RBG has a new stamp? We had our differences, but I’ll honor her by using it.

(U.S. Postal Service via AP)

J. Harvie Wilkinson III is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

I recently received a letter from the U.S. Postal Service. I opened it with mild annoyance, expecting an announcement of some interruption or rerouting of service.

Imagine my surprise at receiving an invitation to the Oct. 2 first-day-of-issue ceremony of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg postage stamp. First days of issue are a big deal for stamp collectors like me. The stamp is marked Forever, the typical designation intended to protect us from the creeping irritation of rising postal rates.

What a wonderful tribute, I thought. I smiled, remembering the old candy store on Fourth Street in Charlottesville that featured various RBG sweet treats at the checkout counter a few years back. They were, the proprietor told me, the hottest-selling items, outstripping the old-fashioned shop’s infinite varieties of licorice, jelly beans and chocolate. So popular was Justice Ginsburg even in unexpected places, and there she was, stealing in absentia the entire scene.

There was much to like and admire about Justice Ginsburg: The personal gestures of kindness arriving at just the right times. The improbability of such a soft-spoken figure wielding such a large influence on the law. Her courage despite multiple bouts with cancer. Her mastery of the judicial craft. “Get it right and keep it tight,” she would say. Nobody did it better.

She had been my friend. She chose several of my law clerks to clerk for her, and each of them adored her. I had learned at dinners to lean over so I could hear what she was saying. I had come to understand that the long pauses in conversation were not terminations, but intermissions between insights.

But using the stamp on my personal correspondence? No way. I summoned no end of excuses. That she had intruded inadvisedly in the 2016 election. That she claimed for the Constitution an all-but-definitive word on abortion. That she was too quick to exile the slightest religious expression from the public square. That she would too easily displace representative government and the votes and voices of millions with the superior wisdom of just five justices of the court.

The gap was just too great. Affixing portraiture to a letter shows the warm and admiring view of the sender for the person on the stamp. My friends would laugh, seeing it as wildly incongruous or as some kind of heehaw from which we would all derive a merry chuckle. Safer just to let it be.

Safer, maybe, but in the end, not right. Being true to oneself should not mean being untrue to someone else. Death does not erase differences. Nor should it. Historical debates are often the most heated. Witness the one raging over whether the founders of our nation should be judged by our contemporary standards or in the context of their times.

But if not an eraser, death may yet be a benign enabler, allowing us to see others in the round and to render differences so large in life less consequential afterward. What comes through to me in the stamp is not a stand on abortion or judicial activism, but ineffable kindness and a lifetime spent promoting the full dignity of women, and doing so in the belief that the law in all its majesty lights the best path toward that end.

So yes, I will use the stamp — if I can find it. I suspect there will be a run on it, and that no matter how many sheets or rolls the Postal Service prints, it will have grossly underestimated the demand.

I hope that, in the future, it will not take mortality and a postage stamp to remind us that simply having different views and leading a different life make no one less of an American than any other. Perhaps that’s how Justice Ginsburg would have wished it. Perhaps she would see her Forever stamp as a feminist response to Abraham Lincoln’s penny — a small but lasting symbol of unity in a fractured time.