![]() More recently, Congress came together to make the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline more easily accessible to those in need. “I didn’t volunteer to be a champion of this issue, but it arose out of the personal experience of being a parent who lost a child to mental illness and suicide,” Smith said in 2004, in one of the most emotional Senate floor speeches in memory. Smith, R-Ore., lost his son Garrett Lee Smith in 2003, he led enactment of landmark legislation that established the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Suicide Prevention Program, providing grants to state and tribal governments for youth suicide prevention and early intervention efforts across the country. In the past, personal grief has prompted legislative action on Capitol Hill. Tommy Raskin graduated from Amherst College in western Massachusetts and was a second-year student at Harvard Law School, where according to the family his professors have included Bruce Mann, the husband of Democratic Sen. Sarah Bloom Raskin is a former deputy Treasury secretary and Federal Reserve governor. The Raskins, well known not only on Capitol Hill and in the congressman’s Montgomery County-based congressional district but across official Washington, have seen an outpouring of support since their son’s Dec. “The pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world,” the Raskins wrote. “Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind,” the Raskins wrote in the statement, describing his struggle with depression as a “relentless torture in the brain.” ![]() Jamie Raskin and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, remembered their 25-year-old son Tommy in a private funeral ceremony Tuesday, a day after releasing a heartrending public tribute. The family announced last week that they had created the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund for People and Animals in their son’s name.Ī private funeral is planned for next week.Maryland Democratic Rep. The Raskins described how their son donated half of his teaching salary “to save people with malaria by purchasing mosquito nets with global charities” and spent the rest on donations in each of his students’ names to other groups targeting global hunger. “He loved his students and they loved him back,” his parents wrote. He spent last fall as a teaching assistant in a Harvard Law justice course, meeting with his dozen students on Zoom and “finding what was precious in their work and teasing it out.” “Above all, he began to follow his own piercing moral and intellectual insights looking for answers to problems of injustice, poverty and war.” “He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip,” the post said. 30, 1995, the middle child was “a daring outspoken defender of all outcasts and kids in trouble” who spent hours in high school tutoring his peers. “making mischief, kicking the soccer ball in the goal, acting out scenes from To Kill A Mockingbird with his little sister in his father’s constitutional law class.”īorn Jan. The eulogy described Thomas’ youth in Takoma Park, Md. “On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son, Hannah and Tabitha’s beloved irreplaceable brother, a radiant light in this broken world.” The moving post detailed how Thomas began grappling with depression in his 20s, and how the illness was “a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him.”ĭespite a large support network of relatives, friends and doctors “the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy.” “Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind,” his parents wrote. Known to loved ones as “Tommy,” the second-year student at Harvard Law School was remembered as an animal lover and passionate vegan devoted to helping others. ![]() “Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me,” said the note, signed: “All my love, Tommy.” My illness won today,” his parents said in a Medium post. In a note left for his family on New Year’s Eve, the day he died, Thomas Bloom Raskin wrote “Please forgive me. Jamie Raskin and his wife Sarah on Monday published a heart-wrenching tribute to their late son, confirming that the 25-year-old took his own life last week after a long battle with depression. ‘Jeopardy!’ winner Mattea Roach’s father died during Masters taping: ‘Proudest dad around’
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