The Last Lion, as The Boston Globe called him, is dead.

The news has been dominated by the death of Ted Kennedy until his burial, and it will be influenced for weeks as Congress debates whether to pass a health-care reform bill in his memory.

There will be memorials, publications, anecdotes, quiet depression on the left and deeply buried satisfaction on the right. All interested parties have had months to consider and prepare for this moment, as the senator had been passing time in Hyannis Port waiting for cancer to kill him.

There is an unintended irony, as so many ironies are, arising from his death. In 2004, when John Kerry resigned his Senate seat from Massachusetts to run for president, Kennedy pressured the state legislature to change the method for filling his vacant seat, which at the time called for an appointment by then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican. The new method requires a special election, which is prohibited from taking place less than 145 days after the vacancy occurs.

In his last days, Kennedy petitioned the state legislature to change the law back so that the current governor, a Democrat, could fill the seat quickly, because Kennedy's seat was the ever-crucial 60th Democratic vote in the Senate. The change has not been made, and apparently will not be.

Thus the Democrats are handicapped in their battle for health-care reform by the absence of the vote of the man who pushed hardest for it for 40 years. Offsetting that is the possibility that Congress will quickly pass some ill-considered legislation in his name to soothe its collective conscience. This would be a tremendous disservice, not only to the country, but also to Kennedy's memory.

Unreconstructed liberal that he was, Kennedy worked hard at compromise throughout his career. He believed that half a loaf was better than none and took what he could get in decades of give-and-take with Republican opponents. If he could not get the health-care plan he wanted, he would at least have tried to create something incremental and logical.

If, in his absence, anything as flawed as what in now before Congress should pass, it will not be a worthy tribute.

Despite sometimes extreme political differences, Kennedy managed to remain personally popular with fellow senators. That was what allowed him to work successfully to implant so many of his ideas into law. He was, by all accounts, a kind and generous person who went out of his way to be nice to friends, foes and total strangers.

His politics and his personality sprang from a life that could be called anything from stressful to bizarre: rich and distant parents, three older brothers killed, a life of philandering and dissipation reversed in midcourse, all culminating in a Senate career that pundits are already calling the greatest of modern times.

Time, of course, will tell. It will take a while to get past the barrage of tributes to all the Kennedy brothers and the overblown analysis of their impact on the country. After all that is over, the indisputable remaining fact will be that of the four Kennedys, Ted was the most important. Joe died in the war, Jack's presidency fades further every year, Bobby never really got started.

It was Ted who remained a national figure for 40 years and had the greatest influence on national politics.

Through a life that paralleled the events of a chaotic half-century, Kennedy never changed his politics. That earned him dedicated friends and passionate enemies and made him something of a rock in the stream of national consciousness. He was committed and diligent.

You may or may not mourn his passing, but we will not soon see his like again.

Fred Wolferman lives in Southern Pines. Contact him by e-mail at fwolferman@sbcglobal.net.