Hank was gone. Stephen Sondheim, Bob Dole, Larry King, and Joan Didion were also present. Prince Philip was laid to rest with all the royal trappings one would expect. In a year that saw the deaths of a host of figures who helped shape our era in decades past, Colin Powell was the only one who spoke more to the still-perilous present moment.
His death came against the backdrop of a global Pandemic in its second year, but also as another casualty of it. His case spoke to the fact that the world has been ravaged by a mutating virus. He had been shot and was under the best of care at Walter Reed, but his immune system was compromised by multiple myeloma and he died.
The image is.
Credit...Kenneth Lambert.
The death toll in the country that General Powell has served in has more than doubled to over one million, and four million worldwide. He was the most prominent victim of Covid-19, but there were other victims as well.
The first member of the House of Representatives to die of the virus was Ron Wright. Donald Cozzens, a former priest who challenged the Catholic Church on its protection of child-molesting clerics, was one of the Covid victims. He died of lung cancer in February.
The obituary pages contained a lot of people who died of more conventional but not less grievous maladies. They died in the midst of the Pandemic, never to see its end, and they had at least one thing in common.
The Senate's former majority leader and former boxer, HarryReid, and the Michigan Democrat, CarlLevin, were paid respects back on Capitol Hill.
The image is.
Harry was the Senate majority leader. He was a fierce legislative pugilist and tactician.
In 1996, Senator Dole became the last of his war generation to win a major party's presidential nomination, and his passing at 98 was another reminder that his former brothers and sisters in arms are a dwindling cohort. The former commanding officers of those who fought at the Battle of the Bulge and Iwo Jima have mostly died, as the youngest of those who fought at the Battle of the Bulge have now entered their 90s. Dave Severance was one of the company leaders who held on until this year. The Marine unit that raised the American flag over Iwo Jima was led by him. He died at the age of 102.
The world has lost a lot of people in the political arena. The other was F.W. de Klerk, the South African president who tore down the barriers ofapartheid erected by his Afrikaner predecessors, a white power structure that collapsed in no small part because a fellow Nobel Peace Prize honoree, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had banged at it from the One of the nemeses of apartheid, Kenneth Kaunda, a founding father of African independence and the first president of a liberated Zambia, died at 97, having dominated his country for 27 years that some supporters had viewed him as a minor deity.
The image is.
The inauguration of the president of South Korea in 1988. He oversaw his country's transition from dictatorship to democracy.
In October, a former general who oversaw with a stern eye, the country of South Korea, died.
Carlos Sal Menem, the charismatic leader of Argentina who was the beneficiary of the first peaceful transfer of power there from one party to another since 1916, died at the age of 90.
In the Middle East, there was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who tried to resist the rise of religious radicalism as the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The work of Dr. Khan showed that his country had obtained weapons of mass destruction. But had Saddam Hussein been in Iraq? Donald Rumsfeld said yes, an assertion echoed by his colleague General Powell. Time would prove that Mr. Rumsfeld and others in the administration were wrong when they said the United States would enter another war after Afghanistan.
Some people who died this year had fought on different fronts. The civil rights movement gained steam because of the bus boycotts that were started by Martha White and Lucille Times in the Deep South in the 1950s. Taylor Branch said that he was the equivalent of Martin Luther King in Mississippi because of his brutality and jail time.
Margaret York was the highest-ranking woman in the Los Angeles Police Department, and she inspired a feminist version of a buddy cop show.
The image is.
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard was a person. She led the resistance to the black snake in North Dakota.
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard lived up to her name by setting up a resistance camp in North Dakota to block the black snake, an underground pipeline that she claimed was too close to sacred Native American burial grounds. The camp became the catalyst for a global protest movement that embraced issues of tribal sovereignty, environmental justice and more.
The first openly lesbian delegate to a national political convention in the United States was Madeline Davis, who spoke before Democrats in Miami Beach in 1972 to argue for an anti-discrimination plank in the party's platform. She told the delegates that she was a woman and a lesbian, and that she was a minority of minorities. We are going to the convention floor from our closets.
Equal rights to athletic arenas were called for by some. Lee Evans, the gold-medal sprinter, raised a black fist in Mexico City to protest racism in 1968. Lee Elder was the first black golfer to compete in the Masters in 1975, and he did so in the face of death threats.
Joan Ullyot, a competitive runner herself, became a powerful voice for women who wanted to compete in marathons, producing research that proved that women were not built for it and pressing the International Olympic Committee to include a women's marathon in the Games. The first was in 1984.
The coaching ranks took a heavy toll. The N.F.L. lost, among others, John Madden, who won a decade with the Oakland Raiders and was the most colorful of TV color commentators. College football lost Bobby Bowden, the architect of a powerhouse at Florida State; college basketball lost John Chaney, who led Temple to 17 N.C.A.A. tournaments.
The image is.
John Madden was in 2006 His Hall of Fame career coaching the Oakland Raiders was a start to a sensational run as a color commentator and video-game king.
Tommy Lasorda bled blue because he liked to say, "If baseball managers in the dugout can be lumped with head coaches on the sidelines, then a final tip of the cap must be paid to him."
The death of Henry Aaron generated a lot of headlines, with tales of his home run heroics and the racial animus they aroused among those who couldn't understand why a Black man would beat Babe Ruth. The ferocious Sam Huff of the football Giants, the acrobatic forward Elgin Baylor of the Lakers, and the lightning-quick Rod Gilbert of the hockey team all fell. The brothers Bobby, 87, and Al Unser, 82, were born into the sport of auto racing in the same decade and died seven months apart in the same year.
Performers of a different mold had left their mark on stages and screens, but we mourned their passing the same as if we knew them. It's not possible to count on Christopher Plummer being General Chang in "Star Trek VI" or King Lear in "The Sound of Music", but he has played many other characters over the course of his seven decades as an actor.
The image is.
Tyson in 1973. She is remembered as the unconquerable wife of an imprisoned Louisiana sharecropper in "Sounder" and the title character in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman." Dennis Oulds/Central Press
The title character in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" was the epitome of two characters: Rebecca, the unconquerable wife of an imprisoned Louisiana sharecropper in "Sounder", and the epitome of the civil rights era.
Rose, Cher's sardonically wise mother in "Moonstruck", Helen, the blue-blooded witch in "Harry Potter", and Cloris, the flighty landlady of Mary Richards, will all be remembered.
Larry King hosted talk shows on radio and TV for a long time, but he never played anyone but himself. Stand-ups perform as themselves, or at least very funny versions of themselves. Norm Macdonald was an exception, as comfortable alone on a stage as he was in a SNL sketch or his own sitcom.
The image is.
Mark Rucker/ Transcendental Graphics, Jens Schwarz/laif, and Fred R. Conrad/ The New York Times are all pictured.
This year, many people died, including Hank Aaron, Colin Powell, Stephen Sondheim, Beverly Cleary, DMX, Larry King, and many others.
The proscenium stage knew that Stephen Sondheim would be gone in 2021, but he could still bask in the applause of a grateful theater world because of his music and lyrics.
The image is.
Stephen Sondheim was in 1990. His music and lyrics enriched the theater world.
There were farewells to the magnetic Jacques d'Amboise, who may have done as much as anyone to popularize ballet in America, and the daring ballerinaPatricia Wilde, who were both eternally linked.
James Levine, the maestro of the Metropolitan Opera whose brilliant career was darkened in the end by a sex scandal, and two of opera's most illustrious singers, died in the same year.
The drummer of the Rolling Stones, Charlie Watts, died at the age of 80. Mary Wilson was the second person to do so. Michael Nesmith left one of the four remaining members of the group. The Everly Brothers will not survive after the death of Don Everly seven years later than Phil Everly.
The image is.
The drummer is Charlie Watts. He was the second member of the Rolling Stones to die.
The lyrics of the rapper Earl Simmons were fresh in memory. The mean streets of his hometown of Yonkers had made him a No. 1 album artist and he was about to perform on stage. He was 50 years old.
A jazz pianist named Chick Corea found a new audience by playing his music with rock music. Johnny Pacheco, the flutist who died this year, spread salsa far and wide as its unofficial ambassador.
If Mr. Pacheco was going to expand the genre, Larry McMurtry was going to subvert the western by scrapping the cowboy and outlaw mythology of dime-store novels in favor of unvarnished stories like "Lonesome Dove."
The Gothic horror tale was revivified by Anne Rice with stories of vampire slayers. Beverly Cleary was a virtual children's-book cottage industry as she found unlikely drama and mystery in middle-class America. Joan Didion was the most thorough and thorough observer of American life, and the journalism of Janet Malcolm gave her a run for her money, even questioning the very ethics of journalism itself.
The image is.
Janet Malcolm was in 1981. Her journalism questioned the ethics of journalism itself and examined American life.
The obituary columns were always set against the bigger story of the day, even though the world said goodbye to them all. For the second year in a row, we noted the passing of a famous person, from cancer or heart attack or the infirmities of old age, in the midst of a plague.
Despite the skeptics and the deniers, we turned to the scientists, knowing that they are the ones who must give us the weapons to get out of this. The pioneers who helped uncover the secrets of the universe in the year 2021, include the winners of the Nobel Prize.
The image is.
E.O. Wilson found clues to human nature in his explorations.
Those who spent time in the labs had more practical goals. Helen Murray Free was one of the people who helped develop a paper strip that could be dipped in urine to detect diabetes. Millions have been helped.
The first saliva test for the coronaviruses was developed by AndrewBrooks, a Rutgers researcher, after getting emergency approval from the federal government. Testing protocols were revised once the airborne nature of the virus was fully understood. At the time, the governor of New Jersey said that Dr.Brooks' contribution to the cause was "undoubtedly saved lives."
The Dr. Frees and the Dr.Brookses have responded with alacrity with vaccines and treatments. The plea to them remains the same, urgent but hopeful: Please, do more.
The obituaries editor is William McDonald.
