20 DECEMBER 12, 2021 THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 21
attack. And there is the perpetual ache of missing Tommy, the
lingering temptation to replay certain moments and conversa-
tions, scouring the past for clues that might reveal how the
unthinkable came to be.
As a teen, Tommy was a troubled sleeper, a boy who
sometimes worried excessively that he might have hurt another
person’s feelings. When all his friends were eagerly getting their
driver’s licenses, Tommy chose to hold back; he never drove in
his life, Raskin says, “because he was always afraid that he could
hit somebody, and he never wanted that responsibility.” But it
wasn’t until college that Tommy’s depression emerged with
startling intensity, presenting primarily as an obsessive anxiety.
With his family’s encouragement, he sought out a psychiatrist
and was diagnosed with both depression and obsessive-compul-
sive disorder. He found some relief through medication and a
regimen to keep himself healthy, and he remained very private in
his struggle. “Even his friends and girlfriends — and he always
had a girlfriend — didn’t know fully everything he was going
through,” Raskin says.
In his early 20s, Tommy came to identify strongly with
effective altruism, a philosophy that focuses on identifying the
best possible way to help others. Around that same time, Raskin
says, Tommy decided that he would not have children of his own,
because he did not believe that doing so would be a morally
responsible choice. “He would state it as a philosophical
principle: that no one has the right to impose an experience of
pain on anyone else. And, of course, stated as an abstract
proposition, that sounds totally fine — but then he translated it
to: ‘Therefore, it would be wrong to have children, because you
would be exposing them both to the possibility of great joy, butback in time instead, excavating memo-
ries for hours every night, staying up
until 1 or 2 a.m. to meticulously chronicle
his son’s 25 years. “I wasn’t getting much
sleep anyway,” he says. “I like the feeling
of working when everyone else is sleep-
ing.” When he submitted the manuscript
— all 900-something pages of it — his
editor told him he’d actually written two
books: a comprehensive biography of his
son, and a gripping memoir of the 50
life-altering days that spanned Tommy’s
death, the insurrection and the impeach-
ment that followed. The publisher was
interested in the latter.
Now that the book is complete, what
follows feels like a kind of resurfacing.
“When I f irst finished the book, I felt this
enormous sense of relief because it was
such an overwhelming project,” he says.
“But then I felt a lot of sadness to be
looking at the world again without
Tommy, and so much difficulty still in
it.” The pandemic is not over; people are
still dying. The country remains bitterly
divided. The scope of the insurrection is
yet to be fully revealed by the ongoing
congressional investigation, an effort
Raskin is helping to lead as a member of
the House select committee on the Jan. 6vegetarian since 2009). Tommy rejected the idea that anyone
must choose between animal rights and human rights; in one
of his spoken-word poems, he argued that indifference to the
suffering of animals set the stage for the neglect and
dehumanization of vulnerable people, and so it was necessary
to treat all living beings with care and dignity.
At a socially distanced drive-in memorial that the family
hosted in April outside RFK Stadium, dozens shared reflections
that conveyed this blend of moral integrity and personal
decency. “He was honestly the smartest person I ever had the
pleasure of knowing, but he was never pretentious, and he never
made anybody feel stupid around him,” said one of his friends.
Tabitha still referred to her brother in the present tense: “I’ll
miss how he expresses love. He’s so gentle and so warm and so
kind.” Another friend said: “He believed in me. ... When I stood
in Tommy’s gaze, I glimpsed a version of myself I could love.”
And another: “He felt other people’s pain like no one else I
know.”
When Sarah Bloom Raskin took her turn behind the
microphone, her blue scarf ruffled by the cold breeze, she quoted
a line from the poet Rumi: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and
rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. “Tommy brought
us to those fields. He brought us on those journeys,” she said.
“We listen to him and think we’re sitting on our family room sofa,
but instead we are elsewhere. ... We’ve been transported to these
reimagined places with new ideas, new openness, and we
wonder: How did we get here? Can we come again? And how do
we stay?”
Can we come again? How do we stay? For the Raskins, these
questions — once pondered in Tommy’s presence — had
assumed a new resonance. What the family was grasping for was
a sense of continuance, a way to hold on to all Tommy had given
them, to serve as a conduit for his vision and his ideals. In Jamie
Raskin’s case, that work began within mere days of burying his
son.O
n a bright Friday afternoon in late September, at the end
of a grueling week on Capitol Hill, Raskin appears at the
front door of his home and peers out onto the wide porch,
where I am lavishing attention on the family’s two dogs — Potter,
the grizzled mutt, and Toby, the blue-eyed husky. “It’s been a
really hard week,” Raskin says — referring to tense clashes
between left-leaning and centrist Democrats over the terms of
President Biden’s infrastructure plan — “and I’m really craving a
hike. How about Rock Creek Park?”
When he reappears a few minutes later, he’s swapped his tie
and jacket for Nike pants tucked into hiking boots, and Potter
and Toby happily take their places in the back seat of the car. In
his long-ago life before the pandemic, Raskin used to trek
through Rock Creek Park with the dogs at least once every week;
when the country shut down in March 2020, he started going
nearly every morning. Tommy, who had returned to his parents’
home that same month after Harvard’s campus closed, would
often join his father.
It’s a quick drive to the park, and the dogs pull excitedly at
their leashes as we set out on the trail. Our walk today is a brief
respite from a relentless schedule; Raskin will spend his Friday
night writing photo captions for his memoir. He started
working on the book this past March, a period when he was, he
says, “still drowning in grief and agony.” Tommy’s death had
rendered the future wholly unrecognizable, so Raskin moved“He was a natural at politics. But that was a small part of
him,” Raskin says. “He had a very philosophical soul. I mean,
from a very young age he would say, ‘Let’s have a debate about
free will and determinism.’ Or, ‘Let’s have a discussion about
the mind-body problem.’ ” Tommy was the kind of kid who
might disappear to his room for an hour because he “needed
to think,” but he was never a loner: His friends and family
describe a magnetic presence and raucous sense of humor,
the reigning champion of family stand-up comedy competi-
tions and a devout Boggle enthusiast, a prolific writer of
elaborate, illustrated stories as a young child who later
produced innumerable essays, legal briefs, poems and plays
as a young man.
Tommy’s parents each saw something of their own fathers in
their son. Tommy and his maternal grandfather, Herbert Bloom,
bonded over their passion for the written word, while Marcus
Raskin shared an irreverent libertarian streak with his grandson,
Jamie Raskin says. He is fond of telling about the time he walked
Tommy to elementary school and they spotted another little boy
who had been suspended for a week and was finally making his
return. “I said, ‘Tommy, look, they let him out of jail!’ ” Raskin
says, “and Tommy said, ‘You mean they let him back into jail.’ ”
At that same young age, Tommy imagined that he might one
day like to become governor of Maryland, but by the time he
was 12, Raskin says, those political aspirations had been
abandoned. “The more he learned about electoral and
legislative politics, the more he realized that was not for him,”
Raskin says. “At one point he just said to me, ‘I don’t think I
could do what you do.’ And I said, ‘You mean, be a law
professor?’ And he said, ‘No, I can do something like that. But I
don’t think I could be in politics because I don’t think I could
handle being around people who I have just fundamental value
disagreements with.’ ”
Raskin shakes his head slightly when he remembers this. “I
felt like such a politician when he said that, like somebody who
puts up with so much nonsense and hypocrisy. And you do, in
politics. You have to,” he says. “You spend a lot of time being
delicate about people who maybe are liars, or warmongers, or
pro-insurrectionists.” In those early conversations about poli-
tics, Raskin recalls, he used to tell Tommy that there are two
kinds of politicians: justice politicians and power politicians.
“And I think Tommy made a decision as a kid that he basically
didn’t want to be around power politicians,” he says. “He’s right.
Every day I put up with so much avoidance of the truth. And
that wasn’t for him. It was a poignant moment between us.”
Yet Tommy remained deeply involved in politics: He joined
the Young Democrats club as a high school student and rallied
people to volunteer for Obama’s 2012 reelection; he cam-
paigned for his father during Raskin’s state Senate races and
again in 2016 when Raskin decided to run for the open
congressional seat vacated by now-Sen. Chris Van Hollen; he
spent countless hours discussing and debating matters of
ethics, policy and political philosophy with his dad. A teacher
by nature — Tommy founded a peer tutoring program in high
school to help his classmates with math and English — he was
adept at persuading others to consider new perspectives. He
was a passionate animal lover and committed vegan but never
engaged in sanctimonious proselytizing of veganism: “I’m
working for a vegan world, not a vegan club,” his parents recall
him saying, noting that he successfully converted many
carnivorous friends and family to his cause by making them
feel welcomed rather than pushed (his father has been a
R askin at home with
his wife, Sarah Bloom
Raskin, in Takoma
Park, Md.