Cory Taylor was busy in the last months of her life. Dying well, it seems, is a time-consuming task. We were three of the many friends who crowded her hours with visits and talk over Japanese tea, energetic conversations that looped around art and life and children and, of course, writing. Her final book, Dying: A Memoir, had brought radio and newspaper interviewers into her last days, as well as dozens of messages of tribute. She welcomed us all.

Although doctors had only given her until Christmas 2015, Cory lasted until yesterday morning, surrounded by family, and dying without pain. She had known she was dying for over ten years. Despite this she continued to live. She continued to write. She changed her relationship to death and, in the process, changed our understanding of life.

But much of this only happened after Cory changed her relationship to writing. After decades of working as a screenwriter, Cory turned her attention to novels and discovered she loved the efficiency of writing books. No need for funding, producers or directors, just terrific editors (Text Publishing’s Caro Cooper, then Penny Hueston) and a great publisher (Michael Heyward) and bam – the books were out.

Given how few people knew she had been diagnosed with advanced melanoma in 2005, we now know that what she needed most to tell her stories was speed. Books gave her that.

Partly inspired by her teen years, Me and Mr Booker (2010) was about a teenage girl’s sexual coming of age in the drab Canberra suburbs of Cory’s own youth. At its centre was an irresistible, whip-smart heroine, who thought and spoke like the 16-year-old we wish we’d been. It was finished in such a blitz, many close friends weren’t even aware Cory was writing a novel.

Me and Mr Booker went on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Pacific Region), and her second novel My Beautiful Enemy (2013) – a heartsplitting queer love story set in a Japanese internment camp in country Victoria – was nominated for the Miles Franklin. To the literary world, Cory had seemingly come out of nowhere only to scoop up the entire prize pool. If we didn’t know and love Cory so much, it’s entirely possible we would’ve despised her. The speed with which she wrote these sublime, perfect and award-winning novels was frankly almost rude.

In her final few months, however, Cory had to slow down. She found herself talking to her editor Penny Hueston – partly complaining, partly apologising – conceding that she wouldn’t be able to finish the novel she’d been working on, after all. As they discussed what dying was like – the sadness of it all, as well as the strange and unexpected moments of hilarity – on Hueston’s encouragement, Cory spent her remaining precious months crafting Dying: A Memoir.

Apart from its intelligence and stylistic virtue, Cory’s last testament arrived like a thoughtful gift to anyone who opened it. It is unsparing in its insights and observations, breathtaking in its courage and generosity. A thing of lightness and beauty; a precious thing that holds the wise, humorous and fragile voice of a very precious member of our community of writers. It contains a voice that will gentle many of us into the next phase of our own lives. It’s as funny as it is profound, confronting as it is consoling. But you can go to the reviews for all that. (For what it’s worth, Julian Barnes and Margaret Drabble agree with us.)

Most importantly though, it’s a fundamentally helpful book. In the book – and in her final interview with the ABC’s Richard Fidler – Cory talks about how ill-prepared the secular can be when it comes to discussing, preparing for or even discussing death.

“Things are not as they should be,” she writes. “For so many of us, death has become the unmentionable thing, a monstrous silence.”

What Cory gives us in Dying: A Memoir is a vocabulary and an invitation to speak about the most difficult thing any of us will face. It is a remarkable gift.

In amongst all the sadness of today, there is also joy. Her book launch at Avid Reader – the inner-city Brisbane book shop where many of the staff and customers are Cory’s friends and fellow writers – was like a funeral and party all at once. Cory was beamed in via Skype, joining us in equal amounts of tears and howling laughter. All three of us were privileged to speak at the launch, and though Cory was not well enough to attend, she spoke to us with the same humour and sharp intellect that infuses all her work.

And now, she continues to speak to us through her writing. As her publisher Michael Heyward said today: “Her body was weakening but she wrote at the top of her powers. Make no mistake, she is one of the writers who matters, whose work will live.” True to Michael’s word, in the coming months, Dying: A Memoir will be published all around the world.

At one point in her literary swansong, Cory tells us what she’ll miss. “The short answer is Shin, my husband of thirty-one years, and the faces of my children [Nat and Dan],” she writes. “The long answer is the world and everything in it: wind, sun, rain, snow and all the rest. But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I will be glad when it’s over.”

As for us, we miss Cory Taylor desperately. Though she has gone, we are enormously lucky that her work lives on. Then selfishly, there’s this: all the books Cory didn’t get to write. The books we won’t get to read, to hear her talk about. What they might have given us, revealed about us. The awards they might have won, the people they would have moved. An absence on our bookshelves and in our lives.

Along with all her writing colleagues and friends, we will miss her fierce intellect and her humour, along with a generosity that extended beyond books to her daily life. We loved her for that, as we loved the books for their tenderness, for their gentle exploration of longing and the secret lives we all have. The loss of this one life is a loss for all of us.

Yet her death was a good one. It was anticipated. She had time to plan and to speak to those she loved. She lived long enough to see that her memoir had touched many other lives. She saw the ripples of her words moving through her readers. She knew she had made a difference. If only we all could die so well.

• Dying: A Memoir is out now in Australia through Text Publishing. It will be published in November in the UK by Canongate.

• The authors have donated their contributor’s fee to Karuna Hospice Services, a Brisbane-based charity established to help people – including Cory Taylor – live a meaningful and happy life while embracing uncertainty and change