Photo: The White House via Getty Images
Sonia Sotomayor doesn’t search for a favorite memory of her mother,Celina Báez Sotomayor, who she lost to cancer in July.
It’s right there, top of mind, instantly bringing a smile: “She could barely walk and a friend came over and started a little song and said, ‘Celina, dance.’ And my mother stood in place and moved her hips and her legs and then got a smile on her face.”
“That image keeps going through my mind,” Sotomayor, associate justice of the Supreme Court and author of the new children’s bookJust Help! How to Build a Better World, says in an interview for the new issue of PEOPLE. “I have eternal optimism, and I think that’s a product of how vibrant a person my own mother was.”
“Individual acts add up. And if all of us were doing that, we would have a whole lot less unhappiness the world,” Sotomayor says.
Philomel Books
Masking Up
Speaking to PEOPLE at a time when some of the most divisive issues — vaccine mandates, gun rights and abortion access — are before the Supreme Court, Sotomayor was careful to avoid hot topics.
“I believe in all of us taking good care of ourselves and it takes active consciousness to do that,” she says.
She knows that “people talk about this being a product of my diabetes or because of my diabetes.” But it’s bigger than that. “It’s a part of me that has grown up understanding that we have affirmative obligations to take care of ourselves as human beings,” she says. “Good health doesn’t just happen. It’s a conscious choice. Like building a better world doesn’t just happen. We have to make choices about how to do that every day.”
Don’t Ask About Today’s Justices
And what about the choices made every day behind the scenes at the high court?
“Well, yes, I will give you one prime example,” she replied. “Okay. When Justice[Ruth Bader] Ginsburg’s husband was ill, one of my colleagues knew that her husband was the cook in the family. She’d never been a very good cook and he was afraid she wasn’t eating so he had food delivered to her every night.”
Steve Petteway/AP/Shutterstock
“I’m a little nervous for you that it’s not a more recent example, though,” this reporter told her. (Ginsburg’s husband, Marty, died in 2010; Ginsburg died in 2020.)
“Yes, I understand that,” Sotomayor said. “But I would like to stay away from more recent examples.”
‘Getting Out of the Courthouse’
Now that Sotomayor-the-author had dedicated so much of her pandemic free time to musing about all the varied ways of making America better (“children’s books are not easy,” she says), PEOPLE wondered: “Do you think the Supreme Court might not be what you do ‘til you die?”
With a laugh, Sotomayor replied, “What an elegant way to ask, ‘Am I planning to retire?’ "
“No. I do have to say, at one point I was serving the homeless in D.C. I got a lot of gratification from getting out of the courthouse and doing something concrete with my hands to serve,” she says. “When COVID is better under control and I can get out among people more, I want to go back to that. But I don’t have to wait until I retire.”
J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AFP via Getty Images
A Child’s Service
Sotomayor temporarily relocated to her mother’s Florida home last summer after her cancer diagnosis. “She was 93 and her memory was failing, but she was fairly strong until the cancer. The deterioration was relatively quick thereafter. It was hard,” Sotomayor says.
Celina ultimately required 24-hour care at home. “It was demanding,” Sotomayor recalls. The justice’s friends, unsolicited, organized meal deliveries.
“She danced ‘til the last few days of her life and her dancing, even in pain, is a memory I don’t think I’ll ever lose,” Sotomayor says.
As for keeping her mom company and trying to ease her discomfort in dying, “Some would say, ‘But that doesn’t improve the world,’ " Sotomayor says.
“Well, that’s the purpose of my book: Every day that you have a thought about helping someone else, you are making the world a better place.”
source: people.com
