A long-lived Trekkie grieves
Sir Patrick Stewart as Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. From “Download free Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard at mrwallpaper.com.”
A grand Titan of stage, film, and television has died. Patrick Stewart. Sir Patrick Hewes Stewart, aka Enobarbus, King Claudius, and MacBeth, aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier, a master actor. Felt quite a shock to scan my news feed upon awakening and learned of his passing. He had been a vibrant 86 years old, at least in public, so it was with further dismay and sadness to discover he suffered from two different but rapidly progressing kinds of dementia in recent months or years. Stewart and his family kept that part private.
I felt so sad. Burst into tears even. Ironically my wife Faithlyn and I had recently watched the grand finale, the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to complete watching the whole series. Didn’t have or didn’t watch much TV from about 1985 – early 2000s. Back then the TV was more to watch rental videotapes. My kids, when they were young, came to rely upon videotapes back before streaming existed. Remember the early Internet including dial-up Bulletin Boards and GOPHER? Then the World Wide Web? Then merging with cellphones and computers and then smartphones? And early AI? Remember when so much of today’s technology was first introduced to the world as fiction back in Star Trek?
Been slowly on an off and on path to watch every single episode of every Star Trek show from old to nü and watch every ST movie. All that is left is to watch DS9 end to end. I missed so much of Old Trek back in the day. Hardcore Fans will argue and bicker and hate on the old versus nü trek stuff, but I’m even more hardcore cuz hell, I luv’em ALL, LOL! So Walter Koenig’s recent death and now Patrick Stewart’s makes me feel so blue, as blue as the blackest night. Star Trek: The Original Series was the only TV show my parents would let me stay up past my bedtime to watch back in the 1960s. They recognized Gene Roddenberry’s creation as transcendent television.
Was 28 when Star Trek: The Next Generation first aired in September of 1987 as I was road tripping back to rural Virginia from Seattle, Washington. Was 35 years old with my first child, my infant daughter Morgan, born in Seattle, when the show finally completed in May of 1994. There were 178 episodes – and I don’t know if 2-parters were considered one or two episodes in the count – and due to my nontraditional lifestyle and the limitations of broadcast TV missed most of them. Often worked evenings, or was busy with family, or in training, or out and about on an outdoor adventure. We didn’t even have a TV set for much of the time. Decades later got to feel transfixed as the aging now-former Starfleet Admiral Jean-Luc embarked upon new dramatic arcs in Star Trek: Picard, a grim, gritty love story of sorts that aired from 2020 into 2023.
So many famous and good people have died this year. Jessie Jackson and Dolores Huerta. Dolly Parton. Sam Neill and Tim Curry. Chuck Norris and Oliver Tree. Robert Duvall and Catherine O’Hara. And three days before “Captain Picard” passed Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in Star Trek: The Original Series, died. The list of others not yet named is quite long, too.
There’s more and better details online of the man’s life and stellar achievements and of marriages, children, and loves lost. For me, however, I felt as if the late Robin Williams was once again leading a group of young students in a Quixotic quest for justice in 1989’s film Dead Poets Society. The shouts rang out once again and this time for the one who flew beyond the stars from Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”
“O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, …
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
but O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
… I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.”
William Dudley Bass
Saturday 31 October 2026
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
Earth
Sol
NOTES:
See and read the entire poem here as above is but an excerpt:
Whitman, Walt. “O Captain! My Captain!,” Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45474/o-captain-my-captain.
Copyright © 2026 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. The foto image of Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard is from a free download website. Thank you.