The Beautiful, Notorious RBG

The Beautiful Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed  Friday, at the age of 87 from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer.

While home alone on Friday evening, I heard the news. Overnight my anguish morphed into misery and by Saturday morning, I had melted into a tearful mess. I am not yet able to speak her name without a sob catching in my throat. As hundreds of thousands of Americans mourn,  I am not alone in my grief. 

This is not the first time we have cried together. We children of the fifties remember where we were when JFK was shot. We remember how we felt watching the tragic images of his assassination and the heartbreaking moments that followed: Jackie, with her pink Chanel suit covered in her husband's blood, standing next to LBJ as he was sworn in. Three year old John-John saluting, as his father's casket left St. Mathew's Cathedral.

Along with younger generations, none of us will forget every tragic moment of 911. 

Yes. We have been here before, as recently as the loss of the great John Lewis who taught us how to get into Good Trouble. 

As with Representative Lewis, countless tributes have unveiled an outpouring of love and a profound sadness; both by those who knew her and those of us who only knew of the Notorious RBG.

I am ill equipped to offer a fitting tribute to such a beautiful tiny giant. That is better left to her loved ones, colleagues and more accomplished writers. 

Yet I owe her more than my tears. We all do. She was after all, the Notorious RBG.

As late as the 1970's, banks could require a woman applying for credit to have her husband co-sign. Because of her tireless fight for gender equality, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974, thus allowing women to apply for bank accounts credit cards and mortgages themselves.

Women could also be fired for being pregnant. And in 1978 RBG, along with ACLU attorney, Susan Dellar Ross, helped pass the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. An amendment to Title Vll of the Civil Right's Act,; this prohibited sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy. 

John Lewis is as famous for standing up for civil rights, as RBG is for her stance on women's rights. However, they both stood for something more encompassing. They fought for Human Rights, and did so in a powerfully peaceful way.

Her's was a calm and quiet strength. A friend once said of her, "She doesn't do small talk." She had no time for the pettiness to which we all sometimes succumb. She was bigger than that. Her focus was the law and justice for which she never stopped fighting, though she battled 5 bouts of cancer within 20 years. In May, 2020, she participated in oral arguments from her hospital bed.

We lost her too soon and her passing has sparked a skirmish to fill her seat, leaving everything on the line.

Now is the time for us all to stand up.. What better way to thank her? And while there will never be another RBG, we can aspire to be more like her. If we endeavor to embrace her powerful spirit, we may discover a bit of RBG in all of us. 

Thank You RBG.  Rest in Peace and Power.

Audrey Knerler