In a year saturated with politics in an ever more polarized 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 Aleksei Navalny.
A man of courage who championed democracy in a country, his native Russia, that does all it can to suppress it, Mr. Navalny died in an Arctic prison as he had lived: as a ceaseless foe of authoritarianism and the nemesis of one of its most intractable practitioners, Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Navalny’s death, at 47 — coming after years of arrests, beatings and a near-fatal poisoning — set off a global wave of grief and anger, but it also did precisely what he would have wanted it to: galvanize his fellow resisters to redouble their resolve.
Mr. Navalny was not a lone figure in the struggle between democracy and the iron hands that repudiate it. And he was not the only righteous dissident to die in 2024. He had a counterpart, albeit of an earlier generation, in Nijole Sadunaite, a Lithuanian Roman 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. He paid dearly for his political passion: torture and 20 years in prison, 13 of them in solitary confinement, under a repressive regime that history ultimately swept away. “I’m someone who never had a youth,” he said.
And in an emerging era in which the challenges to free and open societies can be more insidious, Shafiqah Hudson found her mission in the dark corridors of the internet: ferreting out trolls peddling lies and misinformation on social media. Her efforts may have been “an endless game of Whac-a-Mole,” as Penelope Green wrote in Ms. Hudson’s obituary, but they nevertheless “added up to an early and effective bulwark against misinformation that can threaten democracy.”
Others were remembered for other causes that were no less political. Lilly Ledbetter, a former Alabama factory worker, campaigned so fiercely under the banner of equal pay for equal work that her name was memorialized by 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 of them had never seen: a voting booth. David Mixner went from leading protests against the Vietnam War to using the political connections he later forged, particularly with Bill Clinton, to win advances on behalf of gay rights. And Brooke Ellison may have been paralyzed from the neck down, but she still had her voice, and she used it 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 peacemaking but beleaguered 39th president of the United States, who died at 100 in the year’s final days; or Brian Mulroney, Canada’s 18th prime minister and a signatory of the historic North American Free Trade Agreement; or Nguyen Phu Trong, who, in ruling Vietnam with a viselike grip, sought to further entrench communism while rooting out corruption; or Alberto Fujimori, who revived Peru’s economy, crushed leftist insurgencies 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, a Democrat elected by a then-purple Florida; James Sasser, a Tennessee Democrat who became President Clinton’s besieged ambassador to China; James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who, though a climate-change denier, led the chamber’s Environment Committee; his fellow Oklahoman Fred Harris, a moderate Democrat who pivoted left as a “new populist” in running for president in 1976; and Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat (and later independent) who became the nation’s first Jewish candidate on a major-party presidential ticket, with Al Gore in 2000.
The House, for its part, remembered Sheila Jackson Lee, the Texas Democrat who, more than anyone else in Washington, 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 long devotion to the memory and the causes of a very different R.F.K.
Final Bows
Mrs. Kennedy was not one for the limelight, but others who died this year fairly basked in it, and nowhere more so than in Hollywood, on Broadway and in television studios. 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, for one, will no doubt be featured in all three, having shone onstage and onscreen in exquisitely etched roles, from Miss Jean Brodie in her prime to Violet Crawley, the duchess of “Downton Abbey,” in her dotage.
As for acting versatility, Ms. Smith had an equally imposing male counterpart in James Earl Jones. He could be a thundering King Lear or a wise, animated Lion King (the voice of Mufasa); Tennessee Williams’s vulgar Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or Luke Skywalker’s menacing bad daddy in “Star Wars,” Darth Vader.
Another acting shape-shifter, Donald Sutherland, was gone, as were Carl Weathers, indelibly Rocky’s foe Apollo Creed; Gena Rowlands, an actress who seemed to specialize in women on the edge; Alain Delon, who could be described as a both a heartthrob and “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 playing an enslaved fiddler in “Roots” and later became only 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 by inviting his audience members to chime in. The puckish fitness maven Richard Simmons got his viewers off the couch and sweating to his “oldies” soundtracks. And Ruth Westheimer, that chirpy sex and romance counselor, devoted decades to schooling her fans in, well, other kinds of exertions.
Though three popular comic performers died in the same calendar year, their brands of comedy were of decidedly different decades: Joyce Randolph, the last surviving “Honeymooner,” harked back to the broad, zany TV humor 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. He ended his run figuring in an even more latter-day species of comedy, popping in and out Larry David’s acerbic, self-referential “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
In the glow of the footlights, on the other hand, there was no hint of gloom or sourness in 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 — co-starring with Barbra Streisand in “A Star Is Born” at one turn and, at another, singing one of his searching country songs in a duet with, say, Johnny Cash. Mr. Kristofferson was just one of a cavalcade of music stars to pass from the scene; his rowdier country cousin Toby Keith was another.
There were two who helped put Motown on the map: Duke Fakir, the last surviving member of the Four Tops, and Tito Jackson, Michael’s older brother and a founder of the Jackson 5. And there were the guitar virtuosos Dickey Betts and Duane Eddy; the suave crooners Steve Lawrence and Jack Jones; the Woodstock-era folky Melanie; the moody French balladeer Françoise Hardy; the boy-band idol Liam Payne; the peerless jazz drummer Roy Haynes; and the bossa nova ambassador Sergio Mendes.
The gospel singer Cissy Houston was remembered for her powerful voice but also for bringing another one, that of Whitney Houston, into the world. Two world musicians had carried on a dialogue with the West: Toumani Diabaté, a master of the West African kora, and the North Indian Zakir Hussain, whose tabla accompanied rock stars. And the conductor Seiji Ozawa gave Western classical music an East Asian face and, in turn, helped introduce that tradition to China, South Korea and Japan, his native land.
All of them could fill arenas. But so could a bevy of stars in the hurly-burly of a game.
Athletes, Authors and Artists
Willie Mays was a sports world rarity, a triple threat whose mix of power, speed and graceful 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 had him practically sliding into the Hall of Fame on his belly.
Pete Rose remained at his death banned by Major League Baseball and barred from its Hall of Fame, but even that tarnish, punishment for his gambling misdeeds, could not blot out his legacy as one of the purest hitters and most zealous players the game had ever produced — just as a gripping murder trial and a polarizing verdict could not erase O.J. Simpson’s standing 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, their handiwork not witnessed by sellout crowds but observed and contemplated in quiet. Alice Munro was that rare writer to find literary fame, and a Nobel Prize, through the short story. Paul Auster reimagined the noir novel in becoming the bard of Brooklyn. 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 in her fictive explorations of the “misfortunes of love,” as Anthony DePalma wrote in her obituary. And N. Scott Momaday explored postwar spiritual renewal on 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 color 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. They would adorn the walls of major museums.
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, as depicted in stone on the Acropolis. (She herself, fittingly, had an “enigmatic sphinx-like look,” a friend said.) Both depended on the lithe models who, sashaying on runways, were vehicles for their artistry — though one of them, Peggy Moffitt, was remembered mostly for an absence of fabric in wearing Rudi Gernreich’s topless bathing suit.
Builders and Discoverers
Both designers were as much business people as they were artists, in league, in that sense, with two go-getters whose creations were edible rather than wearable: David Liederman and Wally Amos. Their names became brands of nationally famous cookies. Leonard Riggio and Bernie Marcus’s brainchildren were of the brick and mortar sort: Mr. Riggio founded the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain, Mr. Marcus helped to get Home Depot off the ground. And over on Madison Avenue, Mary Wells Lawrence reached an advertising pinnacle with her own agency, breaking a glass ceiling to get there.
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, otherwise known as the German measles; 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 — a leap of medical science for which they shared a Nobel Prize, though reluctantly: The two were bitter rivals. (Dr. Schally outlived Dr. Guillemin by just eight months.)
Now it’s left to other researchers to build on the achievements of these trailblazers, for their work is done, their stories are over. And it’s left to the rest of us to take stock of their significance by reading their obituaries, a ritual farewell in which we briefly revisit the times in which they lived and helped shape.
Elmore Nickleberry’s life afforded that kind of look back when he died in January. He was one of the last surviving sanitation men whose strike in Memphis in 1968 in pursuit of equal rights for Black workers drew the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to that city to support them — a city Dr. King would not leave alive.
Lou Conter, dead in April at 102, was the last known survivor of the battleship Arizona, which sank in Pearl Harbor, attacked by the Japanese, taking 1,177 sailors and Marines with it.
The death of Ángeles Flórez Peón in June evoked a conflict of which there are few, if any, living memories left. She was described as the last remaining militiawoman of the Spanish Civil War.
And in November, 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 A.I. successors, was mortal. He died at 74 in New Bern, N.C.
In the few minutes it took to read his story, we were taken back to 1989, in the early, screeching dial-up phase of this digital age, when email was a remarkable new thing. Then, with the obituary read and digested, it was back to the present. We turn the page. We move on.
The post In a Political Year, Some Deaths Spoke to the Struggles for Democracy appeared first on New York Times.
