NONE ‘LIKE US WHEN WE ARE GONE’
We look back at those who left us in 2015, including neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote those words weeks before his own death.
Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who fascinated readers with case histories that illustrated the brain’s mysteries, announced his own impending death of melanoma in a column in The New York Times.
The author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife
for a Hat said that as death neared, he saw his life “as from a great altitude” with a “clear focus and perspective.” He also saw this: “My generation is on the way out.”
“There will be no one like us when we are gone,” Sacks, 83, wrote in February. “But then there is no one like anyone else ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced.”
That conviction informs and inspires Passages, USA TODAY’s annual appreciation of celebrated people who died over the past year.
In retrospect, we can see their lives in clearer focus and perspective. And, as Sacks observed, they cannot be replaced.
Not Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed one of the most memorable characters in the annals of science fiction, Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.
Not Yogi Berra, a famous baseball player who became an even more famous American character.
Not B.B. King, the King of the Blues, who took his music from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the Royal Albert Hall, the Vatican and beyond. “People all over the world have problems,” King said. “And as long as people have problems, the blues will never die.”
Not Mario Cuomo, the New York governor whose defense of liberalism in the age of Ronald Reagan reached its zenith in his fiery speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention. Reagan, echoing Puritan father John Winthrop, had called contemporary America “a shining city on a hill.”
“A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House,” Cuomo said. “But there’s another part to the shining city. In this part of the city, there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it.”
Cuomo was 82 when he died, King 89, Berra 90, Nimoy 83. All were part of Sacks’ generation “on the way out.” All are irreplaceable.
Many of that generation were pioneers. Edward Brooke of Mas- sachusetts, 95, in 1966 became the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction — and the last until 1992.
Frank Gifford, 83, was a trailblazer of another sort. As much as any football player, he helped make his New York Giants the toast of New York, and the National Football League the new national pastime.
A running back out of Bakersfield and USC, Gifford was the NFL’s MVP in 1956 on a team that won the league championship. His easy personality and good looks made him the prototypical sports celebrity endorser and led to a broadcast career capped by play-by-play duties alongside Howard Cosell and Don Meredith on ABC’s Monday Night
Football.
Some were soiled by scandal, such as former House speaker Jim Wright, 92, who resigned in 1989 after two years amid an ethics controversy.
Others had an unfortunate final act. Fred Thompson, 73, was a key Watergate committee staffer in 1974, a prolific TV actor and a two-term U.S. senator from Tennessee. But he’ll also be remembered as an unsuccessful, and rather cranky, candidate for president in 2008.
Death wasn’t confined to Sacks’ generation. Many died too young. The loss of Vice President Biden’s son Beau at 46 of recurrent brain cancer was like a loss in the national family.
ESPN anchor Stuart Scott’s audience was well aware of his struggle with cancer, and inspired by his determination in the face of it.
Scott received a standing ovation when he accepted the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance at the 2014 ESPY Awards. “When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer,” Scott told the audience. “You beat cancer by how you live.” He died six months later, at 49. Other successful men died young, including Dave Goldberg, 47, CEO of Survey-Monkey and husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
One very rich man lived to be very old. Kirk Kerkorian, who made billions in Las Vegas and Hollywood deals, was 98.
We lost some great nicknames in 2015. Rodney “Hot Rod” Hundley, 80, was a shameless showboater on the basketball court at West Virginia University and at the microphone as an NBA broadcaster. Johnny “Yard Dog” Jones, 74, was a Chicago bluesman as persistent as his nickname suggested. After years on the small club circuit, he recorded his first album at 55.
If you believe in that sort of thing, you hope that Jayne Meadows, 95, was reunited with her husband Steve Allen, who died in 2000, and that Sarah Brady, 73, joined her husband Jim, the Rea- gan press secretary turned gun control advocate who predeceased her by one year.
Some passages took us back: Lesley Gore, 68, wailing, “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to” in the pre-Beatles year of 1963. Or Billy Joe Royal, 73, singing Down
in the Boondocks two years later. Some of those who passed on left behind famous words:
“Sock it to me!” — Comedian Judy Carne, 76, who starred on the 1960s comedy hit show, Laugh-In.
“Fo, fo, fo.” — Relentless rebounder Moses Malone, 60, who predicted his Philadelphia 76ers would win the 1984 NBA playoffs by sweeping three straight bestof-seven series. He was off by one game.
“Let’s play two!” — Chicago Cubs shortstop Ernie Banks, who so loved baseball that he wished every day was a doubleheader.
“It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.” — Guess who?
Some who passed on were contrasts, such as college basketball coaches Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian, who died four days apart in February. Smith was 83, Tarkanian 84.
Smith, at North Carolina for 36 years, was known for winning two NCAA championships; running a clean program with high graduation rates; and playing at Kansas under Phog Allen, who himself had played there for James Naismith, who invented the sport.
Tark worked the other side of the street. The three schools he coached — Long Beach State, UNLV and Fresno State — ended up facing NCAA sanctions for rules violations. But like Smith, he won both an NCAA crown and the respect of those who played for him.
Some lives ended suddenly and tragically.
John Nash, 86, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind, died in a car crash along with his wife, Alicia, in New Jersey. CBS TV newsman Bob Simon, 73, was killed a crash in New York City.
The civil rights movement lost many veterans, including Julian Bond, 75; Grace Lee Boggs, 100; and the Rev. Willie T. Barrow, 90, “the Little Warrior,” who marched at Selma and helped found what became the Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition.
Hard to believe that those passing on included Donna Douglas, 82, who played the gorgeous, guileless Elly Mae Clampet on
The Beverly Hillbillies, and Pat Woodell, 71, one of three teenage sisters on Petticoat Junction. They both live on in syndication.
Oliver Sacks’ last column for the Times focused on the Sabbath, in Scripture the last day of the week and the one of rest. He saw a connection to the end of life, “when one can feel that one’s work is done and one may, in good conscience, rest.”
Two weeks later, he went to his.
Death wasn’t confined to one generation. Many died too young. The loss of Vice President Biden’s son Beau was like a loss in the national family.