David Letterman shouldn’t have been allowed to retire. Photograph by Damon Winter / The New York Times / Redux

I knew it was going to be bad for me when David Letterman retired, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad.

The first week, I pretended that he was on vacation—he did go on a lot of vacations. Not that he didn’t deserve them. He worked so much and for so long and wanted things to be perfect. He hated mistakes. I once saw him hold up a small card with a little blue piece of paper taped to it. The card was something like an index card. He was reading from the paper on the card. Maybe it was during a Fun Fact segment. And then he saw on the monitor that the blue paper had a little tear at the top of it and had been Scotch-taped together onto the card. “What’s this!” he said, with some anger—he was more than annoyed. “Torn and taped to the card!” He shook his head. Or maybe he said, “What kind of Mickey Mouse show is this?” Maybe he said both. I can’t remember exactly which way he said it. I just remember how he shook his head with disgust, and that he was angry.

That’s one of the things I liked best about him. He’d show how disgusted he was with something going wrong on the show or with something someone said on the show. The most shocking example of this kind of behavior follows: I saw him talking to a Hollywood actor on another program. They were both standing up. This was during the era when men wore sports jackets with the sleeves pushed up. There have been worse things to see in style in the next decades, but that one stays in the mind. He walked a couple of steps toward the actor and grabbed at the sleeves and pulled them down. The Hollywood actor looked surprised. I think he was one of those good-natured Hollywood actors and didn’t understand the whole thing. He didn’t understand disgust with Hollywood ways.

I found the style ridiculous and repellant, too, but I never thought anyone would make a move as hostile and amusing as pulling those sleeves down on another person, on TV. You could like Dave for this and fear him at the same time. That was one of the most unusual things I’ve ever seen on television—the pulling down of those sleeves. This was many years before Dave learned how to meditate, calm down, and deal with his hostility.

But now what are we supposed to do? He shouldn’t have been allowed to retire. It was a job, like being President. His term wasn’t over. In any case, David Letterman is more important than any President and has accomplished more than most of them—he made people laugh.

They should have let him work November through March—three shows a week. Then he could have had the good-weather months free. He once said that he didn’t mind being in New York when it rained. But when it was good weather he liked to be out of the city, in the country.

Now things are bleak. There’s nothing funny to look forward to. There’s just emptiness and darkness and quiet, without David Letterman.

And I know I’m not the only one. A few people called me. There was one person—I was afraid she was going to call. But I didn’t have my glasses on, and I didn’t see the caller I.D., so I made the mistake of answering the phone. And I said, “Oh no, I was afraid you were going to call about this. I just can’t talk about it. It’s caused a deep depression.”

On the other hand, I’m not like the woman who sneaked into Dave’s house several times and eventually committed suicide on a train track. Although I’m married, my husband doesn’t talk. So I depended on David Letterman to talk. In the beginning, these programs were all called talk shows. Every night, I could calm down before trying to go to sleep. I rarely watched the Hollywood-actor parts. Or the sports part—other than Marv Albert’s Bloopers segment.

Dave is complex, he’s complicated, and, now that he’s calmed down, he’s a changed person. He attributes it to meditation. He has a meditation teacher he refers to as “Meditation Bob,” who teaches the supposedly most important people. I can’t get Meditation Bob to teach me. I guess I have to remain crazed with anxiety. Once, on the show, I heard Dave say he wanted to learn how to meditate, but he didn’t want some guy coming into his house and taking his shoes off. Did he want people coming into his house with their shoes on, with the bacteria and dirt from everywhere in the world on their shoes? The shoes have been in airports.

I don’t know how I’m going to calm down now that I don’t have his new calmness and funniness or wittiness spreading over and through to my brain.

It's known that he was a private person. But sometimes you could see right underneath to how he felt. I’ve seen him start to cry, I’ve seen him almost cry, I’ve seen him cry. I’ve seen him looking sad underneath the smiling. I know the kind of thing he’s thinking about. And when they said that his last show was happy, not sad, they were wrong. All that joviality and fun—there was so much sadness underneath. He was trying so hard to make it happy, it made it even sadder.

But who knows? Maybe he went home and cried all night. I mean, after he got his son to bed. Maybe he’s been crying all year. Maybe he’s still crying. I read that he went off and had some fun, some racing-car thing that he likes to do—I never watch that part of the show. I don’t understand these sports things. I don’t understand the Indy 500. I don’t even know what it is. I overlooked that particular one of his interests.

I don’t understand why Dave had Martha Stewart on so often. Last year, when she was on the show, he told her that he had Lyme disease. She said, “So what? I’ve had it, everyone has had it.” And he repeated, “I have Lyme disease!” He seemed alarmed. And she said, “I don’t care that you have Lyme disease.” She said it in a really mean, heartless tone of voice—and then I understood why a number of people don’t like her. She’s not just making peanut-butter-and-cherry sandwiches and planting herbs. I don’t even want to mention her name, the way Norm MacDonald said he didn't want to dignify Hitler by saying his name—he said he didn’t want to give him the dignity or something like that. Then, at the end of the show, he told David Letterman he loved him, and Norm MacDonald started to cry.*

And then there’s the Johnny Carson thing. I never understood why Dave idolized him. The best thing I ever saw on Johnny Carson—I know he was witty; still, it wasn’t the kind of show I wanted to watch—was once when Shelley Winters was on as a guest, and she talked about her daughter who went to Harvard and was getting an advanced degree in something important. Then she stopped and said, “Oh, but you wouldn’t know about that.” And he looked at her, without any kind of meanness—he looked completely innocent—and he said, “Why not? I went to college.” And everybody laughed. Maybe Shelley Winters didn’t laugh.