John Updike wrote in his memoir, "Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?" And yet even if we were to somehow make peace with our own mortality, a primal fear rips through whenever we think about losing those we love most dearly -- a fear that metastasizes into all-consuming grief when loss does come. In The Long Goodbye, her magnificent memoir of grieving her mother's death, Meghan O'Rourke crafts a masterwork of remembrance and reflection woven of extraordinary emotional intelligence. Read more...
