on the Capitol and a congressman’s renewed sense of mission
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=
A family photo of Raskin and son Tommy, who died by suicide last year at age 25.
By Caitlin Gibson
December 6, 2021
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It was chaos, but Raskin watched it unfold with a strange sense of remove, a clarity of focus; he did not feel the visceral fear that gripped so many others around him. He would come to make sense of this later: What was there to be afraid of when the worst thing imaginable had already happened to him?
The day before, on an overcast winter morning, Raskin had stood surrounded by his family at a cemetery in Montgomery County, Md., and watched as the casket cradling his 25-year-old son, Thomas Bloom Raskin, was lowered into the ground. Tommy, as he was known to all who loved him, a student at Harvard Law School, had died by suicide on the morning of New Year’s Eve. “Al mekomo yavo veshalom,” Rabbi Jonathan Roos said to the family gathered there — May he go in peace — and then they took turns shoveling dirt into the grave. The hollow thud of frozen earth striking wood was followed by the wails of Raskin’s wife and two daughters, and these, too, were sounds he would not forget.
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“I think a lot of colleagues were saying, ‘Jamie is dealing with his grief by throwing himself into the impeachment and the trial,’ which didn’t quite capture it for me,” Raskin tells me. “Tommy was a passionately political and moral person, and fascism is probably the one thing he hated in his life. I knew he would want me to fight for our family and our country, and so I felt that he was with me, in my chest, in my heart. I felt it physically, and I felt it ethically.”
He is still trying to make sense of the intersection of these disparate tragedies — how, at the end of one awful year and the beginning of another, he suddenly found himself reeling from back-to-back calamities, each the outcome of something long-simmering beneath the surface. “The truth is that I see those two terrible, traumatic events as very intertwined in my life,” Raskin says. “In a cosmic sense, they were logically independent of each other. But in my life, they are inextricably bound.”
“My road map for the rest of my life,” Raskin has said of his son’s farewell message. For those who didn’t know Tommy, who weren’t acquainted with the full reach of his empathy, his unwavering focus on justice and morality, it might be difficult to understand how Jamie Raskin sees it: The work of defending a vulnerable democracy is not a distraction from the staggering depths of his grief, but rather a channeling, a place to direct all the love for his child who is no longer here to receive it.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/12/06/jamie-raskins-year-grief-purpose/
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Like Joe Biden, he has endured great tragedy, and is still making a big contribution to this country.
He has a whole Bruce Springsteen thing going in this picture.
