When my mother died, I was cooking. One weekend, my husband suggested we cook together. I’d spoken to my mother earlier that day on the phone. I’d told her about our life. She yawned and we said goodbye to one another. I didn’t know then what I would know 16 hours later. I hadn’t even asked how she was doing.

My mother died. My mother was my best friend. After she died, I felt so lonely. The only person I wanted to talk to about my grief was my mother. The only person who could help me was the one who was missing, however much love and support people gave me.

My mother gave me many things, but an education in cookery was not one of them. She liked eating more than cooking. But she had learned to cook when she was a teenager and she had some brilliant recipes. I know everyone says this, but my mother made the best roast beef dinners in the world. And, above all, fish pie! Almost every week, she would buy a prepared fish pie. Then she would bring it home and make her own white sauce.

My mother never got around to teaching me how to make a white sauce-and I never got around to asking her. Now that she was gone, I would have to teach myself. So this became my focus. For the first weeks, I survived on instant foods. But one night, a fish pie mix caught my eye at the store. When I got home, I set myself in front of our electric stove. Armed with a recipe, I tried to teach myself to make a white sauce. Halfway through the recipe, I couldn’t believe it-I’d made a white sauce! Then I remembered: I had always hated fish pie. Admiring my sauce, I wondered why I was so committed to making a dish I had hated for 25 years. Why was it suddenly so important to me?

I spooned the sauce over the fish. Then I ate the pie. It was delicious. More importantly, something strange had happened. The act of making a meal had calmed me. It helped me find peace.

I was raised in the suburbs of Cleveland, just a few, blocks from the brick faced Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library system. I went there several times a week with my mother. She and I would walk in together, but as soon as we passed through the door, we each headed to our favorite section.

Even when I was maybe four or five years old, I was allowed to head off on my own. Then, after a while, my mother and I would reunite at the checkout counter with our finds. Together we’d wait as the librarian pulled out the date card and stamped it with the checkout machine — that giant fist thumping the card with a loud chunk-chunk, printing a crooked due date underneath a score of previous crooked due date that belonged to other people, other times.

After we checked out, I loved being in the car and having all the books we’d gotten stacked on my lap, pressing me under their solid, warm weight. It was such a thrill leaving a place with things you hadn’t paid for, such a thrill anticipating the new books we would read. On the ride home, my mom and I talked about the order in which we were going to read our books, a solemn conversation in which we planned how to pace ourselves through this charmed period of grace until the books were due.

When I was older, I usually walked to the library by myself, lugging back as many books as I could carry. Occasionally, I did go with my mother, and the trip would be as enchanted as it had been when I was small. When I miss my mother these days, since she died two years ago, I like to picture a mother and her son in the car together, going for one more magnificent trip to Bertram Woods.