Mary Schmich: RBG and John Lewis are gone. It's like losing both parents at once. What now?

John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

They were the parents. They led us and taught us and helped to make us who we are. And now they’re both gone.

For all of us who believe in what these two unique Americans stood for — decency, hope, equality of opportunity — it may be tempting to feel unmoored, unprotected, orphaned by their disappearance within two months of each other this summer.

As long as they were around, they helped us believe that individuals could force change for the good and that our country could continue on the zigzagging road of progress.

“All the greats are dying,” I heard someone lament after Ginsburg’s death, noting that Lewis had recently died too.

I knew what she meant, but it’s not exactly true. Pick a moment, any moment, and people great and small are dying. Death is the one predictable thing in life, a fate that in any era doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sex, race or political creed.

Still, the double whammy of losing Lewis and Ginsburg feels like a turning point. In the precision of the cliche, the two of them opened doors that many of us have walked through. It’s tempting to fear that without them, keeping those doors open will be a lot harder.

Lewis passed on first, in July, at the age of 80. He was the son of sharecroppers, born in 1940, when the American South was still legally segregated and the country beyond the South had barely begun to reckon with what we now call racism. The fact that the word “racism” — not used in a U.S. government document until 1968 — is now embedded in our speech and consciences is the result of the bravery of his generation of civil rights fighters.

Ginsburg, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, only a few years after women won the right to vote, died in mid-September at the age of 87. A week after her death, on Friday, she became the first woman ever to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.

Think about that. Until the summer of 2020, no woman had been deemed sufficiently important for that honor, just as until this summer, when Lewis died, no Black man had been deemed important enough to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda.

The fact that both of them at the end of their lives were still making “firsts” says a lot about what they overcame and helped our country overcome.

In our public life, as well as in our personal lives, we can grow impatient with the elderly. Time to move aside. Make way for ducklings. But we also depend on our elders. Their lives illustrate what change looks like. They’re who made the world possible for us and who, in the case of these two, opened up possibilities that existed only in the realm of imagination when they were born.

In the lives of Ginsburg and Lewis, we see the limits of what this country has been. We see the work and courage it takes to expand the boundaries.

Each of them, in their own way, endured the indignities of being born who they were — him as a Black man, her as a woman. The limits they pushed against ignited their imaginations, made them dream and fight. The limits taught them the power of endurance.

And endurance is part of the legacy they leave us. That legacy is also a call to action.

“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time,” Ginsburg once said. She lived long enough to see that the steps are sometimes backward.

Lewis and Ginsburg died at a time when much of the good that they helped create is in danger: The right of women to control their reproductive lives. The right of all Americans who want to vote to be able to do so. The right to affordable health care for all.

But another part of the legacy they leave is showing us that work doesn’t end, and they both worked until the end. From them we inherit these truths:

Changes requires a fight. The fight is never done. Perseverance is essential. So is faith that the world can get better.

The parents who pushed the doors open are leaving us. It’s up to us now to keep them open, and to push them even wider.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

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