22 DECEMBER 12, 2021 THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 23
this?” He assured her he was.
In his opening argument before the Senate, making the case
that Trump was still subject to the Senate’s jurisdiction despite
no longer being in office, Raskin presented a g raphic video of the
violence that unfolded at the Capitol. “Senators, the president
was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on January
13th for doing that. You ask what a ‘high crime and misdemean-
or’ is under our Constitution? That’s a h igh crime and
misdemeanor,” he said, in remarks that soon went viral. “If that’s
not an impeachable offense, then there is no such thing.” He
sought to humanize the experience of being at the Capitol that
day, explaining that his daughter and son-in-law had accompa-
nied him in the midst of a devastating week for their family. His
voice broke when he recounted his exchange with Tabitha after
they’d been safely reunited, after he promised her that this would
not happen the next time she came with him to the Capitol, and
she replied: “Dad, I don’t want to come back to the Capitol.”
“I remember watching him, thinking, I just can’t imagine how
he’s doing this now,” McBath says. “The fortitude and the
strength and the courage was just amazing to me. Because his
sense of duty to this country is so profound, and I really believed
that he was saying to himself, This is what Tommy’s expecting
me to do. And he carried on, even as broken as he was.” She was
one of many colleagues who rallied around him then. After the
Senate voted to proceed with the impeachment trial, Biden
called Raskin: “You’re a helluva lawyer,” the president said, as
the congressman recounts, “but you’re an even better father.”
McBath urged Raskin to create more time for himself and his
family. “What I recognized was that he was not setting
boundaries for himself, to allow himself to fully move through
the grieving process,” she tells me. “I tried to say, ‘Your family
needs you, Jamie.’ ”
And they did, says Sarah Bloom Raskin, but they are also a
family that is deeply familiar with what it means to live with a
public figure. “He was called upon to take on this role, and we
would have loved it if he hadn’t been,” she says, “but he is
somebody of great skill and empathy, and he’s a constitutional
law professor, and there was no better person to do it. He had to
do it. At the same time, we were like, ‘We want you to stay with
us, stay in our little cocoon’ — we were not quite ready to be so
outward-facing. It was quite early in our grief. But he was the
person of this moment in history, so we completely understood.”
It took Tabitha Raskin, a 24-year-old math teacher at
Georgetown Day School, a little longer to feel entirely under-
standing. “I was not happy with him at that time,” she says. “I just
felt like we all needed him around; we needed his full attention.
We needed time for us and the family.” She knows her father
feels clear that Tommy would have wanted him to accept the role
of lead impeachment manager, to steer the charge for account-
ability and justice; she has a more nuanced way of thinking
about it. “Tommy just wasn’t one to impose his beliefs on anyone
or expect others to do things. He wouldn’t have pushed my dad to
do it,” she says. “But I think he would have said: ‘If you want to
do it, you’ve got to do it.’ So I grew to understand that.”
McBath remembers how long she spent in the haze of her own
raw grief — it was tw o years, she says, before she could truly
begin to make sense of a life witho ut her son. So she is still
keeping a close eye on Raskin, because she knows where her
friend is, even — especially — when he seems like he’s
somewhere else.
“I watch him,” she says. “And I s ee him at times, sitting on the
House floor by himself. And he might be looking at his hands,it. And I was going to squeeze it right away, and then I b egan to
say to myself: If Tommy could live with that kind of feeling for
weeks, or months, or years, I c ould certainly handle 37 minutes.”
So he lay still and imagined running the trails of Rock Creek
Park, weaving between trees, along the paths he knows by heart.
The same trails he walked with Tommy and his girlfriend,
through a freshly fallen dusting of snow, only a f ew days before
he died. Raskin pictured himself here, and that is how he held on
until the procedure was complete.
His expression is distant, remembering those long minutes in
that cold machine. “For the first time, I f elt like I had some sense
of what Tommy must have felt, because, you know, when he said
in his note to us, ‘Please forgive me, my illness won today — ’ ” his
voice wavers. “I’d been obsessing about whether that meant that
he had no control, and it was the illness that was compelling him
to do this, or if it meant the illness was so overwhelming that he
was making a voluntary decision. And that second possibility
made me feel like maybe” — h e winces, blinking back tears —
“maybe there was some margin for choice, that we could have
done something, you know? But after what happened in the MRI
machine, I realized there was really no difference.” His voice is
almost a whisper.
He starts walking again, the dogs padding along at his side.
Raskin is thinking of all he has read about depression, the
testimonies of those who have called it “the beast” or described it
as “total darkness.” He wants to understand his son’s experience
to the extent he is able, he says, even if that understanding brings
still more pain.T
here is a transformation of identity that follows a s udden,
catastrophic loss, the reorienting and redefining of
oneself within a n ew, incomprehensible reality, and this
process is one that Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) understands
intimately. Her 17-year-old son, Jordan, was murdered in 2012
by a man who confronted Jordan and his friends at a gas station,
complaining about the volume of their music before firing 10
bullets into their car. In the wake of that trauma, McBath left her
30-year career as a flight attendant and devoted herself fully to
gun control activism. After the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., she decided to
run for Congress with a f ocus on addressing gun violence, and
was elected that fall. McBath, Raskin’s friend and his colleague
on the House Judiciary Committee, knows the horror of losing a
child; she knows the urge to devote oneself to public service as a
way to forge meaning from that loss; she knows how consuming
the work of serving as a member of Congress can be.
So when she realized Raskin had returned to the Hill only a
few days after Tommy’s death, “I went immediately to see him,
and he just fell into my arms and just started weeping and
weeping,” she remembers, speaking by phone from her home in
Marietta, Ga. “And I k new exactly what he was feeling. I know it.
I know those emotions, I know the pain and the doubt. I j ust
wanted him to know that, you know, ‘I’m not just offering you
sympathy, I’m here. I know exactly what you’re going through.’ ...
I love Jamie. We all do. I think every one of my colleagues just
truly admires him. We admire his intellect and his sense of
compassion.”
McBath worried for him, too, as he navigated the intensity of
the impeachment process. When he accepted the role of lead
impeachment manager, she recalls asking him, “Are you sure
this is what you want to do? Are you prepared emotionally to doabout to make such a c hoice and, like
everyone else who knew Tommy well, was
astonished by the way his life ended.
Especially for a father who was exception-
ally close to his son, who saw eye-to-eye
with him on so many things, Raskin still
struggles with how unfathomable it feels.
He has never experienced depression, he
says. When he battled Stage 3 colon
cancer in 2010, undergoing grueling
rounds of radiation and chemotherapy,
what he remembers most is a fervent
desire to live.
We cross a b ridge over the gurgling
creek, and here Raskin pauses for a
moment on the path, to focus on describ-
ing a p articular epiphany: At the end of
March, Raskin underwent an MRI exam
to identify a g rowth on his stomach that
turned out to be a benign cyst. Enclosed in
the narrow tube, his arms pinned at his
sides, he was immediately consumed by
panicked claustrophobia. A nurse had
told him the scan would last 37 minutes.
“And I began to think about Tommy,”
he says. “And what he must have felt like,
being trapped in the desperate emotions
of depression, you know? And they have
given me a little hand contraption that I
could squeeze if I felt like I couldn’t takealso to sadness,’ and obviously he was ...” Raskin trails off. For a
man who found such profound joy in becoming a father,
someone known to friends and family for a lifelong, indefatiga-
ble sense of optimism, it is excruciating to consider that Tommy
was not presenting his argument from the standpoint of a
prospective parent, but a son in pain.
We keep moving through the trees, the cool air filled with the
sound of crickets trilling. “When he would say he didn’t want to
have children,” Raskin finishes, “I think that was as close as he
would come to expressing the difficulty of depression for him.”
With Tommy living at home, Jamie Raskin saw how his son
agonized over the collective suffering wrought by the pandemic.
“We’ve been living in a time of just terrible pain for people, and
he felt all of it,” he says. By that time, Tommy had battled
depression for years, “but the whole situation was made
immeasurably worse by covid-19 and by the condition of our
society under Donald Trump,” Raskin says. “And I want to be
clear: I’m not saying that Tommy died because of Donald
Trump. Tommy was struggling with depression, but depression
exists in an overall social context, and covid-19 was a terribly
isolating and ravaging experience for a lot of young people.”
Despite the psychological toll of 2020, those closest to
Tommy never doubted that he was only at the start of a
brilliantly promising life: He’d spent the summer enthusiastical-
ly working as a legal intern for the animal rights nonprofit Mercy
for Animals; he was a passionate law student and devoted
teaching assistant who spent countless hours with his under-
graduate students on Zoom, guiding them through their work.
A few weeks before he died, as Tommy and his father stood
together in their kitchen, Tommy said, I don’t think I’ll ever be
happy. Raskin offered his trademark positivity and loving
reassurance, and this memory is a difficult one for him: “I kept
talking, but I should have asked him whet her he was having any
thoughts of suicide,” he says. “One of the things I r egret is that I
didn’t really use that word very much, you know? I t hink that was
a mistake. I t hink it’s probably best to talk about it.” He exhales.
“These are things that can keep you up at night sometimes.”
Toward the very end of December, a strange tranquility fell
over Tommy, and Raskin recognizes this now as a sign of
something amiss. He suspects that Tommy had made up his
mind about what he was going to do and did not want to be
dissuaded, and so he was going to some lengths to project a sense
of stability. “His normal state of being was ebullient, riotously
funny, enjoyable. None of that was there. But he wasn’t acting
depressed and upset. It was a kind of serene calm,” Raskin says.
“But it was an act of some sort.”
Among the most gutting passages of Raskin’s memoir is his
recounting of the final hours of Tommy’s life. Sarah Bloom
Raskin was visiting her mother out of state; Hannah was at
home with her husband in Nevada, and Tabitha was with her
partner’s family in Pennsylvania. Father and son watched TV
together and talked about Tommy’s plans for the spring
semester. “Love you, dear boy,” Raskin told him when they
hugged good night. “Love you, dear Dad,” Tommy answered.
Raskin found his son the next morning, lying in his bed in the
downstairs apartment in their home. What followed was a
hellish blur: a frantic call to 911, a d espe rate effort to resuscitate
his son, the shrieks of his wife and daughters when he reached
them by phone, the hours-long wait for them to travel home to
Maryland.
Tommy had met with his longtime psychiatrist for an hour
the da y be fore he died; the doctor observed no sign of a man
A photograph of
Raskin and son
Tommy taken in
December 2019.PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE FAMILY