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Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. Jane Pauley is off today. I'm Lee Cowan, and this is Sunday morning. The last Sunday morning of the year 2020. A year, as we all know, that was full of so many losses. So many subtractions from our lives.

So much pain, so much confusion. This morning we're going to look back at the far too many people we leave behind. The famous and the not so famous. Some known to all of us, some known only to their loved ones. To all of them, we'll be saying hail and farewell. From pioneers in the air, to trailblazers on the ground, to legends of rock and roll. We lost so many this year.

And that's before we count those most of us didn't know. This morning, we say goodbye to those who brightened our lives during a year that was otherwise so very, very dark. What better time, what better year, for our story on the best laid plans. With so much up in the air, Susan Spencer will tell us planning ahead may never be the same. It's almost New Year's, but if you've got no plans, well, you've got plenty of company. If you look at the calendar and you're despairing that it doesn't have the activities that you enjoy, that you once looked forward to, then yeah, I could imagine that would be a real struggle. Not making plans? Why, every day is Blur's Day.

Later on Sunday morning. For all its faults, 2020 wasn't all bad. We just had to look a little harder to find the good, which our David Pogue has been doing. 2020 was a year most of us would like to forget.

But buried in the depressing headlines, there were actually a few nuggets of good news. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon, go NASA, go SpaceX, Godspeed, Bob and Doug. America has launched. Coming up on Sunday morning.

Looks amazing. From zooming to space. Hey, Dad. Hello, Dad.

To zooming with family. The Bright Spots of 2020 brought to you by Science and Technology. Wow, what a great pleasure. Our Dr. John Lapook pays tribute to those who fought selflessly on COVID's front lines. Michelle Miller will remind us that behind every number is a name.

Mo Rocca offers a remembrance of Cy Sperling, a businessman who always kept his head about him. And throughout the morning, we'll be looking back at this year gone by in all of its complexity. All on Sunday morning, December 27th, 2020.

We'll be back in a moment. If there is one lesson we all learned in 2020, it's that there is real truth behind a line adapted from a poem by Robert Burns. The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Our cover story is reported by Susan Spencer. Karina Lopez leaves nothing to chance.

And we mean nothing. I am a planner and I'm a planner by nature. What sorts of things would you plan?

One thing that we love to do with our friends in particular is our friendsgiving. And I mean, I would plan every last detail, I mean, down to what everyone would be wearing or a color scheme. That's planning.

I know. Hardly a surprise then that Lopez is a professional wedding planner. She's based near Buffalo, New York. And guess who's wedding she's been planning her whole life. How long had you been dreaming of your own wedding?

Probably since I was literally a little girl, maybe I was five years old. Lopez and her fiance, Kurt Rogers, who is also her business partner, set their sights on a pull out all the stops multi-day affair last summer with 200 guests. We were going to kick off the weekend with a welcome party on the Friday evening.

Saturday was going to be breakfast and lunch and then the wedding at night and a great brunch farewell on that Sunday. Wow. How did it go? It didn't. Something called COVID hit and we had to postpone. And COVID hit both would-be newlyweds hard. I have never been that sick in my life. I mean, it felt like I had gotten ran over by a car and I had the worst cough I've ever had in my life. Forget that wedding. I think I had a breakdown in bed while I was sick with COVID and I just like started hysterically crying. I just knew that it wasn't going to happen.

And then of course, immediately after I felt guilty for crying about it because people were dealing with serious issues. There seems to be this big cloud of uncertainty that sits over everything. What is the impact of that over time? I think uncertainty can breed anxiety in a lot of people. Psychiatrist Pavan Madan says an inability to plan weighs heavily on his patients these days. He works in the university town of Davis, California where a lot of students find their futures on hold.

They've gone back and moved in with their family which was unexpected and unusual for their stage in life. Dr. Madan's advice is to put big dreams aside for now and focus instead on the small, more manageable details of daily life. So you should get up at 9 and then you should have breakfast at 9.30 just to get structure back? I use more of a collaborative approach.

Just refocusing in a way that makes people think about what's important for them and how they would like their structure to be. So when was the last time you put something on your calendar and honestly felt like it would happen? Never mind a wedding.

How about a dental appointment? If you're like me, your days lately are looking a lot like this. A lot of people, you know, what they see on the calendar sort of defines who they are, right?

In a way, yeah. We are what we do, yeah. We need plans, says University of Delaware psychology professor Philip Gantt. Philip Gable, who sees them as essential to happiness. So you're a fan of plans.

I am, I am. I think they, yeah, they give us direction. They give us hope. And when we can't plan, time itself can seem to crawl. So when people are experiencing negative states, negative feelings, then they will experience time tending to drag. So this accounts for people not being able literally to remember what day it is.

Also, we've lost a lot of our rhythms. A lot of those patterns that separate the weekday from the weekend create that sense of Blur's Day that we might be experiencing. Blur's Day. The sense that it's all one day, yeah. Indeed, Blur's Day may be the most popular day on the pandemic calendar. So as you look at Blur's Day, where exactly in the week does it fall?

Could be tomorrow or it could have been yesterday. Are we hardwired to plan and to look ahead all the time? We are actually. Human beings are unique. They're unique in their ability to think about the future. But Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer says something else also is at play. So you coined the phrase illusion of control. Can you define that for me? It started when I had been at a casino and I see people talking to slot machines. And it occurred to me that they actually thought they could control the outcome.

And this was kind of silly. You can't control things that are chance determined. But that need for control drives us to plan even today when so much is unpredictable. Professor Langer says it's like pushing the closed door button in an elevator. Believe it or not, most of those buttons don't actually do anything.

They are installed only to make us feel better. Pressing the button takes very little energy. Doing something often feels better than doing nothing. Would you recommend that we have faith and just keep pushing those buttons?

I think wholeheartedly I recommend pushing that button unless it means pushing people out of the way to get to it. So keep pushing and planning, but knowing that these are uncertain times. Plans are guesses, but what we need to recognize is that if something leads us in a different direction, that could end up even better for us. I just talked to a young woman who had to postpone her giant wedding.

Concrete plans like that I think may be a little bit more difficult to get past. Surely there are advantages of delaying the wedding. You delay it, you have more time to look forward to it, more time to change your mind if that's the direction in which you want to go. Maybe not what Karina Lopez wants to hear, but in spite of everything, she is optimistic and still planning. What do you have to look forward to if you're not going to plan for anything? The alternative would be you're just setting yourself up. Yes, which is why perhaps you do a Plan B and a Plan C that you know for sure it can happen. So the answer to any doubt about planning is to do more planning.

Yes. There were some bright spots in this year gone by that were often overshadowed. Our David Pogue gives 2020 a second look. 2020 will not be remembered as a big year for good news.

But science and technology actually scored a few triumphs. Beginning with the piece of software that made it possible for meetings, Gabri, classes, relationships, and performances to carry on. Hey dad. Hi Dave. You can't see me though, can you?

No, I can't see you. Something wrong with this start video. I'm referring, of course, to Zoom video calls. There you go. Like the one I had with my 92-year-old dad. Hello, Dave.

Cleveland lawyer Dick Pogue. So am I correct that you had never used Zoom until the lockdown began? Absolutely not. I was amazed when I first saw it. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all had their own similar video programs. Why do you think Zoom became the winner of the pandemic? I think it's the simplicity of getting into the meeting. All the Zoom meetings meant fewer people flying and all the closed offices meant fewer people driving. It's not the kind of economy anybody wants, of course, but it did lead to some more good news. For the first time in a century, you could hear birdsong in the cities.

You could see fish in the canals of Venice. And you could see blue skies in L.A. At one point, global greenhouse gas emissions fell 17 percent, the biggest drop in human history. This was also the year that the plastic pollution problem finally got the world's attention. We've been dumping the equivalent of a truckload's worth of plastic into the ocean every minute of every day. China joined over 125 other countries that ban or tax single-use plastic or plastic bags. But you don't have to be a government to make a difference.

Use your voice, go out there, do what you can. Ordinary citizen Sheila Moravati was fed up with the 40 billion plastic utensils that restaurants include with takeout orders every year that nobody uses. So if I take it out of the takeout bag and throw it in the trash, that's not single-use plastic. That's zero-use plastic. Moravati undertook a one-woman campaign to persuade delivery services like Uber Eats and Postmates to make those utensils optional.

Uber Eats and Postmates now have a checkbox that says, if you would like plastic cutlery, click here. 2020 was also an astonishing year for space. NASA launched its most advanced rover yet to Mars, landed a spacecraft on an asteroid. Dragon SpaceX, we see the view. Thank you. Looks amazing. And for the first time since the space shuttle retired in 2011, flew American astronauts to the space station on an American spacecraft made by SpaceX.

Twice. Finally, 2020 ended with the best piece of news science could possibly have offered us. Vaccines for the disease that ruined the year in the first place. Bill Gruber is Pfizer's head of vaccine development. Vaccines typically take years to develop.

I mean, five, 10 years. How was it possible that this one was developed so fast? This was really born of a great deal of cooperation between academics, industry and government to essentially recognize this at the highest priority. One key element is that as opposed to work typically being done in sequence, a great deal of work has been done in parallel. The vaccines hold the promise that this time next year, good news will be a lot easier to find.

At least that's what my dad thinks. Do you have any broader thoughts about the year 2020? I'll be glad when 2020 is gone. This was a bad year.

But next year has got to be better, much better. Hi, podcast peeps. It's me, Drew Barrymore.

Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you about our new show. It's the Drew's News Podcast. And in each episode, me and a weekly guest are going to cover all the quirky, fun, inspiring and informative stories that exist out in the world because, well, I need it.

And maybe you do too. From the newest interior design trend, Barbie Corps, to the right and wrong way to wash your armpits. Also, we're going to get into things that you just kind of won't believe and we're not able to do in daytime television. So watch out.

Listen to Drew's News wherever you get your podcasts. It's your good news on the go. Few deserve more thanks and praise than our medical professionals who spent this long and lonely year fighting COVID face to face. Our Dr. John Lapook was one of them. This has been a devastating year for healthcare providers.

In a new war against an invisible enemy, the soldiers, my colleagues around the world, have often found themselves fighting without weapons or armor. Their best medicine, empathy. As hospitals filled up, doctors and nurses have had to treat patients in unlikely places, from a tent in Central Park to a parking lot in Nevada. Nobody who's gone into medicine ever thought they would be providing care in a parking garage. Or using refrigerated trucks to help keep up with a soaring death toll that now tops 300,000 in the U.S. alone. When the pandemic struck New York City last March, personal protective equipment was in such short supply, some nurses were forced to wear trash bags.

PPE continues to be rationed as daily cases have surged to more than 200,000. The toll is written on their faces and heard in their voices. You know, I can't talk to a patient without a mask on.

I can't touch them without gloves on. You know, they, they die and they never see our faces. The CDC estimates more than 900 health care workers have died from COVID, but it's a hard number to track and is likely much higher.

Their deaths are remembered in this Twitter account and other makeshift memorials across the country. Never in my wildest nightmares would I ever have thought that we would ever see something that would be killing this many people. Back in April, I spent two weeks helping out on the COVID wards at NYU Langone Health, where I'm a professor of medicine, and saw a microcosm of the professionalism playing out across the globe. Physicians, nurses, therapists, social workers, psychologists, those in food and housekeeping services, and so many others, all risking their lives to take care of patients with COVID-19.

We're doing everything in our power, and we expect you to be the first person to do the same. Wear a mask, maintain physical distance, wash your hands, avoid crowds, and remember that outdoors is safer than indoors. And finally, unless there's a medical reason, get a vaccine when it's available. These vaccines are being developed so quickly because of decades of research, but the FDA and trusted public officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci have told us, no corners were cut.

I just got mine last week. Of course, researchers will watch out for any unexpected safety concerns that may emerge. Last spring, we all appreciated the applause at seven o'clock each night. But right now, the very best thing you can do for us is not to become our patient. As many of you may know, our Mo Rocca has many callings. Among them is his podcast, Mobituaries.

From him now, a closer look at one of those one-of-a-kind characters whom we lost. I'm Cy Sperling, president of Hair Club for Men. Can you guess who has a hair replacement here?

The answer is all four. For 44 years, Hair Club for Men founder Cy Sperling was a weaver of hair replacement and hope for the follically challenged. We now have over 30,000 satisfied clients, and it all started for them when they called our toll-free number to get their free booklet. All of a sudden, my dad found himself in his mid-20s with thinning hair. Daughter Sherry Sperling says her father's ambition sprouted shortly after her parents divorced, and Cy had to move in with his mother. He was trying to date again, and he wasn't really having much success.

He was trying to date again, and he wasn't really having much success. But after restoring his own mane, an inspired Sperling went into business marketing a process that non-surgically attached actual human hair to men's existing hair. And in 1982, the Hair Club shot its first commercial, actually two of them. They shot one commercial of like a guy on horseback with that kind of thick, like wavy blowback hairdo, and the ad guy was like, look, in case this doesn't work, why don't we shoot one with you? On the spot, they said to your father, let's do a backup.

Yes. The first commercial didn't work. They got barely any calls. So they run my dad's commercial, and we had like 2,000 calls.

If you've ever thought about doing something about your thinning hair. And those calls were coming from lonely Joes everywhere. Let's say it's Friday or Saturday night, and maybe you didn't get so lucky, right, to be blunt. So they come home, and they're watching TV because they're still awake, maybe a little drunk, and they're flipping through channels, and there's my dad.

It's designed to give you the facts you need to make an intelligent choice about what's best for you. Almost speaking directly to these guys. Saying, I'm going to help you. Exactly. Crazy, and he's the man on the moon. Regular guy TV pitchman were nothing new.

If you're not completely satisfied. But it was Sperling's bare honesty at the end of the ad that set him apart. I'm not only the hair club president, but I'm also a client. That tagline became his mantra.

I'm not only the hair club president, but I'm also a client. He took something that was embarrassing for him, being bald, and he made himself vulnerable. He was actually sharing something about himself. Exactly. Touche. Touche-mo.

I think a lot of people want to know just exactly who you are and what the hell you're doing. Cy Sperling became a late night comedy favorite. Who is the president of the hair club for men? Did he like being famous? He loved it.

He loved it. It's the American dream come true. You've examined both sides, Cy. You seem to be serious hair loss. Where there's a strain of the trial, it's clearly starting to take its toll on their follicles. But for Sherry Sperling and so many of hair club's clients, Cy Sperling was no joke.

You don't want to look like you're 40 when you're 24, 23 years old. He helped men to feel better about themselves and to live life the way they wanted to, without embarrassment. Cy Sperling died in February at age 78 in Boca Raton, Florida.

His family says he was a hair club client to the very end. It's been the sort of year that tests even the most devout among us. So we've asked representatives of three different faiths for some year-end comfort.

To start us off, Rabbi Elaine Zecher of Temple Israel in Boston. I look into the camera. I see you as you see me. Our grief is real. This year, we have been thrust into loss and loneliness, disease and despair. So we walk together in the deep darkness.

In doing so, we learn that we can see in the dark. This is the source of our healing. To recognize that we are part of a greater whole, sacred in our interconnected existence.

The biblical matriarch Rebecca cried out in anguish and pain, why do I exist? We can question, too, what is our purpose? What impact might we have on others? We may surprise ourselves with our own strength and courage and discover, in the dark, that we can find our own divine light. Good morning, everyone.

This is Imam Zayt Shakir. It's definitely a challenging year, and it's a year that has left a lot of folks bitter, very bitter, justifiably, because so many people can look back and say, so many people can look back at the ways they've been wronged and the oppression that has been visited upon them, the injustices that they've had to deal with. But when everyone is doing that, the space for virtue shrinks, the space for forgiveness, the space for love, and to rebuild a viable body politic, to rebuild a society where we don't necessarily have to agree with each other, but we do have to live with each other. We're going to have to try to be better, and to be better, we have to look at what we can do for others as opposed to constantly obsessing on what others owe us. So I think if we can move into that space of better and transcend that space of bitterness, we're going to have a very, very good 2021, at least a better 2021.

Hi, I'm Judah Smith from Church Home. And the truth is 2020 has been a difficult year. It has been easy to lose hope. But I want to remind you, there is still beauty all around us. Think of the beauty in nature.

Think of the beauty of a loved one, a friend, a family member, something as simple as a game night or a virtual hangout. Here's just a few things we've been practicing in our family to uncover hope for the new year. Number one, take joy in the little things. Please, number two, enjoy the journey.

And number three, take nothing for granted. I believe as we practice this, we are going to have awesome expectation and hope for 2021. From our family to yours, happy new year. We leave you this last Sunday of 2020 in a snowfall at the White Mountains National Forest in New Hampshire. I'm Lee Cowan. We wish all of you a happy new year and hope you'll join us again next year for our next Sunday morning.

Until then, stay safe, be well, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. Two Senate races where you think Republicans have the best chance of taking a Democratic seat away. Nevada, New Hampshire. Not Georgia. Well, Georgia's right up there, but New Hampshire is a surprise. In New Hampshire, people really just kind of don't like Maggie Hassan. For more from this week's conversation, follow the Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.