I looked through them as I sat down to write this, my last column. Some are simple thank yous: Readers are grateful that I've touched on a topic they care about. Others contain suggestions -- books I should read, issues I should tackle.

Still other e-mail messages offer help. After I wrote about my dad's leg pain, readers took pity on my father and me. They forwarded us their leg pain remedies and the names of sympathetic doctors. When I wrote about my mother, who aspirated a pill, readers gently recommended liquid vitamins. One woman sent an actual paper letter detailing vitamin brands and where to buy them.

None of my e-mail messages, though, have been more poignant than one I received after my first column in which I wrote about patients of mine who had died. I said, simply, that I often thought of them, remembered them, missed them. After the column came out, I heard from a woman whose husband had died young of esophageal cancer. She had grown sad in her belief that her husband's doctors had forgotten him. She wrote to tell me that she was grateful to hear that doctors actually thought about their dead. My column consoled her, she said, and she kept it in her bedside table and read it when she was feeling melancholy.

As she had been moved by my column, so I was moved by her e-mail. I was chagrined though by her conviction that we doctors simply dismiss the dead and erase the memories of our former patients like so much chalk on the blackboard. "We're not like that," I wanted to say to her, and, at some level, I've been talking to her in all my subsequent columns.

As I've described in print my doctor days and nights, the people I meet, the blood and paperwork, I've been trying to convey something, especially to her, about who we doctors really are and how we think and feel about our patients. If I had to summarize it all, I'd simply say this: For most of the doctors I know, our patients are our weather -- always there, never quite predictable. In the hospital and in clinic, we follow them like meteorologists, reassured by calm, but always scanning their horizons for signs of impending calamity. When they're doing well, we're happy. When they're doing poorly, we're glum.

Not just current, but former patients are part of our personal climate. Sometimes they're wisps of cloud in the high sky of summer and we can find only traces of them -- someone laughs, and in their guffaw I hear the low chortling of the guy who brought peach moonshine to me after I'd taken out his gallbladder.

Other times old patients are fog, drifting through our minds and obscuring things. We find ourselves troubled without knowing exactly why, and then suddenly out of the mist looms a former patient. It happened just this fall with a woman who died two falls ago. For days around the anniversary of her death, something bothered me, but it took a friend saying her name, to make me realize I'd been thinking of her.

The oldest patients -- the ones we often haven't seen for years -- can be the stormiest. Just last week, I was reading a history of Washington, N.C. It was written in 1976 by a bicentennial committee of local historians. I looked up from the book, thinking of Washington's historians, and without warning, thunder struck. I was felled by the memory of my own town historian who came in talking after a car wreck and died on the OR table as my husband and I tried to save her. I hadn't thought of her for months and months, but there she was, as vivid as lightning streaking across my sky.

We doctors have days that are exhilarating, inspiring and deeply satisfying, but we have lonely days too, bad weather days when things happen that are grim and sad. Often we don't talk about them. Why should we burden someone else with it all?

Writing about it all for these many months has truly unburdened me, and the bonus prize has been my correspondents who have chided me, comforted me and constantly provoked me to think more deeply about what it is that I do as part of my doctoring tribe.

Thank you for reading and for taking the time to write.