May 14, 2015 3 min read

If anybody needs me this Sunday night, don’t bother. I’ll be glued to the tube, watching the only television I’ve cared about in a long time.

The finale of “Mad Men” will air, closing an eight-year run that captured the imagination even of those who, like me, don’t otherwise bother much with series TV. I am generally ignorant about the prevailing popular-cultural references of the past 20 years because I didn’t watch. I didn’t care for “Friends,” never saw a full episode of “Breaking Bad” and couldn’t pick McDreamy out of a police lineup. I’d like to say I spent all those prime-time hours reading or at the gym, but the truth is most nights I was asleep by 10.

I can’t say why “Mad Men” caught my eye, but that first episode in 2007 reeled me in for good.

The show is set in a Madison Avenue advertising agency, starting in the early 1960s. All the men wear proper hats and the women wear foundation garments that give them outrageous hourglass figures; everybody drinks at the office and chain smokes.

The main character, Don Draper, is a handsome cad who carries a cloud of dark mystery. As we await the final episode, many are thinking Don will die at the end.

Why was I dedicated to this show? It aligns with the beginning of my life. I would have been taking my first steps when Don Draper first walked into the ad agency. Although my father wasn’t a big-city ad man, he was tall and handsome like Don Draper. My mother was nothing like the women in the story: she didn’t tease up her hair or wear starchy dresses and has never had a drink or a cigarette.

But we had ashtrays around our house, for visitors, like the ones shown all over the office and homes on the show. And the workers had little kids at home who would have been my age. We shared a slice of time.

Sometime during the third season of “Mad Men,” I got cancer. During that year of surgery and treatment, when daily life was an exhausting blur, I looked forward to Sunday nights, when Don Draper and his wife, Betty, would distract me for an hour. I recently went back and watched a few episodes of that third season and it put me right back there, in the big easy chair in my bedroom, watching Don and Betty fighting while I fought waves of nausea.

Oh, and Betty, Betty, Betty! Grace Kelly-beautiful but a lost soul and a chilly mother. Things will end badly for her, as we learned last week. She’s been through so much: cheating husband, divorce, grotesque weight gain. I still say January Jones should have won an Emmy for wearing all that padding that season.

And now we’re at the end. Betty lost the weight and remarried a politician. The women in the office gained power and ditched the tight dresses. And Don Draper became more lost than ever.

What will become of him? That’s the question of the week. I don’t think he will die; I believe Don Draper will find redemption. But if the producers decide he must die, that will be OK, too, because whether the character lives or dies, the show will be over. And for those of us who lived the story with them, Sunday nights won’t be the same.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.