Eighty-nine names sit on a list published by People magazine of celebrities American culture lost this year. Eighty-eight carry an age, and sorted by decade, one number stands apart. Only eight people died in their sixties — fewer than any decade around it, a real dip between the thirty-five who died younger and the forty-five who died older.
Sixty-five is also the long-established retirement age, the number a life is supposed to slow down at. The list seems to agree, on the surface. Low numbers, a quiet decade, the look of something people simply get through.
And while the statistics tell us if you can get to your sixties, you have a good chance of surviving them, even thriving into your seventies and eighties, that’s not always the case. Two of the eight who didn’t are Jim Hartung and Claude Lemieux, and the collage accompanying this post is a memoriam to both.
They share a timeline. Both are born in the sixties. Both rise to the height of their sport in the mid eighties, Hartung on the medal stand at the 1984 Olympics, Lemieux hoisting his first Stanley Cup in 1986. Their early years were the model of the male physique — trained, disciplined, built for the moment history hands them. The body that wins the gold, or wins the Cup. That same body, decades later, not making it through the one decade built to carry that body through.
We honor the lives they lived. Godspeed, gentlemen, and all those on the list, on the next part of the journey.
— Behan
Source: People, “Remembering All the Stars Who’ve Died in 2026”
