What then should be her epitaph? What final handle should we choose for the woman who was our adviser in chief? Sensible from Sioux City?

Eppie Lederer died on Saturday, taking Ann Landers with her. The two were, after all, inseparable. For nearly half a century, Lederer/Landers made sense the way other people make cars or computer chips. Sense, however, was a much rarer product, harder to fashion and always in demand.

In her newspaper office, in her apartment, in her bathtub, Lederer answered letters one decade after another until cancer finally did what few editors dared ended her column.

Ann Landers was as American as a wisecrack and as universal as a broken heart. She was as dated as “doozie” and as timeless as empathy. She was as outspoken as any opponent of the “gun nuts” and as gentle as any judge who ever delivered a verdict of “40 lashes with a wet noodle.”

In the end, she wasn’t so much a mother confessor as she was a fellow traveler. She was there, offering advice when Stumped in San Diego and Bewildered in Boston were figuring out which values to reassess and which to retain.

Imagine this: Eppie Lederer was born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1918, two years before women won the right to vote. Imagine Eppie Lederer being unable to make her opinion count.

She was one of twin daughters born to a Russian immigrant, a peddler who eventually made his money in movie theaters. As a woman of her own time, she once had the lining of her fur coat embroidered, “Jules’ wife.” As a woman of her own making, she competed for her job and began her career on Oct. 16, 1955, at the height of the feminine mystique.

From the very beginning, Lederer was conscious of the isolation, uncertainty and pain that made people put pen to paper, asking for help from a complete stranger. “These people have nobody else to talk to, ” she once mused, “They write to a name in a newspaper. That’s a tragedy.”

On the other hand, she acknowledged with trademark breeziness, “I’m free, the price is right and they can be anonymous. They feel they know me.”

Beginning in an era when people still whispered the word “cancer” and didn’t “know” any homosexuals, Ann Landers’ motto became: “Wake up and smell the coffee.” The tiny woman with the brassy voice was the leading indicator and change agent of a world that would come to believe for better and for excess in frankness.

“You needed that guy like a giraffe needs a strep throat.” “A father who diapers his daughter until the age of 12 has a geranium in his cranium.”

“Masturbation is a normal part of growing up.”

Landers/Lederer covered a span from “Father Knows Best” to Ozzie Osbourne. From the love that dares not speak its name to gay marriage. From prudes to penile implants.

The woman who once didn’t believe in divorce ended up divorced. The woman who advocated communication and peace was estranged for years from her twin and competitor, Dear Abby.

Through it all this advice columnist had the right stuff: resilience. “How did it happen that something so good didn’t last forever?” she wrote of her marriage. “The lady with all the answers does not know the answer to this one.” As for her mistakes, “I have learned that each of us is capable of doing something completely irrational and totally out of character at some time during our lives. … It simply means we are human.”

Today we have a generation of advisers as rigid as Dr. Laura and as judgmental as Judge Judy. Today, TV hosts encourage people to throw off their anonymity to “air their dirty linen” in public. Discouraged in Dayton has become Just Shameless on Jerry Springer.

But in the two-way dialogue of her life with readers, this adviser hewed a careful narrative line of change and tradition. She didn’t believe in traditional values as a permanent chain to tie people up in knots. Her values were, rather, a sustaining rope like the ones they string between buildings in her hometown Chicago so that people have something to hold onto when the wind howls.

In the end, the most trusted and enduring value in her life’s work was quite simply its humanity. Someone once asked Eppie how she wanted to be remembered. She answered this way: “She did her best. She tried to help. That’s good enough.”

Eppie Lederer. Ann Landers. She made sense and made it seem common.

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.