She was not embittered by the life the crash gave her. At least, not in the accounts that she gave publicly. She maintained the optimism she described as fundamental to her character. She maintained the directness — the willingness to say what she thought, without diplomatic hedging — that characterized her interviews across decades. She maintained the capacity for humor about her own situation that made her a distinctive interview subject.
What she did not maintain, toward the end, was her health. Her heart problems in the final years were, in some accounts, connected to the stress of the decades of opposition activism and the physical toll of the crash injuries that had never fully healed. The spine that had been permanently altered by the crash continued to be a source of physical difficulty throughout her life. The limp she had walked with since approximately December 1972 never went away.
The death in December 2016 came just three weeks before what would have been her sixty-seventh birthday. She died, as most people who have lived to sixty-six die, in the ordinary circumstances of a body giving out — not in a crash, not in a public moment, but in a quiet apartment, found by locksmiths. The quiet end of an extraordinary life.
The Belgrade New Cemetery where she was buried is a significant site in Serbian cultural memory — many of the most important figures of Serbian history are interred there. Her burial in that cemetery is a form of recognition that her place in the country’s story was permanent, whatever the specific circumstances of her final years.