The year in obituaries

EACH week, our obituaries editor captures the essence of a life in fewer than 1,000 words. As the year draws to a close, she lists the ten deaths that sum up the events of 2015. They include giants of geopolitics, literature, and science, as well as ordinary people. Click the title or the picture for the complete obituary.

Mightier than the sword
Stéphane Charbonnier (“Charb”), cartoonist and editor of Charlie Hebdo, was murdered on January 7th, aged 47

“Where's Charb? Where’s Charb?” cried the assassins as they hurtled into the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Where else should he be? At the big circular table, plotting with his fellow scribblers to draw something shocking, gross and salacious. The Virgin Mary giving birth in stirrups. The pope fondling a Swiss guard. The anarchist dog Maurice sodomising a chair or crapping in the foodbowl of Patapon, the fascist cat. Marcel Keuf le flic, goofy and drunk again, punching an innocent civilian in the police station. Muhammad showing his hairy naked bum…

Synthesising revolution

Carl Djerassi, the chemist behind the Pill, died on January 30th, aged 91

Of all the things that irritated him, and a good many did, Carl Djerassi most disliked being called “the father” of the contraceptive pill. True, he had been there at its conception, on October 15th 1951, in a laboratory in Mexico: a short, eager figure with a lame leg, aged 27. But, if anything, he had been the mother, producing—by nifty replacement of a carbon atom with a hydrogen one—the synthetic progesterone that, for the first time, made a pill that was easily taken orally. This was the basic substance, the “egg”, that was then adopted by Gregory Pincus and steered through human trials by John Rock. Both men were jubilant when the Pill was approved in 1960: at last, women could control their own fertility.

The ruler who never was
Boris Nemtsov, leader of Russia’s reformers, was shot dead on February 27th, aged 55

He could have been president of Russia. So Boris Nemtsov’s supporters thought, and so Boris Yeltsin hoped when he groomed him as his successor. But that would need to have been the sort of Russia Mr Nemtsov dreamed of: free, enterprising, hard-working, proud, slightly disorganised, and open to the world. In such a country, he would have fitted right in.

Of gods and men
Sir Terry Pratchett, creator of the Discworld universe, died on March 12th, aged 66

When he was knighted in 2009, Terry Pratchett made a sword. It was the natural accoutrement for a man who, without one, resembled an amiable wizard kitted out by a Houston department store. With a little help from friends, he dug 80 kilos of iron ore from a convenient field and built a kiln in the back garden. Together the team forged a sword that might have bisected a snowflake, had one drifted past. It also had a hidden ingredient. Mixed in with the smelt were bits of meteorite, the stuff of thunderbolts. By this Sir Terry put himself on a par with Blind Io, chief of his Discworld gods.

The beat of the drum
Günter Grass, novelist, artist and all-round agitator, died on April 13th, aged 87

When he was young, Günter Grass was taken by his mother to see “Tom Thumb” at the Stadttheater in Danzig. It delighted him. The Grimm Brothers’ tiny boy, unseen, tricked and adventured his way through life, a gadfly getting into places nobody else could. He crept into a horse’s ear, rode in triumph on the brim of a hat, was eaten by a cow, and in the end reappeared grinning from the belly of a wolf. Tom also lodged in Mr Grass’s brain; and in 1959 he reappeared as Oskar Matzerath, the diminutive hero of his first and most celebrated novel, “The Tin Drum”.

In the land of the blind

Mullah Muhammad Omar, founder of the Taliban, is now known to have died on April 23rd 2013, aged about 60

This picture is the only one of Mullah Omar that is confirmed as genuine. It was taken in 1993, the year before he founded the Taliban, when he was merely a fighter against the Soviet occupation of his country. He needed it as evidence that he had lost his right eye to enemy shrapnel, so that he could claim compensation. He never knowingly faced the camera again, since it was contrary to Islamic law. The flyers dropped by American planes over Kandahar later, offering $10m for information about him, showed a photograph; it was not him. Portraits appeared of a man among yellow chrysanthemums, turning his right eye away. It was not him. Even when, as leader of the Taliban, he became emir of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, he so seldom left his house in Kandahar that most of his followers had no idea what he looked like.

Travels through a mindscape
Oliver Sacks, neurologist, died on August 30th, aged 82

When Oliver Sacks was asked his profession, he often replied “Explorer”. He did not mean this in the geographical sense. As a boy he had devoured Prescott’s books on the conquests of Mexico and Peru; as a young man he had travelled by foot, train and motorbike the length and breadth of North America. But what became an obsession with him was to climb inside the brains of his patients.

It ain’t over til it’s over
Lawrence Peter (“Yogi”) Berra, champion baseball player and unwitting philosopher, died on September 22nd, aged 90

If he hadn’t been good at baseball, Yogi Berra might still have been working in the shoe factory in St Louis. Or Ruggeri’s restaurant. Or that menswear store. He might have been president, except that he couldn’t be president, owing mostly to his way of breaking up the English a little bit, and hating to make a speech. He wouldn’t have been doing too good, because he didn’t like school, except for recess, and he didn’t like to work. His father kept telling him, “Bring that pay-cheque home!”, when all he wanted was to play ball.

A fighting life
Lord Healey, a giant of the Labour Party, died on October 3rd, aged 98

Wherever he went, Denis Healey took photographs. From a Brownie box camera, which ignited the boyhood passion, he soared up to an Olympus, snapping all the way. More than 42,000 photographs and slides eventually filled his house in Sussex. At summits, banquets and college dinners what other guests saw of him was mostly a toothy grin beneath a large flashing lens, and over it those extraordinary eyebrows, God’s gift to cartoonists, twitching up and down.

The bureaucrat’s secret
Cédric Mauduit, management consultant and civil servant, was one of 129 people killed in the Paris attacks on November 13th. He was 41

Among the audience in the Bataclan on November 13th—with Chileans, Romanians, Tunisians, young people from all over—he was on the old side. But when he and his 40-something friends went to such gigs, they forgot their age and the relentless office round. He was there with four mates, one of whom, David Perchirin, had shared his digs in Rennes. He was a Gaullist, Mr Perchirin an anarchist; so what? Together they whooped and waved as the Eagles of Death Metal opened their set. And there it ended, for both of them.