David Letterman‘s final video montage felt like something that could have come from my high-school graduation banquet. In a sense, that’s exactly where it did come from. Photograph by R. M. Lewis. jr. / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty

In May, as David Letterman wrapped up more than three decades on the air, many people wrote about their experiences with Letterman and his show. I wanted to do something a little bit different: wait a while and then write about my experiences without Letterman and his show.

I started watching Letterman at the end of junior high. It wasn’t a regular occurrence: I was little and it was late, and “Saturday Night Live” (which was on once a week at 11:30 p.m. rather than five times a week at 12:30 a.m.) was an easier sell to my parents. When high school arrived, with its starting time of seven-thirty in the morning, there was a drastic tapering off of nearly all post-prime-time viewing, except for the occasional Friday-night show. I saw enough Letterman to know the basics—the pet tricks, the high-concept suits—but I wasn’t watching with any regularity.

Letterman returned to me, as he did for many people, in college. That’s when I attended religiously. The show meshed perfectly with college, both in the sense that it layered anarchy and irony over an undeniable work ethic and in the sense that it was easy to schedule classes a little later in the morning. Those years, the late eighties, were the glory years of the NBC show, the time when nearly every rule that governed the relationships between network and performer, and between performer and audience, was thrown out the window. Plenty of other things were thrown out the window as well, not to mention off the roof. For a half-decade or longer, I was watching perhaps ninety per cent of the shows, and I can remember many specific ones, from Lou Reed and Tim Reid (early 1989) to Larry King and some old guy who played the spoons (spring, 1991). There was a period when it seemed like Richard Simmons was on three times a month.

After college, my relationship with the show changed. It happened to everyone I knew. Work, kids, and responsibilities came for us. Regular viewing of Letterman—what later came to be called “appointment TV”—slipped away, though there was a brief reunion in the final days of the NBC show and the first days of CBS, when late-night melodrama was thick in the air and Dave’s show was suddenly starting an hour earlier. The DVR era arrived, which theoretically renewed the possibility of watching, but that never really happened. The few times I taped the show and watched it the next day, it felt disorienting to the point of vertigo, some kind of cosmic cheat. Letterman was for late nights. How could you make sense of him with sunlight streaming in?

And so I made my peace without Letterman—or rather, without watching him. I never doubted that he was there, and that gave me comfort enough. Even if I wasn’t watching, I knew that he was still puncturing self-important politicians in his monologue, still skewering celebrities in his interviews. I knew there were still loopy bits and skits. I didn’t know what they were, but that didn’t matter. Whenever anything happened that thrust Letterman or the show into the public eye—his heart surgery in 2000, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center the following year, the sex scandal in 2009—I watched more regularly for a little while, but it never lasted.

When Letterman announced his retirement, I took it as a challenge to start watching again. I added a cup of coffee in the evening, as a booster, and tried to get back into the swing of things. Around the time I started staying up late again, I read a piece in the Times about the psychologist Ellen Langer, who, in the early eighties, isolated a group of elderly men and delivered to them a steady stream of pop culture from two decades prior. After only five days of immersion in Langer’s retro-tank, talking about old sports heroes and singing along to old music, the men not only felt younger, but performed better on tests. They had better manual dexterity. Their sight improved. Something like that happened to me when I recommitted to Letterman, but rather than my senses sharpening, my sensibility did. I woke up the next morning with shards of the show still lodged in my mind, which stayed with me in the course of the day. I saw the world a little differently: it was less claustrophobic, less calculated, less corporate. It wasn’t exactly the same experiment as Langer’s. It was impossible to confuse the elderly, bespectacled Dave of 2014 with the young man of the mid-eighties (when, I realized with shock, he was younger than I was when I returned to watching regularly). Still, the show was a blueprint for moving forward into the day, as much tonic as comic.

The end approached. I braced myself. That final run of shows was everything I expected. It was celebratory and sad. At times, it was disappointing, but in the best way—many of the celebrity guests seemed to be using the show the way that I had, to inhabit their younger selves. Bruce Willis wore a wig that looked like his eighties hair. Jerry Seinfeld performed the same standup routine he had done in 1982. Right up to the end, Letterman maintained his longstanding and highly self-aware interest in anticlimax: the flattest show was the next-to-last one, with Bill Murray (who was warm and invested but not particularly funny) and Bob Dylan (who was cold and distant and, in his own way, hilarious).

And then there was the last episode, the true finale. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I loved it. It filled me with love. And what does that mean in this context? That I felt that I understood it fully, right down to the randomness of the flashbacks, the sometimes awkward interactions with other celebrities, and the cheap but perfectly serviceable editing of the final video montage. It was just a normal slideshow, not overproduced, not overdone, intended to trigger memories rather than replace them. It felt like something that could have come from my high-school graduation banquet. In a sense, that’s exactly where it did come from.

And then, no Dave. It’s been weeks. At first, I didn’t feel like giving up. I sought out old shows on YouTube, the older the better. I watched the first show, of course, the one with Larry “Bud” Melman’s creepy opening and Bill Murray and Mr. Wizard. I watched clips of Captain Beefheart and Brother Theodore and Cher and Professor Irwin Corey and Eddie Murphy and Teri Garr. I told myself that what I was doing wasn’t nostalgic but, rather, therapeutic, and I promised myself that I would reread the article about Ellen Langer’s study to make sure.

I didn’t reread it. Instead, I started to understand that the show was never coming back. Reruns weren’t substitutes. They were stopgaps. Once or twice in the week of the final show, I turned on the TV at the time when Letterman was supposed to be on. Nothing was on—or, worse, some random episode of “The Mentalist” was. I watched about five minutes of it, unproudly. And then, just like that, I traded in mourning for molting. I stopped watching old shows. Suddenly, I didn’t want to relive Letterman’s past, or my past with Letterman. It was too painful, not to mention delusional. I wanted to keep just a few things, and let the rest go. And so, I tried. I tried to forget all the Chris-Elliott-as-Marlon-Brando sketches, all the Jay Thomas holiday specials, all the ill-advised experiments (Rerun Plus, especially, where they rebroadcast a sped-up version of the show so that they could cram in a bit of fresh content) and perfectly spiky interviews (Charles Grodin, mostly). I spent days trying not to remember but to forget.