Here if You Need Me by Kate Braestrup

Here if You Need Me by Kate Braestrup
hardcover 211 pages
published by Little, Brown and Company in August of 2007
ISBN13: 9780316066303

Type: {Weekend Read: a book to curl up on the couch with}
Rating: {An Unputdownable: Couldn’t eat or sleep until I finished this book}

Why You’re Reading It:

• You have recently lost someone you love
• You know someone who has recently experienced a loss and want a gift to give them
• You are struggling with the idea of death
• You enjoy life affirming reads
• Human kindness and strength is a topic that  intrigues you

What I Thought:

Here if You Need Me is a book about death, yet is oddly life affirming. After losing her husband Drew, a Maine State Trooper, in an accident, Kate Braestrup decides to take up his dream of becoming a Universalist minister. After completing her training she becomes the chaplain for the Maine Warden Service (the Maine search and rescue team) a job in which her main responsibility is to comfort those who are waiting to hear if their loved ones are dead or alive.

With Braestrup’s appealing voice and original, yet universal stories, she reminds us that while we each have our unique stories, tragedies, and triumphs, we are all human. And it is in that humanness that we are connected. We don’t walk alone, no matter how alone we think we are, and our experiences are not singular even though they are personal. Whether purposefully or not, she never gets preachy. And though a minister by trade, she is not an incredibly religious person (and some might argue not religious at all, actually and ironically… I was quite surprised to find out that she does not believe in an after-life).

Each chapter is a different story, yet Braestrup does a good job of weaving them together. Her descriptions of her own experience and the feelings that follow and of those of the people who’s bodies she holds up as they are learning the most tragic news of their lives, are incredibly relatable. Her simple, fat-trimmed way of dealing with life and death is ironically reassuring and comforting.

There isn’t much I can quote here as much of it is best left in context, but one of the incredible points I gained from this work was that even in death there is not just black and white, but millions of shades of grey.

I can’t make these two realities — what I’ve lost and what I’ve found — fit together in some tidy pattern of divine causality. I just have to hold them on the one hand and on the other, just like that. (p. 202)

I highly recommend this short, meaningful work.