![]() ![]() So, I think we need to talk about it and reach out to people that are suffering. If you don’t talk about it, it looms much larger. As a parent you’re afraid that if you raise it, you will endow the idea with some kind of magical force and then plant the suggestion.īut it is really quite the reverse. I feel like I should have just periodically raised the question. Raskin: That’s one of the things I condemned myself for. I&M: You talk in the book about the importance of saying the word suicide out loud, to not give it some mythical power it doesn’t have. My family, in the course of a week, has come to embody the trauma of 2020, a year full of mass despair, individual pain, and wrenching loss.” “Now I am a figure of unthinkable and unspeakable tragedy, someone subsumed by the grim darkness of his days. ![]() He was a great humanitarian and I want to try to keep that spirit alive that he had. Our job is to try to carry on in the spirit of all the love he had for the people in his life. In the end his suffering was too much and what he saw in the world was too bleak. He suffered from depression, which was so at odds with the normal ebullient nature of his personality that it was very hard to reconcile with the reality of what happened. He certainly didn’t want insurrections and coups and fascism. And he wanted a lot more from our democracy and our government and not a lot less. A poet, a playwright, a student at Harvard Law School. Tommy was a young man filled with extraordinary passion for the world. Raskin: That is like an instruction manual on how to live, and there is not a lot in there about drowning in selfpity. Inquirer and Mirror: In the book, you talk about keeping the note Tommy left, looking at it every day, and speaking it as if it were a prayer. Look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. It was written on the back of a Boggle word sheet in Tommy’s brilliantly clear and eternally boyish print: Please forgive me. “Later in the day police would find the farewell note Tommy left for us. “I needed to record what had happened and set forth my love for my son.” “I felt like if I didn’t write it, I would spend the rest of my life paralyzed and obsessed with just that 45-day period of my life,” he said. Raskin spoke via phone with The Inquirer and Mirror about the loss of his son, his work in Congress and the book he felt he had to write. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed him the lead House manager of Trump’s second impeachment, prosecuted the following month. 6, he could see a growing number of what he called “little omens, dropped like fascist breadcrumbs throughout the capital city.” He began to worry that he had missed both the signs that Tommy’s illness had worn him down and signs that former President Donald Trump’s insistence that he had been robbed of the election would lead to violence. Making his way to the House of Representatives on the morning of Jan. The two always went hand in hand, and now I may be alive on Earth without either of them.” He found himself despairing a life without that natural buoyancy, “and also without my beloved, irreplaceable son. His book represents the attempt to navigate the emotional riptides of the death of his son and the violent attempt to stop the official counting of electoral ballots that would give the presidential election to Joe Biden.Īs he left his son’s grave and stepped into the breach in Washing ton, Raskin felt that what he calls his natural inclination to be constitutionally optimistic might be a path to self-delusion in the face of a “violent authoritarianism and fascism by autocrats and demagogues, and the mortal threats of depression, despondency and despair.” in an event sponsored by Fairwinds Counseling Center, to raise awareness about mental health. Raskin will speak at the Unitarian Church Wednesday, Aug. ![]() I felt it very much in my chest, in my heart.” I felt a lot of anger and I felt a lot of shock and felt determined to get to the bottom of these events and get past them. I felt as if already the very worst thing that could happen had happened to me. 6, I began to experience all these emotions, but fear was not one of them. “I guess it is about us all trying to find our way back from these wrenching and shocking times we live in,” Raskin said in an interview this week. The book began as a love letter to his son, and grew into a love letter to democracy. “Never before had I felt so equidistant, so vacillating, between the increasingly unrecognizable place called life and the suddenly intimate and expanding jurisdiction called death,” Raskin wrote in his book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy.” The very next day his father found himself taking cover during the worst attack on the American seat of democracy since the War of 1812. 31, 2020, 25-year-old Tommy Raskin took his own life. Email: July 28, 2022) The cold facts of any death never tell the true story. ![]()
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