One of the advantages of longevity is that you eventually outrun everything and everyone else – friends, family, critics, even history. And so it is with Queen Elizabeth II, who began her reign as a 25 year old in the blush of postwar promise and ended it as the world’s sovereign and matriarch with her passing Sept. 8 at Balmoral Castle in Scotland at age 96. The death of England’s longest reigning monarch (70 years) begins a period of mourning in Great Britain that will be crowned by her funeral, led by her eldest son and heir, now King Charles III.
Read MoreWhen someone dies, every decade of his or her life become’s contemporary. Here the future Queen Elizabeth II in a 1933 portrait by Philip de Lázló.
