Reflecting on loss: lessons from notable lives lost in 2025

How do you reckon with the losses of a year?

- THE WASHINGTON POST

SANDRA Grimes, pictured outside her home in 2013.

(NIKKI KAHN The Washington Post)

Over the past 12 months, the world said goodbye to a groundbreaking naturalist and a swaggering prizefighter, a Hollywood surrealist and an R&B genius, a transformative faith leader and a self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness.

Each lived a life that was singular and complex, resisting tidy summary. Yet their stories offer universal lessons.

Some are big: grand-scale insights about decency, humanity and the possibility of reinvention. Others, more modest.

Consider the life of Ed Smylie, a NASA engineer who helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was crippled by an onboard explosion. His work on the mission offered a dramatic reminder of the power of duct tape, a household staple that Smylie used to help the crew cobble together an air filter. In doing so, the Mississippi native said he drew on wisdom passed down to every good "Southern boy": "If it moves and it's not supposed to, you use duct tape."

Below are 28 other lessons, big and small, from noteworthy people who died this year.

Robert Redford, 89: Actor, filmmaker and activist

For many viewers, Redford was Sundance - not the film institute but the outlaw. Starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he escaped a posse of lawmen by jumping off a cliff and into a river. (Never mind that his character can't swim).

A few years after the film's release, Redford made a very different leap, throwing himself into environmental causes even as critics told him to stick to movies.

"I had to hear over and over again all through the '70s, 'Oh, what does he know, he's an actor," he said.