In interviews occasioned by the publication of his book Will The Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, Ruth’s dear friend Studs Terkel described himself as “an agnostic.” In other words, he said, “a cowardly atheist.” I have a hunch that characterization may apply to a number of us here. But not to Ruth. In her gentle, quiet way, she was an uncompromising atheist. An atheist for all seasons.

After her death, Quentin shared a story that deepened my understanding of Ruth. At the age of twelve, she decided she couldn’t take communion because she didn’t believe in God. She very much wanted to take communion, she wanted to please her parents, but she couldn’t falsify her reality. The minister and Sunday School teacher came to the family home. Together with Ruth’s parents, they arrayed themselves around the little girl, got down on their knees, and prayed she would accept the faith. The child known as Little Ruthie Johnson didn’t yield. She remained true to her sense of the world.

Something essential is evoked by that image of the slight, delicate girl holding her ground against such imposing adult authority. Ruth thought for herself. She saw things from her own angle of vision. She knew her own mind. In her singular way, she didn’t impose herself on others, yet stood her ground and was true to herself.

One word for that quality of discrimination, I suppose, is taste. Ruth was deeply cultured. A passionate, demanding reader. An ardent audience for theater and music. But I mean “cultured” in a somewhat different sense. Vaclav Havel once remarked that culture is, at bedrock, a matter of how we treat each other. It’s in this sense that Ruth was so superb and refined. I don’t mean simply that she was kind, though she surely was that, but that she brought a particular quality of attention and a deft, all-but-invisible touch to the orchestration of human relationships. She had an uncanny way of inhabiting social forms, of creating space for the play of interest and delight. Somehow—I can’t explain this—a phone conversation with Ruth was different from a phone conversation with anyone else. A passing encounter in the community garden plot my wife Patsy and I shared—and share—with the Youngs was fertile in mysterious ways. In conversation Ruth’s reactions were often surprising, inviting you to look at familiar things in a new light.

Allow me briefly to sketch three spaces in the world that Ruth animated with her acute and lovely qualities.

The first was something called Vigil Against Violence. For five years during the 1990’s, a group gathered on the first Sunday of each month on the grounds of the Stateway Gardens public housing development at 35th and State. We came together to read aloud the names of homicide victims on the South Side in an effort to keep visible the injury to our common life that intolerable yet tolerated levels of violence inflict. In the first few years, we received lots of national and local press attention. After a while, we didn’t even bother to send out press releases. As they evolved, the vigils became less an organizing initiative than a ritual observance—a moment when those present exposed themselves to certain hard realities. Over the years, many people came and went. Quentin and Ruth came and came. Again and again. As one of the organizers of the vigils, I was sometimes beset by doubts and would ask myself why we kept doing this month after month, year after year. But then during the reading of the names I would look into Ruth’s face—so wholly present, so generously angry—and I would be recalled to myself and our shared purposes. I once asked Ruth why she never missed a vigil. “For me,” she replied, “that would be like not going to church.”

The second space—christened “Vidiots” by Ruth—was a regular gathering of friends at the Young’s apartment for a cultural evening. Tom and Eleanor Nicholson were charter members of Vidiots, as were Patsy and myself. This was not, I hasten to say, a book club; it was, in a way, a counter-book-club. We would come together for an evening devoted to significant amounts of alcohol, impossibly rich desserts, and television. It was highbrow television—“The Jewel in the Crown,” “War and Peace,” “The Singing Detective,” and so on—but the truth is we would have watched anything for the pleasure of each other’s company. Quietly and decisively, Ruth presided over these wonderfully indulgent evenings. The day after she died, as I climbed the stairs at 5822 S. Blackstone on that saddest of occasions, I realized I had only joyful associations with the space I was about to enter.

That brings me to the wonder of Ruth and Quentin’s marriage. Some things are so large it’s difficult to bring them into perspective. Ruth’s love for Quentin, his love for her, the life they created and sustained together, has been such a constant presence in our world that it’s only recently that I have come to realize we have been bearing witness to something extraordinary and rare: a marriage so passionate, so companionable, so full of laughter and conversation, so complete that it will stand as an enduring masterpiece of lives well lived. Great love stories tend to be narrow, obsessive, exclusive affairs. This is a love story that includes us all within its spacious and hospitable embrace.

And so it is that Ruth lives on. Not in the usual way people are said to live on in the cultural artifacts they leave behind—books, battleships, buildings, and so—but in the ways we, her friends, attend to and enjoy each other. She stirs in the air of freedom and delight, high seriousness and supple gaiety she has bequeathed us.

[Remarks at memorial service for Ruth Young on April 14, 2007 at Ida Noyes Hall.]