24 DECEMBER 12, 2021 THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 25
Raskin recalls. “And he said, ‘Good. It’s
really good not to have ambition for specific
titles and offices, but to have ambition for
values and how you want to live.’ ”T
he police found Tommy’s farewell
note hours after they arrived at the
Raskin home, and it was confiscat-
ed before any of his family members could
see it or know what his words for them
had been. Because of the New Year’s
holiday, they were first told it might be
days before they could receive it — “and
that would have been absolutely agoniz-
ing,” Raskin says — but Brian Frosh,
attorney general of Maryland, and Tako-
ma Park Mayor Kate Stewart stepped in
to make sure the note was returned to the
Raskins as quickly as possible.
It was written on the back of a Boggle
word sheet, in Tommy’s instantly recog-
nizable, endearingly childlike print, andsympathy. In those first weeks, a family friend began
compiling a list of “acts of kindness” carried out in Tommy’s
memory; what began as a local gesture quickly went national,
then global. A couple in Silver Spring pledged to donate their
stimulus check to support housing for immigrants. A woman
in New Zealand made a donation to a suicide prevention
nonprofit. A man in São Paulo, Brazil, wrote that he had
delivered a homemade meal and pet food to someone who was
living on the streets with his dog. As the list soon approached
1,500 acts of kindness, it became too time-consuming to
continue recording them all.
The reverberations continued: In July, the Thomas Bloom
Raskin Act went into effect in Maryland, expanding the state’s
211 crisis call center to allow counselors to proactively check in
with people who have registered as needing mental health
support. A nonprofit organization started by the Raskin family,
the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund for People and Animals,
swelled to over $1 million in contributions and has announced
numerous grants, gifts and the establishment of a paid
internship at Tommy’s former workplace, Mercy for Animals.
The foundation is run by Tommy’s sisters and cousins, and
having this mechanism in place to quickly respond to issues that
Tommy would have cared about — such as the resettlement of
refugees from Afghanistan and Haiti — has been a comfort, the
family says.
“There’s so much attention that he would put into this, and so
making sure that we’re appropriately honoring him — it feels
good, but it’s also a little overwhelming,” says Tommy’s sister
Hannah Raskin, a 29-year-old vice president at Silicon Valley
Bank. “I know that he would know that we’re doing our best, and
he’d be understanding and happy that we’re all getting together
and thinking about other people.”
Tabitha says she sometimes feels this pressure, too,
knowing how meticulous Tommy was in his research and his
thinking about moral dilemmas. “We can’t end all of the hurt
in the world. But at the same time, knowing that we can
relieve the hurt for some people, for some animals — it
wouldn’t be enough necessarily for Tommy, but it would
matter,” she says. “Every little thing matters. We all do what
we can.”
Sarah Bloom Raskin has found solace in spending time with
Tommy’s friends, the many people in his orbit who reached out
to the family after his death, wanting to be close as they moved
through their collective grief. Getting to know some of those
people, seeing her son again through their eyes, has been deeply
meaningful, she says: “His friends are ambassadors to the path
forward.”
Jamie Raskin says it’s still too soon to see exactly where that
path leads, though he knows the principles that will guide him.
On the day Tommy introduced his father as a political candidate
in January 2006, Raskin vowed to always represent the moral
center rather than the political center, to push toward an
alignment of the two. That is how Tommy lived, he says:
“Tommy was totally antiwar, and he was vegan, and he had these
positions that would be considered radical in terms of conven-
tional political norms.” In life, Tommy always challenged Raskin
to embody his ideals; in death, Tommy bestowed on his father a
reaffirmed sense of resolve.
When he considers what lies ahead, Raskin recalls his gradua-
tion from Harvard Law School, and the professor — t he civil rights
lawyer and legal scholar Derrick A. Bell Jr. — who asked Raskin
what he planned to do next. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t really know yet,’ ”he’s not really looking at any one thing, but I can see him
thinking. And I know he’s thinking about Tommy.”
W
e return to Rock Creek Park for another hike a f ew
weeks after the first, this time on a stunning Saturday
morning in October. The park is busier with weekend
visitors, and as we wind along a t rail bathed in mottled sunlight,
a passing hiker does a q uick double-take before raising his hand
to greet his elected representative.
“Thank you, Congressman, for everything you do for us,” he
says to Raskin.
“Thank you, dear man,” Raskin replies, placing his palm over
his chest. “I appreciate it.” The man’s walking companion chimes
in as she approaches from a f ew steps behind: “Are you still
managing to stay optimistic, despite the horror?” Raskin
assumes that she is referring to the investigation of the Jan. 6
attack; he’d appeared on CNN the night before to discuss the
work of the House select committee, which has issued subpoenas
against Trump administration officials and rally organizers.
“Yes!” he says emphatically. “We’re going to make it through. We
might even put some of these people in jail if we have to.”
Raskin has always been well recognized among his fiercely
loyal constituency when he’s out and about in his community,
but never more so than now, in the waning months of a
particularly high-profile year for his career. He is greeted
repeatedly, by some people he recognizes and others he doesn’t,
many of whom address him with a gentleness that conveys a
certain familiarity with his story.
He’s used to this, he says, meaning the overlap of professional
and personal space in his life, and he actually prefers it. “I’m not a
person who is good at rigidly demarcating public life and private
life. I just see it as life,” he tells me as we continue along the path.
“As you can tell from people coming up to me and talking — t hey
want to talk about their kids, my kids, how they know each other,
their work, my work, our society. For me, it’s all one thing.”
There was a time, soon after Tommy’s death and the
insurrection, when Raskin thought his career might be over —
that leading the impeachment could be the last meaningful
political work he would ever do. In the depths of his despair,
Raskin says, he sometimes thought: Let them — Trump, his
allies, his supporters — have it; let them have the country, the
political system they seemed intent on controlling by any means.
But then Raskin would think of his daughters, his nieces and
nephews, the grandchildren he might have one day. He would
think of the most vulnerable Americans, and the constituents
who reach for his hand when they pass by on these trails, who
say, “Thank you” and “Keep up the good fight.” He would think of
all of them and remember what Tommy wrote: Please look after
each other.
“I know that I h ave a r esponsibility to do whatever I can to
preserve American democracy, which is fragile in a lot of ways. I
feel that strongly, and I know Tommy felt that strongly and
would feel that strongly,” Raskin says. “And so as I’ve gotten
stronger and stronger, I k now that this is a political and personal
mission that I can never back down from, ever.”
T
he letters started arriving as soon as word of Tommy’s
death became public — hundreds of letters, then
thousands, and now there are boxes and boxes filled
with more than 15,000 messages of support and solidarity and
R askin sifts through
family photos at
home. “I have a
responsibility to do
whatever I can to
preserve American
democracy, which is
fragile in a lot of ways.
I feel that strongly,
and I know Tommy
felt that strongly and
would feel that
strongly,” he says.
“A nd so as I’ve gotten
stronger and
stronger, I know that
this is a political and
personal mission that
I can never back
down from, ever.”when it was given to them it felt like a relief, “like a gift,” says his
mother — one last chance to hear from their boy, to feel
reas sured that he would not have wanted them to blame
themselves. That he had done the best he could.
Nearly a year later, the note is kept atop the dresser in their
bedroom. “It’s the first thing we look at every morning,” Jamie
Raskin says. He has come to see in Tommy’s words more than
just the day of his death, but the embodiment of his life, the
distillation of all he tried to do in the quarter-century he
shared with them. “I think his parting instructions about how
he wanted us to live are very consistent with trying to take
care of our family, our friends, our country, our world,” he
says. And so it feels right to begin each day with Tommy’s final
message, now his father’s road map, a reminder of the work
still to be done: To help rebuild a fractured country, to
reimagine the life of a family, to inhabit the visionary places
Tommy once sho wed them. To find a way to come back, and
stay.Caitlin Gibson is a Washington Post staff writer. If you or someone you
know needs help now, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at
800-273-8255. You can also reach a crisis counselor by texting
7417 41 to the Crisis Text Line.