Here if You Need Me, by Kate Braestrup

Kate Braestrup was a writer and mother of four when her husband, a Maine state trooper with a calling to become a minister, was killed in a car accident. Here if You Need Me is a collection of vignettes or essays that she wrote after he died. Some of the piece are about mourning for her husband and raising her children in the months and years that followed. Braestrup seems both unusually brave and aware—she washed and dressed her husband’s body and accompanied him to the crematory—and typically unable to get out of bed some days. One of the decisions that helped her keep getting out of bed was deciding to take on her husband’s dream of becoming a minister; her time in the seminary is the focus of a few vignettes. The largest number of the essays are, however, focused on her new career as chaplain to the Maine Game Warden Service. Many of these stories deal with how Braestrup and her colleagues cope with the work of searching for missing people and dealing with the varying outcomes of those searches. While these stories are often very sad, there is something about Braestrup’s humor, attitude of love (which in many ways seems to be her religion), and calm that renders reading the book a joyous experience. Even her author photo gives one a sense of radiant calm.

For a logical-sequential like me, my inability to understand the order in which Braestrup placed the essays was somewhat frustrating (why not a nice chronological order?), but didn’t detract from the overall effect of the book. Despite not being religious, I found the book a peaceful read.

Favorite passage:

For three days following Christina’s murder, Detective Sergeant Love worked pretty much around the clock. In between all the meetings, the phone calls, the inspections of the scene and new pieces of physical evidence, the interviews with witnesses and family members, the interrogation of the suspect, and in between attending to the manifold legal requirements for proper documentation of all of the above, Anna would periodically duck into her office with her breast pump. Bottles of her milk would be sent home where her husband waited with their baby.

If ours were a sensible culture, little girls would play with Anna Love action figures, badge in one hand, breast pump in the other.

True love demands that. Like a bride with her bouquet, you toss your fragile glass heart into the waiting crowd of living hands and trust that they will catch it.