In her last years, her health declined significantly. She had heart problems. She lived alone in her Belgrade apartment, on the modest pension, seeing fewer people and giving fewer interviews than she had in earlier years. She described herself in this period as having largely withdrawn from public life, though her reputation as a survivor — of the crash, of Milošević — remained intact.
## The Death: December 2016
Vesna Vulović died on December 23, 2016, in her apartment in Belgrade. She was sixty-six years old.
She was found by locksmiths who had been called to her apartment after friends, concerned by her silence and inability to reach her, arranged for the door to be opened. She had heart problems that had worsened in her final years, and her death was attributed to heart failure by reports from Belgrade at the time.
She was buried in New Cemetery in Belgrade on December 27, 2016 — four days after her death and the day after Christmas, a timing that meant her death competed for public attention with the holiday. Serbian media and public figures paid tribute; she was mourned as both a national figure and as a symbol of a particular quality of Serbian endurance.
Her husband, mechanical engineer Nikola Breka, whom she had married in the late 1970s, had preceded her. The marriage had ended in divorce — she attributed this to her smoking, a characteristically direct and self-accountable framing. She had no children; an ectopic pregnancy during her marriage had been medically serious, and she did not have other pregnancies.