If this year was about anything it surely had something to do with a historic election.  An election and the thousand stories wound up inside, some interesting and relevant, some entirely useless, kept most of us wholly occupied for the majority of the year.  There was just so much goodness: pants suits and shopping sprees, bowling scores and "bitter" people, a team of mavericks and a team of rivals.  And yet, while the key buzzwords of the election, or at least the ones that prevailed, were "change" and "hope," reflecting an unnerving and hopefully enduring optimism, 2008 also gave us the deaths of nearly twenty notable people.  Right from the beginning with Brad Renfro's passing, so jam-packed with death was this year that even nearing its close, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt get solemnly added to the list.

I'm not going to delve too deeply into everyone who passed away in this calendar year, but I thought some words on the ones who meant something to me would be appropriate.  These aren't meant to be obits (do I look like the New York Times to you?); they're simply a reflection on some one-sided relationships, personal and indulgent.

Paul Newman

There's little denying just how fucking cool Paul Newman was.  Handsome, talented and totally iconic, he exemplified everything that a movie star is supposed to be.  While The Color of Money earned him his Oscar, it was his work in Hud, The Hustler, The Sting, The Verdict, and Nobody's Fool that have always stuck with me.  And, of course, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a movie that never stops running in my head.  Plus there was that whole thing where he donated something like $200 million to various charities just by selling salad dressing and tomato sauce.  He also had a large hand in starting the organic food movement that keeps all the people at the Park Slope Co-Op near my apartment so freaking happy.  So, there's that too.

David Foster Wallace

Without a doubt, the voice of our generation.  A genius mind, an undeniable talent, that literally changed the way we looked at literature by utilizing copious amounts of footnotes and endnotes; this is a death that is truly heartbreaking.  To see that someone with so much talent is unable to take (for whatever reason) the strains of daily life doesn't really give too much hope to the rest of us.  While I wil certainly claim no extensive expertise on his writings, there is one thing that he wrote that was, for me, simply life-altering.  Reading his 2006 New York Times essay about Roger Federer I realized just how great sports writing could be; I understood that there was more to it than just what the Mike Lupicas of the world could spew out.  I think about him and that piece every time I sit down to write about sports, knowing full well that nothing could ever compare to it.  But you've always got to strive for something, right?

Michael Crichton

I was never the biggest fan of Crichton's work; his novels always felt badly constructed to me, too heavily drawing substance from the poorly described and hastily tacked on scientific goobley-gook that he threw in, like the chaos theory moral of Jurassic Park.  However, Crichton will always hold a special place in my heart because he created ER and I'll never begin to be able to thank him for that.  You see, I wrote my college thesis about the show (it's not as bad as you think, I wrote about how medical-ethical issues are portrayed through television), and the decision to do that (and the support of my philosophy adviser) played a large part in leading me to where I am right now.  Without that first step, I don't think I could be sitting here at my desk, where I sometimes attempt to deconstruct the innanities of pop culture and daily life, while trying to stay within the realm of criticism.

Heath Ledger

I guess it's impossible to recap the Year in Deaths without having some words to say about Ledger's untimely and accidental overdose.  While there are many salacious elements to this story, his post-Joker "darkness" and Mary-Kate Olsen's involvement among them, for me this is saddest just because he was a man in his prime with a young daughter.  I'm sure there's a lot to take from his death, a lot to be said about the psychological underside of our culture, but either I don't have the heart to do it or I'm not the one for the job; whenever his life and death come up, all I can think about is the daughter.

Shulamis Toder

Ok, you don't recognize this name and you're not supposed to, but this woman was significant for me in that she was my grandmother, pictured right with my grandfather Aaron (just turned 96) in 2007.  Born in Antwerp in 1913, my grandmother was a toddler when she arrived in Brooklyn with my great-grandparents, and she never left the borough that I now call home until she and my grandfather relocated to Northern California in the mid nineties.  Not ironically, the first apartment they shared was about a ten minute walk from where I'm currently sitting.  Her descent was shockingly fast, having ignored symptoms of colon cancer for perhaps two years, her body simply couldn't cope when it spread to her liver and kidneys.  And while it seems counter-intuitive that the death of a ninety-three year old woman who weighed less than a hundred pounds would be so tough to swallow, there's simply no preparing yourself for it, especially when you've pretended to be ready since the last scare.  While the other people on this list, Foster Wallace and Crichton especially, influenced (what I consider to be) my intellectual pursuits, it was my grandmother who had the most influence over what I tried to become, emotionally and morally.  She was always the one taking the high road, attempting to teach through her actions how to be good.  To be honest, I wish I had paid better attention when I had the chance.

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As I said, these are just some personal thoughts on a few of the many who passed away this year.  If you have some words on any one else (Renfro, Tim Russert, Jim McKay, Bobby Fischer, George Carlin, Estelle Getty, Bernie Mac, Isaac Hayes, Sydney Pollack, Pinter, Kitt, or anyone else), feel free to leave a comment.  These are all people who influenced, inspired and will be missed by many, many people.  I'll tell you one thing I wont miss: 2008.