On the last day of December, 25-year-old Harvard law student Thomas Raskin died by suicide. He left a short note for his family, which read: Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.
His broken-hearted parents, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sarah Bloom Raskin, memorialized Tommy in a lengthy post on Medium, introducing many of us to their brilliant and much-loved son. Tommy “had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind,” they wrote. He also had a secret, which ultimately took his life.