I ran across Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night while looking for something else at the library. It looked interesting so I checked it out. I’m so glad I did. A wonderful story about Addie and Louis, two long-time neighbors whose spouses have both passed away. They decide to begin spending nights together, not a romantic, sexual relationship, but companionship to overcome loneliness; someone to talk to and lie next to.

Talking about his wife, Louis says,

“At least she’s at peace now in some other place or higher realm. I think I believe that. I hope she is. She never really got from me what she wanted from me. She had a kind of idea, a notion of how life should be, how marriage should be, but that was never how it was with us. I failed her in that way. She should’ve had somebody else.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself again,” Addie said. “Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out of old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings. Except I still say that isn’t true of you and me. Not right now, not today.“

A gentle story of two people reaching out and touching each other right in the heart. The author passed away after writing this book, before it was published. A lovely coda.