18 DECEMBER 12, 2021 THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 19

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 — h ow, 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.”

Please forgive me, Tommy had written in his final hours. My

illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and

the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.

“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.

T

here are many highly visible families who turn abruptly

inward after loss, retreating from the public gaze, issuing

only brief statements to request privacy as they mourn.

The Raskins made a different choice. The day before their son’s

burial, they published a lengthy and soulful statement about his

life, a v ivid portrait of Tommy and what he ultimately endured.

They disclosed his struggle with depression, and the manner of

his death, and included the entirety of his farewell note. That

degree of openness did not necessarily come naturally to all of

them, “ but Jamie is the most hardwired for it,” says Sarah Bloom

Raskin, former deputy secretary of the Treasury under President

Barack Obama and a professor at Duke University School of

Law. “He completely gathers strength from other people. He

trusts people’s ability to love and care. He attributes to humanity

the best of intentions.” And so it was decided that they would

share with the world exactly who and what had been lost.

Tommy was born in January 1995, two and a half years after

his older sister, Hannah, and two years before his little sister,

Tabitha. An effervescent boy with his mother’s clear blue eyes

and his father’s mop of wild curls, he and his sisters grew up in

the Takoma Park home just outside D.C. where the Raskins have

lived for over 30 years, on a sloping street beneath a canopy of

trees.

Jamie Raskin — the son of Barbara Raskin, a n ovelist and

journalist, and Marcus Raskin, an author, philosopher and

co-founder of one of Washington’s most prominent left-leaning

think tanks, the Institute for Policy Studies — was a constitu-

tional law professor at American University when his children

were young, with no inkling that he might one day run for public

office. That changed in 2005, when he learned that his

Democratic state senator, 30-year incumbent Ida Ruben, was

pushing to expand the death penalty in Maryland and impeding

marriage equality. When Raskin stood on his front porch in

January 2006 to kick off his state Senate campaign to represent

Maryland’s 20th District, 10-year-old Tommy was the one to

introduce his father to the modest crowd gathered in the front

yard.

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 — a nd

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.

That night, it had been decided that Raskin’s younger

daughter, Tabitha Raski n, a nd his son-in-law, Hank Kronick —

who is married to Raskin’s daughter Hannah — would meet the

congressman on Capitol Hill the following day for the certifica-

tion of the electoral college votes, while Hannah and her mother,

Sarah Bloom Raskin, would stay home with family. “I thought

Tabitha didn’t want me to leave her alone,” Raskin says, “but it

turned out she didn’t want me to be alone.” Amid the frenzied

evacuation from the House floor, Raskin urgently texted Tabitha

and Hank; they were barricaded in the office of House Majority

Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) along with Raskin’s chief of staff,

Julie Tagen. They spent a harrowing 45 minutes sheltering

there, crouched under a desk, fearing for their lives as

insurrectionists stomped down the hallway and jiggled the knob

of the locked door as they passed.

The vivid details of that day are seared into Raskin’s memory

and chronicled in his forthcoming book, “Unthinkable: Trauma,

Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy,” which will be

published Jan. 4, just before the first anniversary of the

insurrection. In the aftermath of such wreckage, both personal

and historic, it felt essential to Raskin to make a r ecord of

everything. By the time Tabitha and Hank left the Hill to go

home on the night of Jan. 6, Raskin had already spoken the word

“impeachment” to his House Judiciary Committee colleagues

David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Joe Neguse

(D-Colo.). He returned to the House floor after midnight and

delivered the concluding remarks for the Democrats, in response

to the Republican objections to the electors from Pennsylvania,

and then the counting was over at last, the election formally

certified. It was past 4 a .m. on Jan. 7 w hen Raskin finally arrived

home in Takoma Park, Md., bearing the weight of a wounded

family and a wounded country.

In the weeks that followed, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

(D-Calif.) tapped him to lead the impeachment of President

Donald Trump, Raskin found himself catapulted into the

national spotlight. Both before and during the trial, his widely

circulated remarks and arguments blended a scrupulous

interpretation of constitutional law with the emotion of the

insurrection’s human toll. He spoke of his family’s experience,

how the assault on the Capitol came the day after burying

Tommy, “the saddest day of our lives.” Colleagues and friends

and media interviewers asked him repeatedly about the

convergence of his son’s death and the impeachment proceed-

ings, how he was handling both these monumental experiences

simultaneously.

“I think a l ot 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

Above: Rep. Jamie

Raskin (D-Md.)

speaks with reporters

on Capitol Hill i n

October. Previous

pages: A family photo

of Raskin and son

Tommy, who died by

suicide last year at

age 25.

W

hen Jamie Raskin revisits those shattered days of January, what

surfaces in his memory are the sounds. Among them: a hideous

pounding, the hammering of an enraged mob trying to violently

force its way onto the floor of the House of Representatives, bash-

ing some unseen, heavy thing against the central doors leading to

the chamber, again and again. “I will never forget it,” says the Democratic congress-

man, who has represented Maryland’s 8th District since 2017. ¶ Then came a chorus of

screams as the House floor devolved into pandemonium on the afternoon of the Jan. 6

insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Some people raced to shove furniture against the

shuddering doors; others began making phone calls to loved ones, saying what they

thought could be final goodbyes. Raskin remembers someone yelling instructions to

retrieve the gas masks — he hadn’t even known there were gas masks beneath the

chairs — and someone else calling for members of Congress to remove the lapel pins

they wear to identify themselves. Several Democrats were shouting furiously at their

Republican counterparts: You did this! You let this happen! He glanced up at the

gallery and saw Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) succumb to a panic attack as Rep. Jason

Crow (D-Colo.) tried to tend to her. ¶ 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?

PHOTO: JABIN BOTSFORD