Lessons from the lives we lost: 28 remarkable stories from 2023

How do you reckon with the losses of a year?

Over the past 12 months, the world said goodbye to a groundbreaking naturalist and a swaggering prizefighter, a Hollywood surrealist and an R&B genius, a transformative faith leader and a self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness.

Each lived a life that was singular and complex, resisting tidy summary. Yet their stories offer universal lessons.

Some are big: grand-scale insights about decency, humanity and the possibility of reinvention. Others, more modest.

Consider the life of Ed Smylie, a NASA engineer who helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was crippled by an onboard explosion. His work on the mission offered a dramatic reminder of the power of duct tape, a household staple that Smylie used to help the crew cobble together an air filter. In doing so, the Mississippi native said he drew on wisdom passed down to every good “Southern boy”: “If it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape.”

Below are other lessons, big and small, from noteworthy people who died this year.

Robert Redford, 89

Actor, filmmaker and activist

For many viewers, Redford was Sundance - not the film institute but the outlaw. Starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he escaped a posse of lawmen by jumping off a cliff and into a river. (Never mind that his character can’t swim).

A few years after the film’s release, Redford made a very different leap, throwing himself into environmental causes even as critics told him to stick to movies. “I had to hear over and over again all through the ’70s, ‘Oh, what does he know, he’s an actor,’” he said.

Before long, he had become one of the environmental movement’s most prominent champions, advocating for wildlife and public lands in the West. Critics came around, even as movie fans continued to wonder: Did he really jump off that cliff in Butch Cassidy?

Nina Kuscsik, 86

Women’s running pioneer

In the late 1960s, when Kuscsik and other women began breaking barriers in the marathon, the running world tended to believe that women were just too frail to run 26.2 miles. Skeptics encouraged women to limit themselves to five miles or less, warning that their uterus might fall out if they attempted a longer race.

To Kuscsik, this was nonsense: one more hurdle in a running career that saw her become the first woman to officially win the Boston Marathon and to compete in the New York City Marathon. “Seeing how many women are running marathons today,” she said in a 2016 interview, “it just makes you realise you can change things.”

D’Angelo, 51

The R&B visionary released only three studio albums. Yet his records helped pioneer the neo-soul movement, brought him widespread acclaim and demonstrated that in art, at least, less is sometimes more.

David Lynch, 78

Hollywood’s most celebrated surrealist believed that ideas were like fish. “If you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas,” he said. “The real beautiful big ones swim kind of deep down there.”

Pope Francis, 88

The pontiff adopted an open, inclusive style, ditching the bulletproof lid on his popemobile and traveling in a modest Fiat - windows down - during his first U.S. visit. His message: “We need one another.”

Ozzy Osbourne, 76

His early years were far from promising. But it didn’t matter: After dropping out of school and doing time for burglary, Ozzy traded thieving for singing, transforming himself into the biggest name in heavy metal.

Jane Goodall, 91

Primatologist and wildlife defender

When Goodall started working with wild chimpanzees, she had no scientific training or college degree. What she did have was a mind that was “uncluttered and unbiased by theory,” as her mentor Louis Leakey put it.

Beginning in the early 1960s, she conducted field work in East Africa that revolutionised our understanding of animal behavior, and that contradicted assumptions about what it is to be human. “The longer I was there, the more like us I saw that they were,” she said of her chimpanzee subjects. “We’ve been so jolly arrogant to think we’re so special.”

Joseph McNeil, 83

Civil rights activist who helped spark the sit-in movement

He was only 17, a college freshman in Greensboro, North Carolina, when he and three friends sat down at a segregated downtown lunch counter in 1960, ordering coffee and doughnuts in defiance of a “Whites only” policy. “We weren’t thinking about making history,” McNeil said. He and his friends only wanted “to clear up a wrong.” But their protest inspired a wave of sit-ins across the South and revitalised the civil rights movement.

After years in which established faith leaders and community activists were at the forefront of the struggle, McNeil and his friends showed that students, too, could lead the way. The sit-ins taught him “the importance of service before self,” he told The Post. “I think of all those people,” he said, looking back on his friends and fellow activists. “They didn’t ask, ‘What is in it for me?’”

Sandra Grimes, 79

Counterintelligence analyst who tracked down a mole

For years, the CIA struggled to figure out why so many of its Soviet informants ended up dead. The culprit proved to be a mole, Aldrich Ames, whose treachery cost the lives of at least eight double agents. He was finally unmasked and arrested in 1994 with help from Grimes, a CIA counterintelligence analyst who put off retirement so that she could work on the investigation. Poring over spreadsheets, she identified suspicious bank deposits that suggested Ames was the traitor.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell what is going on here,” she recalled telling her boss. But it did take Sandra Grimes, whose meticulous digging enabled the agency to link Ames’s newfound wealth to his lunch meetings with a Russian official.

Boris Spassky, 88

Success can be a burden. Just ask Spassky, a chess grandmaster who was the world champion for three stress-filled years. Only after he lost his title, he said, did he feel he could breathe “freely.”

George Foreman, 76

The heavyweight boxer demonstrated the possibility of second and third acts, losing the “Rumble in the Jungle” to Muhammad Ali before experiencing a religious awakening, reclaiming his title and reinventing himself as an affable pitchman.

Roberta Flack, 88

Genre-blending singer and pianist

As a young girl in Arlington, Virginia, she practiced the piano every day, six hours a day. Music was her life; as she told it, she played even while she ate. This was even more difficult than expected: The piano didn’t smell good because her father had salvaged it from a junkyard.

But from those noxious beginnings, Flack became an unorthodox giant of popular music, a singer and pianist who applied her classical training to other genres, recording hits such as Killing Me Softly With His Song. Her approach to performing was emotionally honest, daringly so. “I want everybody to see me as I am,” she said. “Your voice cracks? Okay, darlin’, you go right on and keep giving it what you’ve got left, and the audience ignores it and goes right along with you. I’ve found out the way to get myself through to people is just to unzip myself and let everything hang out.”

Giorgio Armani, 91

Fashion designer

The devil, it’s said, is usually in the details. And so it’s often the filmmaker who storyboards every frame, the writer who labours over every comma, who gets praised as a master - hailed for work that’s flawless and impeccable. And yet there is also a beauty in faults, kinks and imperfections, as the designer known as Il Signor Armani knew well.

“When I began to design,” he said, “men all dressed in the same way. American industry called the shots, with its technicians scattered all over the world … all impeccably equal, equally impeccable. The Mao syndrome,” he continued. “You couldn’t tell them apart. They had no defects. But I liked defect.” In his hands, the suit jacket became slouchy, soft and lean. Worn by men and women alike, it somehow gave the effect of both elegance and ease. As fashion critic Rachel Tashjian put it, “Armani made stars on film look glamorously natural, as if they had just thrown on a blazer, left their shirt a bit wrinkled and went on to their sexy day.”

Brian Wilson, 82

When Pet Sounds was released in 1966, the Beach Boys record was considered a commercial disappointment. Time has shown it to be a classic, a kaleidoscopic work of art credited in large part to Wilson.

Louis Schittly, 86

Run toward the danger; go where the patients are. That was the approach of Schittly, who joined other physicians in founding the humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, in 1971.

Rob Reiner, 78

“The most important thing is that you be a good person,” he said, “and you live by the golden rule of do unto others. If you live by that, that’s all I care about.”

Jim Lovell, 97

Astronaut who commanded Apollo 13

When he ended up on the big screen, played by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13, his signature words were slightly misquoted. That was hardly a problem for Lovell, the calm, quick-thinking astronaut whose understated message to Mission Control - “Houston, we’ve had a problem” - announced that Apollo 13 was in peril. An oxygen tank had exploded on board, forcing him and his crew to endure four harrowing days in space using the mission’s lunar lander as a lifeboat. The crew returned safely, landing in the South Pacific, thanks in part to Lovell’s skills as a pilot.

He was just grateful to be alive.

“We do not realise what we have on Earth,” he said, “until we leave it.”