I’ve been reading some of the literature of grief. We’ve had a pair of deaths in the family, not quite back-to-back but close together nevertheless. A few months apart. One expected, one very much a surprise. In the ensuing days and weeks that followed, as plans were rearranged or outright canceled; as the reality of the enormity of the task before us to shut down an entire apartment; as the phone chirped with innumerable tender texts of consolation; and the endless phone calls to friends, family, lawyers, banks, and funeral homes—somewhere in this mess I pulled a book off the shelf and opened to page one. The greatest recent book on grief is easily The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s account of how the year after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, unfolded and how many of the things she did in that year were all a way to bring John back, even though she knew he was gone forever. This had been languishing on my bookshelf for over twenty years, the front flap of the dust jacket serving as a bookmark for a spot I found particularly interesting. And as I reread the book, it struck me in ways it hadn’t my first meander through.

Why would it? There was no reason it should. It wasn’t that I was unaware of the emotion of grief. Sure, over the course years, we’d lost loved ones, friends, grandmothers. But we’d not faced death like this before. Not parents. This was new, and immediate, and I turned to the book to re-familiarize myself with the grieving process.

Over the weekend, despite having not finished The Year of Magical Thinking, I decided I needed additional books on the topic of grief. The literature of mourning is a peculiar one, with the reader avidly consuming the sadness of the authors. Yet, there it is. I had two books in particular in mind: C.S. Lewis’s classic A Grief Observed, taken from the journal he kept after the passing of his wife, Joy; and H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s work on the passing of her father and how a goshawk helped her through her grief.

So, to the bookstore I went. And found both, neither of which I have yet to start. I haven’t even finished Didion’s book yet, and it’s not long. But I was sidetracked. (I’m easily sidetracked when it comes to books.) As I was passing the Essays section, a book with a lapis blue cover caught my eye. What kept it there was the author’s name, in black lettering on the spine: Ursula K. Le Guin. The book was No Time to Spare and it is a collection of her blog posts from when she decided to start blogging—in her eighties.

By her own admission, Le Guin never had much use for the form. In fact, based on her belief of where the term “blog” came from, she’d had little use for them. (For the curious-minded, she thought it was short for something like bio-log. It’s actually a shortened version of the term weblog.) But she discovered Jose Saramago’s work as The Notebooks, which were his own posts from a blog he started when he was eighty-five. Those I have not read, but having recently been immersed in the writing of Le Guin—Tombs of Atuan, some selections from her story collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, and having just finally finished her translation of the Tao Te Ching, which I’d been nibbling at for years—finding this book felt like an act of divine providence. So I added it to the pile, along with a book on how to write haiku which I had not seen before.

I started it the moment I got home, and like so much of Le Guin’s work, I have not been disappointed. It’s smart and wryly funny, in Le Guin’s unmistakable voice. It is wise and erudite and full of the wisdom of an eighty-plus-year-old author whose philosophical fiction places her among the best sci-fi writers of all time. Always though-provoking, never dry.

Her essays involve all manner of topics, from economics to questions she gets from readers, with occasional interludes relating the antics of her cat, Pard. But among the things I most enjoy are her mediations on aging. Having started her blog in her eighties, Le Guin writes on a wide variety of subjects, while never denying her place within the space/time continuum. There is a grace Le Guin’s writing that cannot help move the reader, and a humor that makes you want to read parts of it out loud to someone.

Which brings me back to mourning.

As we as a family prepare for the end of life rituals of two extraordinary people, I continue to read books on grief. And they are, in their own way, helpful. Everyone’s grief is different, takes different forms. Reading memoirs of loss, it’s hard to find an experience of feeling that matches yours perfectly. But you keep reading because there’s solace in knowing that, maybe you aren’t feeling it the same way as the author or the guy next to you, but you feel it. As did they.

But while the literature of loss is important and dearly needed, it’s the literature of growing old, nibbling at the edge of mortality, facing it clear-eyed yet with humor, that I keep returning to. Because yes, it is true, we all must go sometime. I’m sorry to break this news to you if you hadn’t already heard. But it’s how we approach the end that matters. The parents we lost were marvels of musical talent, wondrous educators whose students were never far from their minds, and generous beyond what some might consider their obligation. And they were like this to the end. Were they perfect? Of course not, no one is. But perfect or not, they were much loved. And the lesson I try to take away from them, and from Ursula K. Le Guin, is that how we approach the end is as important as any other stage of life. Maybe even more so.