It’s 1987, and I’m five years old. Mormonism is my whole world. I am given to understand that while there may be many good people in the world waiting to accept the good news of the Gospel, they do not have the whole picture, they do not have what they need. And others—maybe the majority of people—wouldn’t embrace it even if they had it. They are lost. I feel somewhat superior to my kindergarten peers but also feel a huge sense of pastoral responsibility. I have something they don’t. I need to be a good example. I need to share.

Also, I love television. My parents don’t let me watch TV a lot, but if Dad has the TV on, I’m usually welcome to sit with him and watch. Football is scary, and I don’t like it (yet). He also watches a show that’s kind of hard to understand with special effects that, even then, look really dumb. There’s a stern-looking guy with pointy ears and some other men. There is also a woman in a short dress with darker skin who is maybe the prettiest lady I’ve ever seen. But I can’t say that I care for the show. I don’t get it. I think it’s called Star Track, and I’m not especially enthused when it comes on. But I usually sit and watch.

Dad and my uncle are having a conversation one afternoon about a new updated version of this show, and they sound excited.

Every Saturday night that Star Trek: The Next Generation is on for the next seven years will become must-see-TV in my household. Even my mom, who doesn’t care much for television, will watch. And there was little Margie who became awkward tween Margie as the seven seasons passed, absolutely mesmerized by the crew of the USS Enterprise. I loved them all, but I revered Captain Picard. He reminded me so much of all the good men in my life, the men I looked up to: my father, who was the bishop of our ward; our stake president, one of our close family friends; the men in the big chairs I’d see when we’d go to my grandmother’s house to watch General Conference. There was just one problem.

“Mommy,” I remember asking early in the show’s run, “where is the Church?”

“What?” she asked.

“Well, in the Star Trek future, when everything is so good for humanity, where is the Church?”

“Honey, Star Trek is made up. Of course, in a future three or four hundred years from now the Church will fill the whole earth. But Star Trek is just a story.”

“So the future won’t be like Star Trek?”

“No. But the Second Coming will bring peace and order that will be kind of like Star Trek, except better.”

I nodded. I got it. But then I thought about how even more Church, three hours of uncomfortable clothes and sitting and less-than-exciting music didn’t seem like as much fun as the crew of the Enterprise was having. And then I wasn’t sure, on a purely day-to-day level, that it would be that much better for humanity, either. Sure, the characters on Star Trek: The Next Generation still had problems, but they faced them together. They solved them. Perpetual, if not eternal, progression.

And then there were the problems they could not solve. They faced philosophical and moral dilemmas. The answers were not easy, which contradicted what I was being taught at home and in church. (“All you have to do is follow the Prophet!”) I learned it was possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. I learned that despite our best efforts and intentions, we can still get it catastrophically wrong. I learned the value of what I’d now call epistemic humility. I’ve revisited the series many times in adulthood, and with rare glaring exceptions, the writing holds up.

And then there was the fact that I could not imagine a better human-being than Captain Jean-Luc Picard. He was smart. He was fair. He led with integrity and intention. Over and over he showed me that principled people of deep conviction saw nuance, they understood that rules, even sacred ones, cannot apply all the time in every circumstance. And he drank tea! A lot of tea. (He did other things that I knew, even then, “good” people weren’t supposed to do.) And yet, there he was: leader, scholar, lover of good books and good music. He wasn’t perfect. And he’d be the first to tell you so. Yet young Margie knew that anybody claiming that Captain Picard was missing something fundamental, that he was one of those worldly sinners she was warned about, was wrong.

The longest summer of my life was the agonizing summer of 1990, which I spent wondering what would become of my hero, who had been assimilated by the Borg and left, perhaps, for worse-than-dead. I was eight. And I struggled with this: Could a force exist that was so powerful, that it could take agency away? Even of a great and good man like Captain Picard? I heard my mom’s voice in my head, “It’s just a story.” But somehow, little Margie, newly baptized and confirmed member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, now fully responsible for all of her own many sins, believed it possible. Things could happen to people. Things so terrible that agency didn’t figure into it. And it wasn’t their fault. Other people might blame them, of course. But it wasn’t their fault.

Star Trek was a moral education for me in a way that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints never has been. And Captain Picard was my teacher. Patrick Stewart was not Jean-Luc Picard. He was a Shakespearean actor, a thoughtful man, a gifted one. But also, Patrick Stewart was Jean-Luc Picard. And when we lost him, last week, I was unprepared for the way it knocked me sideways.

In Picard, the early 20s series in which Sir Patrick reprises the role, the character must show a group of new lifeforms what it means to inhabit the universe with integrity. Nothing less than the end of all life as we know it is on the line. Picard is asked how he can possibly teach these young lifeforms such a momentous lesson in the small time they have before the oncoming apocalypse. “The way children learn most things,” he says, “by example.” And he embarks on what he believes is a mission that will kill him but may save everyone else. It’s the stuff of high melodrama. And I was there for it.

Because I remembered how, when I was a child, Captain Picard taught me by example, too.

Rest in power, Sir Patrick. And thank you.