What is it to sit in the shared grief of losing a beloved public figure?
What is it to mourn the public side of someone else’s real and personal grief?
What is it to cry, losing hope for something of a figure, where someone is crying for the real heart of that real person?
The world lost notorious RBG this afternoon. We lost a fighter, a champion, and a believer in the good, to a shitty horrible illness that I thought she would handily beat again this time around.
We lost a person who time and time again, showed up strong in the face of complex and confusing rhetoric designed to demean and belittle people and their rights.
A family lost a wife and a mother and a grandmother. My thoughts are with them as they navigate losing this incredible woman.
And the country lost a gatekeeper, a symbol fighting hate and oppression, an incalculably strong figure to fight against the roiling rise of tyrant and hatred.
America, already hurting and broken, lost yet another someone they could trust and look to as the days continue to get darker. And all of us at the sidelines, just watching, stunned into confusion and hurt at losing a woman not even our own.
We put so much on the shoulders of an 87-year old woman. She was a cancer survivor previously, and we asked her to hold back the tides of oppression that are roiling?
How could we ask so much of her?
An incredible woman as she was, this shows so clearly that we all have a role to play in fighting for a better world. We all have to make it better. We all have to stand up and fight.
For now, let’s cry and learn more about this woman who did so much. Let us mourn this tremendous loss. Let us be sad for missing her guidance and wisdom in the future.
Tomorrow, let’s dry our eyes and for the sake of her family who is mourning, and be reminded that we all have our role to play in making our community, and our world, a better place.
We can’t all be Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But all of us have a responsibility to learn from her. To be bettered by her. To take up the torch from her, and to fight the good fight for her.
Thank you RBG.
We’re going to do the best we can. Promise.
