The notable obituaries of 2023

TWO FIGURES of great global significance died in the last week of 2022; the world went into 2023 remembering them. One was Benedict XVI, the first pope to step down simply because he was weary; the second was Pelé, for many people the finest footballer of his generation, who wanted to retire when he was 34 because he felt he was past his best.

Early retirements made one link between the two men. The second was their unwavering vision of what they would do in life. Pelé was built to be a forward, short, strong and fast, with thighs as thick as his waist, and able to shoot with either foot; as a child he had played with anything round, from a mango to a bundle of rags. He won the World Cup for Brazil in 1958 with a sensational goal at the age of 17, and helped win it for Brazil again with an unstoppable header in 1970.

Benedict’s route from childhood was one of piety, study and, perhaps from his experience under Nazism, instinctive obedience. His life was the seminary, the professoriat and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Catholicism’s rule-enforcing body, which he ran like a Rottweiler. His conservatism made him papabile, yet as pope he showed a surprisingly sweet and joyful side; his encyclicals were less about doctrine, than about love.

The year was marked by the deaths of two hugely controversial politicians. Henry Kissinger was America’s most influential secretary of state and national security adviser since the second world war. Under him every important relationship, from the Soviet Union to China to the Middle East, was transformed by his incessant back-channel, often devious, diplomacy. In South-East Asia he prosecuted ruthless wars in pursuit of America’s national interests. And yet he remained an outsider, a German-Jewish refugee from the Holocaust who never quite fitted into his adopted country. Silvio Berlusconi, by contrast, fitted in all too well with a pattern of grubby-but-stylish populism in Italian politics. He was the country’s longest-serving prime minister and one of its richest men, constantly dogged by scandal (sexual, business and otherwise) but always bouncing back smiling, convinced that Italians adored him.

No such certainty marked four acclaimed entertainers who died this year. All of them struggled mightily to forge an independent identity. Tina Turner, a dazzlingly sexy singer and dancer, took 16 years to summon the courage to break up with Ike, the partner/manager who spoiled her and beat her; when at last she left him, she had nothing but 36 cents and a Mobil credit card. That was in 1976; it took her eight years, with the album “Private Dancer”, to make the big time on her own. Matthew Perry, an actor who starred in the sitcom “Friends”, never wanted to be remembered for his best-known role—though he did want to be remembered. He struggled to be alone, and the alcohol and drugs which he battled with also comforted him.

Sinéad O’Connor, a passionate and provocative Irish singer, sometimes wanted to be a girl and sometimes a boy, forcing a barber to shave off all her hair. She was sometimes Mother Bernadette Mary, though she loathed the Catholic church enough to tear up the pope’s picture on American TV, and sometimes Shuhada’ Sadaqat, in full hijab, chain-smoking Mayfair cigarettes. She was a peerless interpreter of sentimental Irish songs who hated Ireland, and an abused child who bitterly missed her abuser, her own mother. She died without deciding who she was. All that united her cast of troubled characters was the pure soaring beauty of her voice.

The most extraordinary case of warring identities came, however, in April, with the deaths of Barry Humphries, an Australian intellectual, and the florid, fantastic, gladioli-throwing star he created and strove to manage, Dame Edna Everage. She, a mere Melbourne housewife, with her fluting strine and flyaway sunglasses, had audiences eating from the palm of her hand. He, though, a bookworm and lover of classical music, failed to become a respected actor. Increasingly, manager and star insulted each other, until Fate mercifully took them on the same day.

Rather than laughter, though, 2023 was a year of war. The most famous casualty of Ukraine’s war was Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner group of Russian mercenaries, killed in a suspicious air crash in August. Rather than memorialise a man who fed so many through the “meat grinder” of the southern front, it seemed better to mark the deaths of Ukrainians. One was Andriy Pilshchykov, a Ukrainian pilot who lobbied ceaselessly for American F-16 fighter jets. We also published an obituary of the city of Bakhmut, two-thirds destroyed and with all but 5,000 of the people fled, which Ukraine insisted on holding and Russia insisted on taking: a senseless battle over ruins.

In the Middle East, the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza was sudden and catastrophic. Among so many deaths, two were especially moving: Ofir Libstein, mayor of one of the destroyed kibbutzim on the Israeli border, and Rushdi Sarraj, a photographer and film-maker (pictured) in Gaza. Both men were intrepid optimists: Ofir, that Israelis and Arabs could share in the growing prosperity he was bringing to his kibbutz, and Rushdi that Gaza’s birds, beaches, food and cheerful, indomitable people would bring in tourists. Both, in their different ways, celebrated natural beauty—but that was before Hamas’s bullets cracked, and Israel’s bombs fell.

Natural beauty was also the reason for The Economist’s first obituary of a tree, a sycamore around 300 years old that grew, with singular and special elegance, in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, north-east England. This was not quite a sacred tree, but it was one people visited to meditate and remember loved ones, as well as to picnic and party. The community and region, indeed the whole of Britain, were hurt when, one night, a still-unknown malefactor felled it with a chainsaw. But their next thought was more positive: to replant, coppice, transform the wood into art; find new beauty, and new incarnations.