As fate would have it, Mr. Laxalt died on the same day — Aug. 6 — as did another figure of the Reagan years, Margaret Heckler, a moderate Republican who championed women’s rights in the House and became the administration’s Health and Human Services secretary. (As fate would doubly have it, their obituaries, appearing together on the same day, had both been written in advance by a veteran former political reporter for The Times, Adam Clymer, who died a little more than a month later.)

The Senate also bade farewell to Daniel Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, a champion of neglected Asian-American war veterans; John Melcher, Democrat of Montana, a former veterinarian and reliable centrist who made preserving his state’s wilderness and keeping bread on its farmers’ tables his priorities; and the Georgian Zell Miller, a former governor and conservative Democrat who was most widely recalled for his fiery keynote speech at the 2004 national convention — the Republican one, that is.

Still another Democrat, though no ideological bedfellow of Mr. Miller’s, was Ron Dellums, a Californian who brought a left-wing, antiwar agenda to the House in 1971 and, over 27 years there, rose to chairman of the Armed Services Committee and leader of the Congressional Black Caucus.

If Mr. Dellums’s death evoked the home-front struggle against the Vietnam War, that of Ernest Medina, a former Army captain, reminded us of the terrible toll the war had taken in the land where it was waged. He was court-martialed in the killings of unarmed South Vietnamese men, women and children by three platoons under his command in what became known as the My Lai massacre. But he was acquitted; only a lieutenant, William L. Calley Jr., was convicted in the case, and Mr. Calley would spend just three years confined to barracks or under house arrest.

“I have regrets for it, but I have no guilt over it because I didn’t cause it,” Mr. Medina said later.

Old soldiers in the civil rights struggle were also buried. Wyatt Tee Walker and Dorothy Cotton were both in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle in the darkest days of that campaign (and both died at 88). Linda Brown’s very name was immortalized in the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. The lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree overcame discrimination in her own life to stand and argue for justice for African-Americans and women in a series of courtroom triumphs. And Rosanell Eaton carried the voting rights banner into the 21st century and up the marble stairs of the Supreme Court as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that compelled North Carolina to scrap a law whose real purpose, it was plain to see, was to keep black people from voting.