Dick Wall in The Book Keepers (First Run Features)

When Carol, his wife of nearly 43 years, died at age 63, Dick Wall found himself having to deal with inexpressible grief, and also something else. Carol’s latest book had been published while she was sick, and she could not travel for a book tour to publicize it. So, Dick decided to take over the tour himself, which became part of his long journey of healing, and which his son, director Phil Wall, chronicles for the emotional documentary The Book Keepers.

Dick travels all over the country, from Vermont to the Dakota Badlands, speaking to audiences in small bookstores about how he came to do this tour. He explains that, before her death from cancer, Carol never gave him permission, and he never asked her for it. In between stops on the tour, Dick discusses with his son his state of mind since he became a widower. Early on, he mentions that at one time he thought to himself that, once Carol died, his trauma would also end. However, he admits, “It wasn’t over, I can tell you that.”

Carol and Dick met in high school in Radford (a city in the southwest part of Virginia) and married when she was 20 and he 19. She began, as she called it, her “pretend writing career” in school. We hear and see Carol in several archival interviews as well as home movies—even while she is sick—writing novels before her 2014 memoir, Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart, about her friendship with a Kenyan neighbor, was published prior to her death from the recurrence of the cancer that she thought she had beaten.

Carol taught English in a local school, and Dick said that she especially enjoyed introducing Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s classic play, to her students, as it touchingly reveals how everyday, seemingly innocuous moments make up our lives. Phil intercuts moments from a 1977 TV adaptation of the play starring Hal Holbrook as the omniscient Stage Manager as Dick describes how his wife applied the lessons of Our Town to her own difficulties: “She never blamed anybody for her illness. And that’s the gracious acceptance of life.”

After a while, his children start worrying about his mental state, that he is plowing through this tour because he feels he has to. Dick’s daughter, a psychologist, says that Carol’s exhortation before she died to “take care of the book” didn’t necessarily mean to try to sell as many copies as possible. (When Dick begins the book tour, the paperback edition has just been published.) Later, as Dick sits down and checks the sales on Amazon, Phil tells him straight out, “It’s the wrong goal.”

But then, as Dick quotes from Joan Didion’s memoir about losing her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, “Life changes in an instant.” He meets a woman, Teresa, at a hospice support group—her husband and teenage daughter were killed in a car accident—and falls in love.

The film’s final moments are the most moving, as Phil beautifully juxtaposes joyful images of Dick and Teresa with Carol’s poignant words about her writing and her life: “I’m always looking and believing in a happy ending, not just for myself, but for other people too.” As Claude Debussy’s delicate piano piece, Clair de Lune, plays on the soundtrack, Dick Wall’s roller-coaster ride of emotion, which began with the ultimate heartbreak, concludes in a wave of sheer happiness.