In a year saturated with politics in an ever more polarised world, where the obituary many feared they’d be reading would be that of democracy itself, one death seemed to encapsulate the historical moment we’re in: that of Alexei Navalny.
A man of courage who championed democracy in his native Russia, a country that does all it can to suppress it, Navalny died in an Arctic prison as he had lived: as a ceaseless foe of authoritarianism and one of its most intractable practitioners, Vladimir Putin.
Navalny’s death, at 47, set off a global wave of grief and anger and did precisely what he would have wanted it to: galvanise his fellow resisters to redouble their resolve.
Navalny was not the only righteous dissident to die in 2024. He had a counterpart in Nijole Sadunaite, a Lithuanian Catholic nun who took on Soviet totalitarianism in the depths of the Cold War. For years, she too had known the inside of a cold Siberian cell. Half a world away, Shih Ming-teh died on his 83rd birthday, more than 60 years after he began agitating for democracy in a then-dictatorial Taiwan.
Others were remembered for other causes that were no less political. Lilly Ledbetter campaigned so fiercely under the banner of equal pay for equal work that her name was memorialised by the US Congress, in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. Dorie Ann Ladner was a tenacious if unheralded fighter for civil rights in the Jim Crow South, shepherding Black Americans to a place many had never seen: a voting booth. David Mixner went from leading protests against the Vietnam War to winning advances on behalf of gay rights. And Brooke Ellison may have been paralysed from the neck down, but used her voice effectively in asserting the rights of the disabled.
None of them had the outright power to effect change; theirs had to be the power of persuasion. Raw political clout was more the province of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, who died at 100; or Brian Mulroney, Canada’s 18th prime minister; or Nguyen Phu Trong, who sought to further entrench communism in Vietnam while rooting out corruption; or Alberto Fujimori, who revived Peru’s economy and then landed in prison as a corrupt abuser of human rights. Or, on Capitol Hill, a roster of politicians who had jockeyed for power.
The Senate alone lost Bob Graham, D-Fla.; James Sasser, D-Tenn.; James Inhofe, R-Okla.; Fred Harris, D-Okla.; and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who became the nation’s first Jewish candidate on a major-party presidential ticket, with Al Gore in 2000. The House remembered Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who ensured that a country that had long denied racial freedom would now celebrate it with a national holiday, Juneteenth.
And in a political year in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr made headlines, Americans were reminded of his mother, Ethel Kennedy, who died at 96, and of her devotion to the memory and causes of a very different RFK.
Final bows
The ritual “in memoriam” segments of the Oscar, Emmy and Tony broadcasts next year will have no shortage of passings to mark.
Dame Maggie Smith will no doubt be featured in all three, having shone onstage and onscreen in exquisitely etched roles, from Miss Jean Brodie to Violet Crawley, the duchess of “Downton Abbey”.
James Earl Jones could be a thundering King Lear or a wise, animated Lion King; Tennessee Williams’ Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or Luke Skywalker’s menacing daddy, Darth Vader.
Another acting shape-shifter, Donald Sutherland, was gone, as were Carl Weathers, Rocky’s foe Apollo Creed; Gena Rowlands, an actress who seemed to specialize in women on the edge; Alain Delon, “a French monument”, in the words of President Emmanuel Macron; Shelley Duvall and Teri Garr, who offered brilliant variations on quirkiness; and Louis Gossett Jr, who took home an Emmy for “Roots” and became the third Black actor to receive an Oscar, for “An Officer and a Gentleman”.
Then there were those who forged outsize personas on the small screen. Phil Donahue reinvented the talk show; Richard Simmons got his viewers off the couch and sweating to his “oldies” soundtracks; and Ruth Westheimer devoted decades to schooling her fans in, well, other kinds of exertions.
Joyce Randolph, the last surviving “Honeymooner”, harked back to the zany TV humour of the 1950s; Bob Newhart, the bemused, button-down Everyman, emerged amid the disorienting cultural shifts of the ’60s; and Richard Lewis showed up in the world-weary ’70s with a set of dark, anxious, jabbing jokes.
In the glow of the footlights, there was the exuberant singing, acting and, most of all, dancing of Chita Rivera, an unforgettable whirlwind in “West Side Story” and “Chicago”.
Kris Kristofferson straddled two worlds, Hollywood and Nashville, and was just one of a cavalcade of music stars to pass from the scene; his rowdier country cousin Toby Keith was another.
Heroes and tainted stars
Willie Mays was a triple threat whose mix of power, speed and precision made him arguably the greatest ballplayer who ever lived. Spectacular in baseball in their own way were Fernando Valenzuela, whose trademark screwball left batters flailing, and Rickey Henderson, whose lightning speed on the basepaths earned him the career record for stolen bases.
Pete Rose, at his death, remained banned by Major League Baseball and barred from its Hall of Fame, but even that tarnish could not hide the undeniable fact that he had been one of the purest hitters the game had ever produced — just as a gripping murder trial and a polarising verdict could not erase O.J. Simpson’s legacy as one of football’s greatest running backs.
Death took a toll in basketball as well, visiting the jump-shooting master and scoring machine Jerry West and two of the game’s most dominant big men, Dikembe Mutombo and Bill Walton.
Just as dominant in their own worlds were a host of writers and artists who left us. Alice Munro was that rare writer to find literary fame and a Nobel Prize. Paul Auster reimagined the noir novel. John Barth and Robert Coover wrote experimental fiction befitting a discordant postmodern world. Edna O’Brien chafed against social conventions, particularly those constraining her heroines. And N. Scott Momaday explored tribal reservations in the American Southwest, becoming the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
In museums and galleries, two art stars of abstraction were remembered: Frank Stella, a restless explorer of colour whose most familiar works were, paradoxically, black stripes; and the sculptor Richard Serra, whose preferred medium was steel slabs on a massive scale. Faith Ringgold, by contrast, chose a softer material in creating pictorial quilts that commented on race and gender relations.
Creators and discoverers
Softer material, too, was the stuff with which designers like Roberto Cavalli and Mary McFadden spun their high-fashion creations — his unabashedly flashy, hers taking a cue from the elegantly flowing gowns of antiquity.
Two other go-getters’ creations were edible rather than wearable: David Liederman and Wally Amos; their names became brands of nationally famous cookies. Leonard Riggio’s and Bernie Marcus’ brainchildren were of the brick and mortar sort: Riggio founded Barnes & Noble, Marcus helped to get Home Depot off the ground. On Madison Avenue, Mary Wells Lawrence reached an advertising pinnacle with her own agency.
Unlike entrepreneurs, scientists rarely start from scratch; they build on the groundwork that others laid before them. That was how Paul Parkman was able to help subdue rubella; and how Joel Breman was able to assist in combating the Ebola virus, smallpox and malaria; and how Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally were able to discover the hormones the brain uses to control growth, reproduction and other bodily functions.
Now their work is done, leaving us to take stock of their significance by reading their obituaries, a ritual farewell in which we briefly revisit the times they helped shape.
Many of us could recall a familiar voice that once greeted us at our boxy computers with a cheerful “You’ve got mail!” It belonged to Elwood Edwards, who, unlike his AI successors, was mortal. He died at 74 in November.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
