Kent Haruf's little flame

This summer, I went to visit novelist Kent Haruf at his house in Salida, Colorado, to talk about writing and life and death. Not quite a year before, Haruf had been diagnosed with a terminal lung disease. He was in hospice care, and I had not known what to expect when he invited me to come.

But on this warm afternoon, he had made guacamole and lemonade, and we sat in the room behind the kitchen in the old mining-era house. We could see outside to the garden and the cabin-studio where he spent mornings reading and writing his last novel, Our Souls at Night. 

We talked almost entirely about books. He had recently expanded his reading to include what he called “airy-fairy” books about spirituality and death. He was pondering how he wanted to face death, and he was gathering resources to die awake to the experience of it. “I feel good,” he said.