Coming to an end

Ted Koppel is leaving Nightline after 25 years of hosting the best news show on network TV. He's considered too old, too stodgy, and will be replaced by a younger team that's more dynamic, with fewer scruples - dumbing the news ever further down.

On last night’s final episode, he replayed excerpts from his shows featuring Morrie Schwartz, a professor dying from ALS, who became the subject of Mitch Albom’s best selling book Tuesdays With Morrie.

I haven’t read the book, but the Ted Koppel interviews were quite moving, and I especially liked Schwartz's tale illustrating his view of his coming demise...

A small ocean wave is cresting along quite happily until he notices that the waves ahead of him are crashing on the shore, disappearing into nothingness. Terrified at the realization that he too will soon crash on the shore and die, he confides his fear to another wave. But the other wave explains that there’s nothing to fear: he will not be crashing and dying - he'll merely return to being a part of the larger ocean.