At a time when our culture is open to just about everything, there is one taboo – the grief experienced upon losing a loved one. Or, as the author herself puts it, “If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

It is one of those exquisitely personal transactions that lead me to this courageous and empathetic memoir. As I lose my own aging mother, little by little, I have entered a pre-mourning period that is often challenging for myself to navigate and others to understand.

And so I gravitated towards this courageous memoir from a woman who has steered her way those grounds and provides a sort of blueprint of what it’s like to feel unmoored. Meghan O’Rourke’s mother Barbara died in her early fifties; as she lay dying of cancer, Meghan became “irrevocably aware that the Person Who Loved Me Most in the World was about to be dead.”

Without the rituals of long ago to guide her, with a strong fear of death that encompassed her since childhood, she “just wanted to flee the pain that lay like a fog in the house; getting away would be like turning a blank page, to a new story, a different one.” The loss is so huge that she “needed to contain it somehow, to put barriers around its chaos.” But like a child who has become separated from mommy, she is in disbelief that “a person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back.”

She knows logically that her mother is no longer with her and that it’s up to her and her two brothers to carry her forward in the year. Yet she remains “clueless about the rules of shelter and solace in this new world of exile.” As C.S. Lewis wrote at the beginning of A Grief Observed, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

What is astounding about this memoir – what elevates it above many other so-called “grief books” – is that Meghan O’Rourke is able to take the personal and lifts it into the universal. The pain that any grieving or soon-to-be-grieving person feels – “Am I really she who has woken up again without a mother?” – or a father, or a husband or wife can understand Meghan’s emotions, her monumental agony. It’s a sorority or fraternity that only those who have experienced it are given entry.

With both candor and lyricism and an unswerving eye to preserving her truth, the author explores the fifteen months following her mother’s death. She quotes scientific research as effortlessly as she quotes poets and writers who have confronted the grieving process. And at the end, when she resorts to a primal whisper – “Come on, Mom, say another night, stay the night—Stay the night,” she gives voice to all those who struggle with the implausibility of knowing that those they love cannot live forever. It’s a masterful work.