He is occupying my heart and filling my chest with oxygen. But I am still in the land of the living, and Tommy is with me somehow every step of the way. I have felt no fear today at all, for we have lost our Tommy Raskin, and the very worst thing that ever could have happened to us has already happened. He thought of Tommy in the midst of the Jan. Raskin welcomes the intrusion.ĭuring his sound check at the microphone on the Senate floor before the impeachment trial, for example, he suddenly remembered Tommy reciting his poem, “Where War Begins.” This is how grief works, sneaking up on us when we don’t expect it. Throughout this book, he pivots to reflections about his son, often in unexpected moments. Raskin knows the depths of that despair, but he also offers a way out. More than two years after my brother’s suicide, though, I hear his name or see a childhood picture of him, and that slammed door swings open to an image of how he died. I would never compare my loss to that of a parent who has lost a child. We are haunted by our loved one’s death because there is no forgetting how they died.

This is not to ignore one of the hardest parts of suicide.

“I ardently wish that the people who are staring at me, all my colleagues, could have met Tommy, could have known him, could have seen that he was the most positive, exuberant, and dynamic life force one could imagine, truly the funniest person you might ever hope to meet.” “I am a figure of unthinkable and unspeakable tragedy, someone subsumed by the grim darkness of his days,” Raskin writes in describing his first day back on the House floor after Tommy’s death. In writing about his son, Raskin speaks for so many of us who have lost a loved one to suicide: We don’t want them to be remembered only for the way they died. “It would be my own attempt at a personal answer, a labor of love and a way to respond to all those people who told me, in such fine-grained detail, about the love and the crises in their own families, about their grievous personal losses and their incremental triumphs, and about the desperate fears they have for our nation’s future and the most cherished hopes they have for what America may still become in a world of so many frightful dangers.” This book is Raskin’s way of responding to the outpouring of condolences for his family and the echoing fears for our country. The day after the Raskin family buried Tommy, a violent mob stormed the Capitol.

Tommy raskin obituary