In my late twenties, when I was a psychiatry resident with little time to spare, I volunteered to canvass my Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood for Ted Kennedy's 1994 re-election campaign. He had no primary opposition, but he needed enough signatures to be put on the ballot. I thought I could make a small contribution, and an easy one: after all, who in Cambridge would refuse to sign a form so Kennedy's name could be on the ballot? A lot of folks, to my surprise - especially older, somewhat crotchety, ethnic gentlemen in North Cambridge. Despite this being Tip O'Neill country, many of these mostly Irish-American men were socially conservative; Kennedy, to them, was anathema. As they spouted about Chappaquidick and asked me how much I was paid while slamming the door, I received a political education: If even Ted Kennedy could become unpopular among his own people, then nothing of value could be achieved in politics without risking unpopularity. (After the balloting, I received a thank you letter from the Senator, musing on his early door-to-door experience campaigning for his brother.)

For a number of years afterward, I attended the yearly birthday celebrations for President Kennedy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, held in May. Ted would always be a key speaker; JFK Jr. also spoke and often presided, and one year I sat just behind him. I suppose I partly went to be close to their celebrity, but I also went because I thought they mattered. I had some personal evidence to support this belief: My father had been active in Iranian politics in the 1950s and 60s, a social democrat out of place in a conservative monarchy. In the brief years of the Kennedy administration, he and others like him could finally breathe: in the Middle East, the name Kennedy meant democracy respected, not benignly neglected.

Ted was the least likely to have succeeded. His eldest brother Joe - bright, handsome, ambitious - was to be the one; his WWII death passed the torch to the sickly and playful John, later tragedy sent it to melancholic Robert. The youngest, out of sight in the Senate, was a supportive cast figure. In the end, he turned out to be the star, achieving more than all the rest, through his patient and painful work in that least appreciated of our three (theoretically) co-equal branches of government.

He did not seem to have the fire for the presidential role, his protean campaign against a sitting Democratic president doomed to fail, his timing terrible; the fallout from that loss persists (Jimmy Carter complained as recently as last month about Kennedy's refusal to shake his hand in the 1980 convention), but it was for the best. The Senate was Ted Kennedy's term-unlimited kingdom; why give it up to be a time-limited citizen-president?

Though the standard image of him is the fusty liberal, there is something in him that spurns the mainstream; his early endorsement of Barack Obama, rather than the Clinton establishment, suggests a deep contrarian streak. Or perhaps he has been at the center of power long enough to know that those at the center generally do not deserve it.

Now diagnosed with terminal illness, he will, hopefully, live a good while longer, but his mortality is upon him - and us. My grandfather went through the same illness a year ago; his brain tumor held him at the edge of death for about 6 months. I spent 2 weeks of it with him, day after day, thinking about his life, wondering about his death, meeting his friends who came, one by one, to say goodbye. All in all, it is probably more helpful to survivors, though more emotionally trying for the dying, to grieve slowly and over time.

We are never ready to let go, though, even when someone has lived a full life. There is always more to learn, more benefit to be had, and, for us in middle age, more comfort in the continued presence of our parents. Ted Kennedy has well-known flaws, long the target of right-wing rhetoric, yet grief is palpable, and more will be felt, because he is our final connection to that generation of his family, and their peers, who have led us ever since World War II; seven decades of leadership cannot be easily replaced.

Will the next generation - the younger Kennedys, the Obamas, and others, neither "tempered by war", nor "disciplined by a hard and bitter peace" - be up to the task of leadership? One feels the midlife tug of crisis - the passing of the old, the rising of the young, the burden of the present. As one surveys this scene (along with the recent deaths of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and William Buckley), it is hard to suppress the hunch that the best of us are going, and the lesser ones who remain have much work to do. Perhaps Ted Kennedy's example can give us some hope: sometimes when little is expected, much is accomplished.