There’s an old saying that says that if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.

This was the mentality of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, whose death was caused by metastatic pancreatic cancer — cancer that started in the pancreas, and spread to other parts of the body. According to The New York times, she was nominated in 1993, under the Clinton administration, when she was 60 years old, and served all that time — totaling 27 years — until her death Friday evening at age 87.

Anywhere you look, you will see nothing but positivity about her. In a Business Insider article from 2017, she was described as “a firecracker on the bench”. In an article on CNN, a former law clerk for Ginsberg, Amanda Tyler, had nothing but the highest praise for her as she was interviewed by Anderson Cooper.

“She was meticulous,” Tyler said. “She had the highest standards. I like to analogize working for her with being on a sports team with someone like Michael Jordan. She was so great, that she made everyone do their best work, and be at their best.”

To be compared to one of the greatest basketball players to ever step foot on a court, you must’ve done something really, really special.

Ginsberg was also resilient. Another article on CNN, by reporter Ariane de Vogue, tells of how she worked through not one, but FIVE bouts of cancer.

“At one event sponsored by the Library of Congress last August, she revealed that during her bouts with cancer she has often turned to work to distract from her health,” de Vogue writes. “‘I love my job,’ she said. ‘It’s kept me going through four cancer bouts. Instead of concentrating on my aches and pains, I just know that I have to read this set of briefs, go over the draft opinion.'”

Most people would hear the word “cancer”, and automatically think the worst. For Ginsberg, as we can see, the diagnosis didn’t even phase her. That is truly incredible.

Finally, she was an icon. Not only did she have a movie written about her, “RBG”, which received many good reviews, but she wrote two books on Swedish law, one on sex based discrimination, one on equality, and a biography called “In My Own Words”, which was published in 2016. She was a feminist icon, with her four famous quotes on Google being all about women.

“My mother told me to be a lady,” one of them reads. “And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.”

Ginsberg is survived by her two children and four grandchildren. There is a hole in the supreme court, and a hole in many people’s hearts, for sure. Rest in peace, RBG — You will truly be missed.