One, after all, was a celebrity chef and grizzled culinary adventurer who hosted a TV show watched around the world, possibly even in some of those “parts unknown” to which he took us. The other was not just a designer of handbags, accessories and other desirables but also a woman of 55 whose very trademark of a name was a status symbol for women of means.
Add to that the nature of their deaths — suicide by hanging, the authorities said — and widespread interest could only be compounded.
It was also to be expected that the deaths of such era-defining figures as President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush, Sen. John McCain, Aretha Franklin, Philip Roth and Stephen Hawking would inspire hundreds of thousands or more to pause, reflect and turn to the obituaries.
But few would have expected, it seems fair to say, that the death of an extravagantly tattooed 32-year-old fashion model and sometime actor floating somewhere outside the cultural mainstream under the name Zombie Boy would draw more readers to the New York Times website than that of almost any other person in 2018. And yet it did. Only the obituaries of Spade, Bourdain, McCain and one other person attracted more readers than that of Zombie Boy, whose real name was Rick Genest.
And that other person — that is to say, his death — elicited the most unexpected response of all. He was Tyrone Gayle, a 30-year-old press secretary to Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. When he died of colon cancer in October, the Times obituary generated a readership that was astonishing: in digital parlance, almost 2.3 million page views (as of a week or so ago).
What accounted for the tide of interest in Gayle’s obituary is open to speculation. His youth and the promise of a rich life and career were undoubtedly factors; with his cancer in remission, he had gotten married in May. Perhaps race had something to do with it: He was a rising African-American operative in the heavily white world of national politics.
There was no shortage of notable lives to remember in 2018. Billy Graham’s was one. Few religious leaders had more impact on the 20th century than Graham, a Christian televangelist whose flock ringed the globe.
Months later the body of McCain, recalled as a war hero, presidential candidate and patriot, lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Besides him, only Bush, a former congressman, was given that honor this year. But many others who had gone to Washington were also remembered in death. One was Paul Laxalt, a Republican stalwart from Nevada and a confidant of Ronald Reagan.
Laxalt died on the same day — Aug. 6 — as did another figure of the Reagan years, Margaret Heckler, a moderate Republican who championed women’s rights in the House and became the administration’s Health and Human Services secretary. (Their obituaries, appearing on the same day, had both been written in advance by a former reporter for The Times, Adam Clymer, who died a little more than a month later.)
The Senate also bade farewell to Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, a champion of neglected Asian-American war veterans; John Melcher, D-Mont., a former veterinarian and reliable centrist who made preserving his state’s wilderness and keeping bread on its farmers’ tables his priorities; and Zell Miller of Georgia, a former governor and conservative Democrat who was most widely recalled for his fiery keynote speech at the 2004 national convention — the Republican one, that is.
Still another Democrat was Ron Dellums, a Californian who brought a left-wing, anti-war agenda to the House in 1971 and, over 27 years there, rose to chairman of the Armed Services Committee and leader of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Old soldiers in the civil rights struggle were also buried. Wyatt Tee Walker and Dorothy Cotton were both in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s inner circle in the darkest days of that campaign (and both died at 88). Linda Brown’s very name was immortalized in the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. Lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree overcame discrimination in her own life to stand and argue for justice for African-Americans and women in a series of courtroom triumphs. And Rosanell Eaton carried the voting rights banner into the 21st century and up the marble stairs of the Supreme Court as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that compelled North Carolina to scrap a law whose purpose, it was plain to see, was to keep black people from voting.
Among the filmmakers who died this year were the Czech-born Milos Forman, who gave us an Oscar-winning translation of Ken Kesey’s novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”; Bernardo Bertolucci of Italy, who scandalized swaths of the moviegoing world with his “Last Tango in Paris”; and Penny Marshall, who attracted millions of fans as a sitcom’s Laverne before becoming, with “Big,” the first woman to direct a film earning $100 million at the box office (not to mention plaudits from the critics).
Hollywood, television division, lost writer and producer Steven Bochco, who gave us his well-drawn crime dramas “Hill St. Blues” “L.A. Law” and “NYPD Blue.” On the other side of the camera, there were farewells to Margot Kidder, forever a saucy Lois Lane, whose death in May was declared in August to have been a suicide; and Burt Reynolds, whose good looks almost hid his comic streak (but didn’t).
Broadway dimmed its lights for Neil Simon, who once practically owned the place. The stage was also barer without Nanette Fabray, whose acting, singing and comedy blossomed the year bombs fell on Pearl Harbor; and playwright Ntozake Shange, who as a black woman in a mostly white male preserve became a barrier-breaker with a series of feminist monologues that formed a hit under the title “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.”
And on a different stage, Hubert de Givenchy, whose platform was the fashion runway, left an immeasurable void.
Giants of a kind fell throughout the year: In the realm of letters, there were Tom Wolfe, who threw down the “new journalism” gauntlet before taking up the novel; and Ursula K. Le Guin, who demonstrated that science fiction and fantasy could be both popular and literary.
In another popular genre, comic books, Stan Lee left behind a cast of 20th-century superheroes who would all but overwhelm 21st-century popular culture.
Few deaths if any in 2018 were bigger news than that of Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul”; for a time the media coverage seemed round-the-clock.
The music world lost other luminaries as well, among them Cecil Taylor, one of the most original jazz musicians of his era; Marty Balin, a ‘60s rock star with Jefferson Airplane; Jerry Gonzalez, a herald of Latin jazz; Charles Aznavour, the French singer with a global following; and a clutch of rappers, among them XXXTentacion, murdered at 20, and Mac Miller, who juggled fame and substance abuse, dead at 26.
Baseball fans across the board said goodbye to Willie McCovey, whose loss was felt most keenly in his beloved San Francisco. Green Bay mourned the loss of running back Jim Taylor, a Vince Lombardi guy, who helped power-sweep the Packers to one championship after another in the 1960s.
If the digital world seemed to be growing exponentially, it paused long enough to remember Paul Allen, who as much as anyone ushered in the personal computer era as a co-founder of Microsoft.
No fewer than 12 Nobel laureates in the sciences died this year. Their names were not widely known, but that of another scientist, Stephen Hawking, was. He became a popular culture phenomenon — as a best-selling author, documentary-series host, subject of an Oscar-winning movie and even occasional TV guest star — all as he “roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity,” as Dennis Overbye wrote in The Times.
Hilary Lister, for one, understood that. She became the first quadriplegic person to sail alone across the English Channel and the first disabled woman to circumnavigate Britain solo. Otherwise immobilized, she did all that with straws. Sipping on them or puffing into them, she could signal her commands to her trusty mates, a collection of electronic mechanisms that controlled her boat. She died at 46.
She left us with some advice.
“Live every second of every day to its maximum potential,” she said. “Always look ahead, always assume you will live forever.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.