As I’m writing this, I am processing the news of Justice Ginsburg’s passing,

I’ve already written a blog about how she’s been an inspiration and a personal hero. (https://nosmallthing.net/main/people-who-touch-me/everyone-needs-a-hero/)

A trailblazer and a great example of “incrementalism,” she forwarded the cause of equality for ALL Americans and tried to be inclusive in the process, working through our institutions rather than disrupting or negating them.

She was capable of disagreeing (she wrote many strong dissents as a judge), but she never acted to diminish anyone as a person in pursuit of a goal.

I’m so sad about the position of the rule of law in our current society. As I reflect on RBG’s passing, I keep thinking about Mourning Coming to America.

We have lost so many incredible human beings this past year.  Elijah Cummings and John Lewis represented lives of personal sacrifice, determination, and resilience. Chadwick Boseman brought an unusual level of humility and authenticity to his onscreen personas and to his craft as an actor.

I might not have known Breonna Taylor or George Floyd if it weren’t for how they died; their lives cut short by men we’ve equipped with guns and empowered to make decisions about use of force that they were probably not suited to make.

And this past week, we’ve gone over 200,000 corona virus deaths. In my mind, many of these deaths could have been prevented if we had a president more concerned with our long-tern welfare than with short-term stock market stats.

I’m mourning all this — and more.

• I’m mourning the loss of civility in how we act with each other. Every day, I learn about actions like a defiant shopper killing a store’s security guard for asking him to wear a mask, this act representing an almost an unfathomable mixture of victimhood and entitlement.
• I’m mourning the loss of rational and evidence-based thinking. We are in greater danger from white nationalists that we are from Muslim students.  (Look at trends in violent crimes.)
• I’m mourning our current elected leaders’ sense of priorities. It’s hard to accept efforts to ram a nomination for replacing RBG through the senate with less than sixty days before an election yet refuse to vote for a new relief package for the ranks of workers who lost jobs because of COVID and can’t feed their families.

By definition, “mourning” is the deep feeling of sorrow or grief usually following the death of someone.  Every culture seems to have their own traditions.

People in mourning often wear somber colors, or eat certain foods, or abstain from certain pleasures for set amounts of time.

I expect people will be mourning the loss of our country’s diminutive champion of equality for some time. Media personalities will recount RBG’s accomplishments and share some surprisingly personal stories. Hopefully, her example will inspire new people to devote energy to her causes, to equality and fairness.

But I want to share another mourning tradition I’ve taken on. This habit has become extremely important to me now that it’s easy to get numb to the numbers of pandemic deaths. This tradition brings me to tears many days, but also gives me hope.

Every day, on MSNBC, towards the end of her show, Deadline: Whitehouse, Nicolle Wallace runs a segment called “Lives Well-Lived.” She shares photos of someone who recently died of COVID and reads something about them sent by a loved one.

I didn’t personally know the black teen from Florida who planned on going to a local junior college to pursue some tech related field, shown in his photo smiling in his prom tux.  I didn’t know the nurse from New York who held up her smart phone to patients on ventilators so that they could hear words of love from dear ones who couldn’t be with them. I didn’t know the middle-aged man from a southwestern state who married a woman with four children and raised them “like his own” (and was grieved over by all the grown children he adopted).

The 200,000 of my fellow Americans who have perished from this virus deserve to be known and mourned. Somehow, feeling that my grief is shared, knowing that others are witnessing the same stories being told,  provides me some comfort. Mourning with others makes me feel human, and I’m grateful for this.

Remembering the light any individual life brings to this world is no small thing.