Our obituaries editor selects 12 farewells from the past year

A definite delicious fragrance hangs o'er the obituaries of the yesteryear yr. It is that of Zabar’s Special Blend, personally selected by Saul Zabar, co-founder of the best delicatessen in New York. His shop at 80th and Broadway was and is a piled-high cornucopia of the most delicious Jewish food imaginable. Forget the 800 different types of cheese and the overtopping bins of green olives; on my visits I was after the chocolate babka or, especially, the nova salmon. Mr Zabar searched this out every Wednesday in the smokehouses of Brooklyn and Queens, in the cold stores of various fishmarkets, sampling the succulent smoked flesh with a bent-out paper-clip. He was every bit as exacting about coffee which, he insisted, should be like a symphony with no one instrument playing too loud. None did.

The substance boiling on a hotplate in Patrick McGovern’s laboratory also had the look of coffee, but not so. In fact it was a methanol and chloroform solvent mixed with ceramic powder scraped from the bottom of a vessel many thousands of years old. The process was meant to release from the powder any organic compounds—barley, honey, herbs—that might give a clue to what had been in the vessel before. For Mr McGovern’s purpose was to study the history of alcohol, reconstructing the tipples of ancient Egypt, Neolithic times and the Anatolia of King Midas. Once brewed up, he served them at feasts, and even on the open market.

Tom Lehrer liked to provoke merriment in even more wince-inducing ways. The very titles of his songs were irresistible (“Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”, or “We’ll All Go Together When we Go”), as were his descriptions of Catholic confession (“There the guy who’s got religion’ll/ tell you if your sin’s original”) and Arizona, “where the scenery’s attractive/and the air is radioactive”. But his hour was brief. In the 1960s and 1970s he was feted as a wickedly acidic observer of the American scene and then, when the Vietnam war made comedy difficult, he simply went back to his real career, mathematics, and his old thesis, on the concept of the mode.

The tears drawn by Jimmy Swaggart were not of laughter, but repentance. He would dance and shout, and sing and weep, to save the thousands of souls who clustered to his church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in stadiums across the nation. In the great battle between Good and Evil he fought the devil in the form of a bear-man, protecting himself purely with the name of Jesus. He vanquished that bear, but unfortunately he also partook of the sin nature of all men and women, and particularly sinned with a pretty woman who posed for him in a hot-sheet motel just outside New Orleans. That was the end of his ministry though, having brought so many to salvation, he trusted that at the end he, too, would be bathed in the Blood of the Lamb.

Mr Swaggart dealt in rescue and damnation; so too did Peter Gurney, a bomb-disposal expert who worked in the Middle East and, especially, in Britain during the ira terror campaign of the 1980s and 1990s. He was often asked what his thoughts were as he took what he called “the longest walk in the world” towards a bomb that was meant to kill him. (For most were, though some were fakes.) At first, he said, he would obsess about the ratio of distance to potential injuries. But as he reached the device, and even began to dismantle it, it was just him and the bomb, equals: kill or be killed. Nothing else existed. People admired his courage but, he insisted, it was much more important to be afraid. Men without fear were bloody fools and they deserved to die.

Jane Goodall had to go through a similar procedure, at first, with the wild chimps she studied in Tanganyika. She needed to lose her fear of them; they had to lose theirs of her. Bananas were the great lure that encouraged contact and understanding. Quite soon she could get close enough to make her most ground-breaking observation, that chimps used grass stalks to fish out termites from their nests. Use of tools was therefore not an exclusively human trait. By the end, she was so accepted that one of the big males would take palm-nuts from her hand. She herself became expert in the chimp language of pant-hooting, as well as an outspoken voice for conservation and the general betterment of the world.

Other campaigners also drew my attention. One was Razia Jan, a Harvard-educated Afghan native who, against the odds, managed to set up a school for girls in rural Afghanistan and, remarkably, keep it going. She did so, very cleverly, by getting the men of seven rural villages on her side as guardians of the project, even making them believe they were in charge of it. By 2016 she had 800 pupils there and had founded an institute to take her graduates from 12th grade, mostly to train as midwives. Then, in 2021, the Taliban swept back to power, banning all education for girls after the sixth grade. Faced with that, Ms Jan just took in more younger pupils, and kept in touch with the homebound older girls by setting up a mobile library. The world may despair of Afghanistan, but she believed in hope and change.

So too did Muhsin Hendricks, the world’s first openly gay imam. He defied both mockery at school and the hostility of his local Muslim Judicial Council in Cape Town to preach that Islam, too, was an inclusive faith. In the course of his theological studies in Pakistan he discovered, as he suspected, that neither Muhammad nor the Koran condemned homosexuality. Indeed, since it was part of creation, it was evidently ordained by God. For this he was fired from his teaching jobs and had to found his own mosques, meeting places and human-rights foundations to provide spiritual care to those torn between their faith and their sexuality. He was killed for doing so.

Two other men shaped their lives in explicit expiation for deeds committed when they were young. One was Sen Genshitsu, an expert in the Japanese tea ceremony. His family had long followed that calling, but in the second world war he trained as a kamikaze pilot, being saved from certain death only because, by a fluke, he was crossed off the flight-list. In gratitude, and out of horror at his military past, he decided to travel the world, performing the tea ceremony to immaculate perfection as an act of conciliation, meditation and peace.

In very different circumstances Athol Fugard, a South African playwright, tried to explain and expunge in his works the moment when, as a white brat of ten or eleven, he had spat in the face of Sam, one of his family’s black servants. In adulthood he roamed the corrugated-iron pondokkies, or black slums, of Johannesburg, gradually becoming a voice for the poor and an impassioned opponent of the apartheid regime. That regime silenced him as far as it could, but the defiant voices of his characters rang out all the same.

Their rawness made a striking contrast with the wit-filled intellectualism of Britain’s greatest contemporary playwright, Tom Stoppard, whose works blended moral philosophy with acrobatics, Latin literature with gay love, and rock n’ roll with the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia. He claimed to write for posterity, not the present moment, and challenged his audience at every turn to keep up with his dazzling conceits. Yet the play that made him famous, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”, was a tale of two very ordinary men, minor characters in “Hamlet”, pitted against inexorable Fate.

Fate also raised up to positions of world power two men of admirable simplicity who died in the past year. The first was Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis, a man of astonishing humility and kindness, who preferred to live in a guest-house rather than a palace, who welcomed refugees, and who washed the feet of prisoners on Maundy Thursday. He thought nothing of appearing, like St Francis himself, with a lamb round his shoulders, or of welcoming feathered Amazonians to St Peter’s. His flexibility on doctrine drew plenty of hostility from conservatives, but his streak of Jesuit steel, honed in his years as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, enabled him to promote, slowly, the reformers he wanted and the church needed.

The second man was Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States. Though successful in business, he was essentially a Georgian peanut farmer. His term was marked by stagflation, unemployment and the energy crisis; he was remembered for being vague and ineffectual. But, as a born-again Christian, he believed in the power of human kindness. The closest the world has come to Middle East peace was engineered by him as he and Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister, shared photos of their grandchildren on the White House veranda. In retirement he monitored elections round the world, and helped to build housing for the poor. He was, perhaps, a bad president; but he was that much rarer and better thing, a truly good man.

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