Ask a Literary Lady: Why Do We Mourn Writers?

Dear Readers,
A few days ago, one of my favorite writers passed. It is with that in mind that I write with no answers for you this week, just questions.
Every avid reader has been struck at one time or another by the death of a writer they admired and perhaps even loved deeply. It’s a lonely sadness that you feel. You can’t share it or ask for comfort. It’s hard to explain to others, and maybe you’re even embarrassed by how much you’re affected. After all, it’s someone you never knew and never even met. It’s grief once removed, and yet it’s grief nonetheless.
Why do we feel so bereft when a writer passes away? Is it because it’s the nature of great literature to make us feel like we know the author? Is it because we feel we’ve lost a familiar voice and perspective, whether it’s wise, funny, or authoritative? Do we mourn them because, in reading a novel, we’ve shared an experience with the writer that’s moving, memorable, and personal to us?
We readers want so badly for our favorite writers to be endlessly prolific and immortal. When we find out they are not, do we grieve because we’re saddened there’s an end to what the writer has to say? That no more ideas, no more words, and no more works are forthcoming? Do we sigh because there had to be a last book?
I suspect it’s generally only later in life that you begin to lose the writers you love. In your younger, formative years, much of what you read is written by authors who are long gone—Austen, Fitzgerald, Dickens. It’s only later in life that you start to explore the works of more contemporary writers. And it may be even later than that, when years of assigned reading and instruction have passed, that you start to discover who you truly love to read, whose words hold weight for you.
Maybe this is why we feel such a connection to someone others may think of as merely a stranger. We spent years reading books, and we finally found them. They were a discovery for us, and thereafter they defined our taste in literature. We told others about them, we volunteered their names when asked what we liked to read, and we compared other books to their works.
So maybe when we mourn the passing of well-loved writers, it’s because, as a friend of mine said, “It’s the end of a train of thought.” Theirs and ours.   
Love and paperbacks,
Literary Lady