RBG’s stone memorializes her court service

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s tombstone at Arlington National Cemetery was unveiled over the weekend and is engraved with the seal of the US Supreme Court.

In Jewish tradition, it is customary for the unveiling of the tombstone to come sometime after shiva, the mourning period, and before the one-year anniversary of the death.

Ginsburg (in oval) died from complications of pancreatic cancer on Sept. 18 at age 87.

Her headstone features the high court’s official seal, which, like the Great Seal of the United States, depicts a bald eagle with a shield but also includes a single star beneath the bird’s talons — meant to symbolize the Constitution’s creation of “one supreme Court.”

Below that, Ginsburg is remembered as an associate justice who served on the bench of the Supreme Court from 1993 until her death in 2020.

The gravestones of some other justices also bear the high court’s historic seal.

Ginsburg is buried alongside her husband, Martin, whose name is engraved above hers on the stone. He died at 78 in 2010.

Relatives can choose headstones in the couple’s section of the Virginia cemetery that differ from the rows of white monuments that mark the graves of military service members.

The Ginsburgs’ final resting place is not far from where President John F. Kennedy is buried and near the plots of nine Supreme Court justices, including three who served on the bench with Ginsburg: Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens.