Death transformed a year, and what may lie ahead

Death has rarely so shaped a year as it did in 2020. It swept the world riding the back of the coronavirus. It galvanised a Black Lives Matter movement across the United States and abroad, sending people of all colors into the streets to demand social justice. It altered the ideological makeup of the US Supreme Court so decisively that the consequences of that shift will assuredly be felt for decades.

Almost one year in, the pandemic races on like the unstoppable wildfires that blackened the West, and it’s far from done with us, we know, even as vaccines have arrived to defeat it.

Some segments of the population suffered more than others, but the virus felled people from all walks of life, some of them famous: former presidential candidate and pizza chain magnate Herman Cain, playwright Terrence McNally, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

George Floyd’s death, by contrast, was seen as symptomatic of a societal sickness. There were other Black Americans killed by police officers in 2020 — Rayshard Brooks Jr., Mike Ramos and Breonna Taylor among them — and their names became rallying cries in their own right. But more than any other, Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police in May became a tipping point in the long struggle for racial equality.

Another death in 2020 with historical implications was that of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Coming in September in the heat of a presidential election campaign, it mobilized Republicans to fill her seat as quickly as possible with her jurisprudential polar opposite, a rock-solid conservative.

Ginsburg’s death, for all the sorrow it brought, did not come as a complete shock. But Kobe Bryant’s death did shock, the former basketball superstar perishing alongside his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven others in a helicopter crash north of Los Angeles in January.

Bryant became the first in a parade of sports idols who passed from the scene this year. Within a span of six weeks, Major League Baseball lost Tom Seaver (another COVID casualty), Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Whitey Ford and Joe Morgan. The Green Bay Packers lost four stalwarts from the team’s glory years: Willie Davis, Willie Wood, Herb Adderley and Paul Hornung, Hall of Famers all. Gale Sayers, one of the NFL’s greatest running backs, left Chicago bereft. And Mickey Wright, whom some called the greatest women’s golfer, died at 85.

Don Shula, died in May still holding the NFL record for total victories, 347. And this month gold-medal Olympian Rafer Johnson was gone, his death coming just a few weeks after that of Diego Maradona, by all measures one of the greatest players in soccer history.

Causes Worth Fighting For

The competitive sport of politics suffered the loss of John Lewis, who, bloodied but unbowed on a bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, took the fight for civil rights to Congress and never let up.

Lewis was accompanied in death this year by two of his brothers in arms in the civil rights struggle. In the case of the Rev. C.T. Vivian, death came on the very same day it arrived for Lewis, July 17. The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery preceded them in March.

Across the ocean was Betty Williams, who had taken to the streets and the halls of power to stop the violence in Northern Ireland, earning a share of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the U.S., the Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris, the first woman to be ordained a bishop in the Episcopal Church of the United States, sought to push open the doors to the church hierarchy even wider, to let in more women as well as Black people (like her) and gay people. Debra White Plume spent a lifetime fighting the power — be it government, corporate or police — pressing for the rights of Native Americans.

Quieter but altogether significant figures of government also left the stage: David Dinkins, the courtly career politician who broke a race barrier when he was elected mayor of New York, a belated recognition that his city’s complexion had long been multihued; Paul O’Neill, the former Alcoa CEO who became George W. Bush’s treasury secretary, only to be cashiered within two years after showing, it was said, too independent a mind about the economy and insufficient loyalty to the president; and Brent Scowcroft, whose privately imparted views were often mouthed, and turned into foreign policy, by the Republican presidents he advised.

Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith was the last of the Kennedy siblings to pass on. Annie Glenn and Rene Carpenter, the wives of astronauts (but more than that), evoked NASA’s glory years, the 1960s. So did Chuck Yeager, the sound-barrier-breaking test pilot. And so did space agency mathematician Katherine Johnson, who was belatedly celebrated in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures.”

Their deaths did not necessarily signal the end of one era or another, but Kirk Douglas, dead at 103, and Olivia de Havilland, at 104, were certainly among the very last vestiges of that proverbial golden Hollywood era that spanned the 20th century’s middle decades.

It gave way, we remember, to the filmic disruptions of the ’60s, in one case to the over-the-top Cold War likes of Bond, James Bond, as originally embodied by the dashing, suave and seemingly perpetually amused Sean Connery, who died in his sleep in the Bahamas on Oct. 31.

What Survives

Connery joined a long list of actors, ranging across the eras, whose embedded stars in a Hollywood sidewalk now constitute memorials: Rhonda Fleming, Ian Holm, Max von Sydow, Brian Dennehy, dancer-actor Marge Champion.

Chadwick Boseman's life was cut short at 43 — another blow that only his intimates saw coming. He had worked right up until the end, presumably through the pain of cancer, and showed us what the future might have held when he offered a couple of blazing last performances in “Da 5 Bloods” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”.

Old TV shows and old movies are continually resuscitated, and never more so than now. So it is that screen stars, too, are assured of an electronic afterlife. Farewell, Jerry Stiller, Carl Reiner, Regis Philbin, Diana Rigg, Alex Trebek and Honor Blackman, we’ll see you again.

Even the transitory art of theater has found means to freeze performances in time on film and videotape, letting us watch a master like multiple Tony winner Zoe Caldwell at work in “Master Class,” or revisit unsparing scenes from “The Normal Heart,” the autobiographical play by Larry Kramer that charted and channeled his fervent AIDS activism.

Little Richard is gone, but not his indelible primal rock ’n’ roll. Bill Withers, Betty Wright, Kenny Rogers, Helen Reddy, Trini Lopez, John Prine and Charley Pride (the last two still more casualties of COVID) will continue to sing to us. We’ll continue to marvel at Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing, McCoy Tyner’s melodic jazz piano, percussionist Ray Mantilla’s inventive versatility, Julian Bream’s sublimely updated classical guitar and soprano Mirella Freni’s rapturous embrace of Italian opera.

John le Carré left us a pile of spy novels that rose to literature. Some say Roger Kahn’s sportsbooks and Jan Morris’ travel writing did the same. A journalist’s work, by its nature, rarely has a long shelf life, but Gail Sheehy’s “Passages” has already upended that truism.

Business empires, for all their riches and reach, may not last forever, although one doesn’t see Sumner Redstone’s media colossus or Stanley Ho’s casino kingdom crumbling any time soon. Nor will Pierre Cardin’s fashion juggernaut be closing up shop following his death.

For certainty we turn to scientists, even if they can’t always provide it. We turned to Margaret Burbidge to answer questions about the stars; to Freeman Dyson to elucidate something even smaller than an atom; to neuropathologist Mary Fowkes to help us understand the coronavirus plague through the autopsies she performed; and to Takuo Aoyagi to give us something that will tell us when our health is in danger. He did so by inventing the modern pulse oximeter, which became a critical tool in the fight against the coronavirus.

And if 2020 taught us anything, it was about the universal will to survive in the constant face of one irrefutable certainty: our impermanence. That has always been the human condition, of course, but seldom has there been a year when staying alive felt more urgent.

©2020 The New York Times Company