The synagogue parking lot was jammed with cars, and the spillover stretched half a mile down the main road. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the day when, it is said, the Lord decides who will be sealed in the Book of Life for another year.

Although solemn by any measure, this was always the Reb’s shining hour, the morning for which his greatest sermons seemed reserved. It was rare when congregants did not go home buzzing about the Reb’s message on life, death, love, forgiveness.

Not today. At eighty-nine, he had stopped giving sermons. He made no appearance on the pulpit. Instead, he sat quietly among the other worshippers, and I sat in the next section over, beside my father and mother, as I had done on this occasion all my life.

It was the one day I looked like I belonged.

At some point during the afternoon service, I walked over to find the Reb. I passed former classmates, vaguely familiar faces but with thinning hair now, or eyeglasses, or jowls that didn’t used to be there. They smiled and whispered hello, recalling me faster than I did them, and I wondered if deep down they thought I felt superior because I’d moved on. They might have been justified; I think I acted that way.

The Reb was sitting a few seats off the aisle, clapping along to an upbeat prayer. He wore a cream-colored robe, as usual, but his walker, which he hated to use in public, rested against the nearby wall. Sarah was next to him, and when she spotted me, she tapped her husband, who looked over from his clapping.

“Ahh,” he said. “All the way from Detroit.”

His family members helped him up.

“Come. Let’s talk.”

He eased out slowly, finding the walker. People in the aisle drew in, hands at the ready, in case he needed help. You could see in their faces the mix of reverence and concern.

He grabbed the handles and steered himself out.

Twenty minutes later, after stopping every few feet to greet somebody, we found seats in his small office, across from the large one he’d once inhabited. I had never before had a private audience with the Reb on the holiest day of the year. It felt strange being in his office when all those other people were outside.

“Your wife is here?” he asked.

With my folks, I said.

“Good.”

He had always been sweet to my wife. And he never chafed me over her faith. That was kind.

How are you feeling? I asked.

“Ach. They want me to eat today.”

Who?

“The doctors.”

It’s okay.

“It isn’t.” He clenched a fist. “Today we fast. That is my tradition. I want to do what I always did.”

He lowered the fist, which shook on its own.

“You see?” he whispered. “This is man’s dilemma. We rail against it.”

Getting old?

“Getting old, we can deal with. Being old is the problem.”

One of the Reb’s most memorable sermons, to me, anyhow, came after his oldest living relative, an aunt, had died. His mother and father were already gone, and his grandparents were long since buried. As he stood near his aunt’s grave, he realized a simple but frightening thought:

I’m next.

What do you do when death’s natural pecking order puts you in the front of the line, when you no longer can hide behind “It’s not my turn”?

Seeing the Reb now, slumped behind his desk, reminded me, sadly, of how long he had been on top of his family’s list.

Why don’t you do sermons anymore? I asked.

“I can’t bear the thought,” he said, sighing. “If I stumbled on a word. If, at a key moment, I should lose my place-”

You don’t need to be embarrassed.

“Not me,” he corrected. “The people. If they see me discombobulated…it reminds them that I’m dying. I don’t want to scare them like that.”

I should have known he was thinking of us.

As a child, I truly believed there was a Book of Life, some huge, dusty thing in a library in the sky, and once a year, on the Day of Atonement, God flipped through the pages with a feathered quill pen and-check, check, X, check-you lived or you died. I was always afraid that I wasn’t praying hard enough, that I needed to shut my eyes tighter to will God’s pen from one side to the other.

What do people fear most about death? I asked the Reb.

“Fear?” He thought for a moment. “Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?”

That’s big.

“Yes. But there’s something else.”

What else?

He leaned forward.

“Being forgotten,” he whispered.

There is a cemetery not far from my house, with graves that date back to the nineteenth century. I have never seen anyone come there to lay a flower. Most people just wander through, read the engravings, and say, “Wow. Look how old.”

That cemetery came to mind in the Reb’s office, after he quoted a poem both beautiful and heartbreaking. Written by Thomas Hardy, it told of a man among tombstones, conversing with the dead below. The recently buried souls lamented the older souls that had already slid from memory:

They count as quite forgot,

They are as men who have existed not,

Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath

It is the second death.

The second death. The unvisited in nursing homes. The homeless found frozen in alleys. Who mourned their passing? Who marked their time on earth?

“Once, on a trip to Russia,” the Reb recalled, “we found an old Orthodox synagogue. Inside, there was an elderly man, standing alone, saying the mourner’s Kaddish. Being polite, we asked for whom he was saying it. He looked up and answered, ‘I am saying it for myself.’”

The second death. To think that you died and no one would remember you. I wondered if this was why we tried so hard to make our mark in America. To be known. Think of how important celebrity has become. We sing to get famous; expose our worst secrets to get famous; lose weight, eat bugs, even commit murder to get famous. Our young people post their deepest thoughts on public Web sites. They run cameras from their bedrooms. It’s as if we are screaming, Notice me! Remember me! Yet the notoriety barely lasts. Names quickly blur and in time are forgotten.

How then, I asked the Reb, can you avoid the second death?

“In the short run,” he said, “the answer is simple. Family. It is through my family that I hope to live on for a few generations. When they remember me, I live on. When they pray for me, I live on. All the memories we have made, the laughs and the tears.

“But that, too, is limited.”

How so?

He sang the next sentence.

“Ifff…I’ve done a good jobbb, then I’ll be re-mem-bered one generation, maybe two…but e-ven-tu-allllly…they’re gonna say, ‘What was his naaame again?’”

At first I protested. Then I stopped. I realized I did not know my great-grandmother’s name. I’d never seen my great-grandfather’s face. How many generations does it take, even in close-knit families, for the fabric to unravel?

“This is why,” the Reb said, “faith is so important. It is a rope for us all to grab, up and down the mountain. I may not be remembered in so many years. But what I believe and have taught-about God, about our tradition-that can go on. It comes from my parents and their parents before them. And if it stretches to my grandchildren and to their grandchildren, then we are all, you know…”

Connected?

“That’s it.”

We should get back to services, I said.

“All right. Yes. Gimme a little shove here.”

I realized it was just me there, and he couldn’t get up from the chair without help. How far was this from the days when he commanded the pulpit with a booming voice and I sat in the crowd, wowed by his performance? I tried not to think about that. I awkwardly moved behind him, counted “one…two…three,” then lifted him by the elbows.