It is early in the morning in Southern California. As I sit here on the Coronavirus couch, I am still processing the death of a judicial great, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Current events notwithstanding this would be a blow. But we cannot strip current realities from the tapestry of the meaning of her passing. 

I have spent this evening contemplating. Thinking about the life I have been privileged to live, in no small part because of her. I have spent the hours researching; reading articles about her stances, her convictions, her ‘third act’ of sorts as she ascended to the Supreme Court almost 30 years ago at the age of 60, and where she served for a full career; 27 years. I am thinking about the quietude of that second career, hours also spent contemplating and researching and opining. 

Singular pursuits these.  Alone in her study or in chambers, putting pieces together in her mind silently; conferring with clerks and colleagues, yes, but owning the ultimate decisions as her own. 

Justice Ginsburg was often in the minority; her singular phrase was ‘I dissent’. There is value here. There is value in the no; in the negative, in the demurring. There was courage in the dissent; there was activity in the only seemingly still and silent. 

I imagine her alone with a barrister’s lamp shining on case law; a notepad and a hefty pen jotting down ideas and page numbers and case names; I imagine her looking out a window as she thought; still as stone, seemingly doing nothing. 

But no. In that seeming repose, she came to conclusions that affected each and every one of us, whether she was in the majority or the minority. Whether or not the opinion was popular, whether or not her opinion would carry the day. Synapses and neurons firing a million times a second. Not nothing. Not nothing. 

But tonight, steeped as I am in the life that was Ginsburg, on this first night of Rosh Hashanah, the first New Year where I am alive, but there is no living Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I have no words. 

They will come more easily tomorrow, when I have read more, and cried more, and thought about that day in 1993 when I took the day off of work so as to see her sworn in, and thought about how old she was; 60 to my 30 and wondered what, if anything I would have to contribute at that advanced age; as I consider my own ‘third act’ of sorts as I prepare to leave my (sharply lesser) government service to hopefully leave a durable legacy to those who will assuredly not know my name, I think of Justice Ginsburg who both inspired and exhorted me for the almost 30 years she served on SCOTUS, as well as her work before then. 

For those of us who think of her as almost a friend, ‘The Notorious RBG’, it is almost impossible to fathom that the majority of Americans knew, and know, little of her legacy; they do not know that freedoms and choices they take for granted still exist because of her–both her affirmations and her dissents–the so many Americans she fought and thought and read and wrote and queried for, who will never know how she held fast to the tide of freedom and justice, particularly in these last almost four years, they will never know they live in an America she fought for. 

I will speak more of legacy tomorrow. But on this finally cooled off night, I wondered what to leave you with. There are pictures of Justice Ginsburg smiling; I may share some of them with you tomorrow; because we need to remember the joy of being in service and in thrall to something greater than ourselves; that weighty matters can be addressed with a quietly joyful heart. 

But I can, and will, leave you with a song. 

To take a short break, I watched an episode of Boston Legal, where the main case was about Roe. I was 10 years old in 1973; Justice Ginsburg was 40 that year. During that time she, along with being faculty at Columbia Law, also founded and served as General Counsel of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. When I was learning long division and diagramming sentences, she was paving the way for the 5th grade girl in short pigtails and a shirt that always showed just a peek of rounded belly; a girl she would never meet, but a girl who was, and is, deeply indebted to Justice Ginsburg. 

Ten years before, in 1963, when I was an infant and Justice Ginsburg was 30 and just beginning the practice, the calling, of her profession, Bob Dylan wrote a song that came hard on the heels of the March on Washington, that historic event. I don’t remember it; I was only 10 days old. But no doubt the young Ginsburg remembered it. She shaped change. At a lectern at Columbia, later on the influential DC Circuit, and then her capstone appointment to the Supreme Court, to the extent that this America is an America worth shoring and celebrating–for *all* of us–our lives are what they are, autonomy and freedom and agency intact, in no small part because of her. 

The song, ‘The Times They Are A Changin’, split America into two camps; two distinct cohorts we still see today: those who embrace change, and those who would thwart it. 

57 years later, the infant in the bassinet with Dylan playing in the background in South Central Arkansas now pens a remembrance to a woman she never met, but who shaped her deeply. 

But yes, the song. The episode where Keb’ Mo sings this song was in 2008; the week after Obama won the Presidential election. In this context, this was a song of hope. 

But the song has a double edge. Twelve years later, and after almost four years of a government hell bent on snatching and clawing back every inch of progress since I was in a bassinet in 1963, and later when Ginsburg was teaching and with the ACLU, and now with the strains of fascism growing ever louder, the song has the fragrance of both the ominous and of the exhortation. 

Justice Ginsburg knew, and I fully agree, that there is only one correct cohort in the push for justice, and in the pull of righteous dissent. 

Listen and locate yourself. 

Lyrics in comments. 

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

May her memory be a blessing.