A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

What all these people were doing at the shopping center on a normal weekday was beyond his comprehension. Obviously people no longer had jobs to go to.

He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.

daylight by taylor

People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned over in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.

But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after either.

“You have to love me twice as much now,” she said.

And then Ove lied to her for the second—and last—time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.

Every human being needs to know what she’s fighting for. That was what they said. And she fought for what was good. For the children she never had. And Ove fought for her. Because that was the only thing in this world he really knew.

Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.

But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.

“Loving someone is like moving into a house,” Sonja used to say. “At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections.

It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.

For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.