Kate Braestrup: Here If You Need Me

Kate Braestrup’s true story, Here If You Need Me, begins with a memory she relives nearly every day — the last time she saw her husband, a Maine state trooper, alive. For Kate Braestrup, coping with death meant pursuing and fulfilling her husband’s dream of becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister, and eventually becoming the chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, which conducts the state’s search-and-rescue operations when people are reported missing. Braestrup’s role in the process is quiet yet powerful. She is the first person to alert waiting parents that their six year-old-daughter was found alive after a harrowing search. She is also the first to inform a distraught wife that her husband fell through the ice on a snowmobile and did not make it out of the freezing cold water alive. She has witnessed miraculous rescues of people who fell hundreds of feet into rocky ravines and of swaddled infants left in the cold by drug-addicted suicidal parents. She is there, often when nobody else is, to share smiles and tears of elation — and empathetic body-wrenching sobs of heartbreak. She is the author of a novel, Onion, and has written for Mademoiselle, Ms., City Paper, Hope and Law and Order.