Nedra K. Ross did not reach for elaborate language or carefully constructed sentiment when she sat down to tell the world about her mother’s final hours — she reached for the truth, plain and complete and more powerful than anything a speechwriter could have assembled: “At approximately 8:30 this morning our mother Nedra Talley Ross went home to be with the Lord. She was safe in her own bed at home with her family close, knowing she was loved. Thank you Lord.”

Those words have traveled across every corner of the internet since they were posted, shared by people who loved the Ronettes and people who simply recognized, in the simplicity and the grace of a daughter’s farewell to her mother, something universally and permanently true about what it means to lose someone and what it means, against all odds, to lose them well. The picture Nedra K. Ross painted of her mother’s final hours is one that the fans who followed the Ronettes’ extraordinary journey — from three cousins forming a group in 1959, to opening for the Beatles on their final US tour in 1966, to their hard-won Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2007 — needed to receive and will carry with them for a long time, the image of a woman of 80 years, grounded in the Christian faith that had anchored her life since she left the Ronettes and never once wavered , leaving the world exactly as she had lived in it — surrounded by love, at peace, and entirely herself until the very end.