Here If You Need Me: A True Story by Kate Braestrup
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“Here If You Need Me: A True
Story” by Kate Braestrup (Little, Brown and Company, 9780316066303, $23.99) On the cover of her new memoir, Kate Braestrup looks a bit like Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony Soprano’s on-again, off-again psychiatrist and emotional sparring partner. But inside the book’s pages, she reads much more like Anne Lamott or Elizabeth Gilbert as she leads readers through the surprising life that has tested her faith and proven her mettle: Braestrup is a chaplain with the Maine warden service, and it’s her job to hold the hands and to bolster the spirits of desperate people during difficult times: when their children are lost in the woods, when their partners may be freezing in the night, when their sisters or brothers have been found, unmoving, alongside the road. She’s a tough, compassionate lady, the kind you’d like to have beside you when the search and rescue teams are afoot and the uncertainties become too much to bear alone. You could imagine even Tony Soprano crying on her steady shoulder. “Search and rescue” may be the most apt and encompassing description of Braestrup’s calling: she has no church, and her flock is a shifting mass brought to her by circumstance and necessity. It’s a “ministry of presence” that she came to abruptly a decade ago when her husband’s sudden death left her a mingle-aged single mother. Since then, she’s ministered to the families of accident victims; to wardens in dangerous situations and in need of a friendly ear; and to the dead, pulled from wreckages or found alone, having ended their wanderings in the wilderness. As she tells one waiting mother, “I’m not really here to keep you from freaking out. I’m here to be with you while you freak out.” In each benevolent, surprising essay-chapter of “Here If You Need Me,” Braestrup offers quiet insight into the unsettling questions that move beneath daily life like thawed water under an iced spring river. “Love begins with the body,” she writes, and her stories show that the body is also where love often ends up. As she describes saying goodbye to her once-strong husband before his cremation or easing a stranger’s move from this world to the next, she writes with unflinching compassion and an eye for the transcendently comic: from one knowledgeable game warden she learns that wild bears enjoy playing ball with the heads of human corpses. What image more perfectly, more poignantly, captures the human condition? Braestrup’s book is moving, wise, and funny. Like Michael Perry’s memoir “Truck,” it does a remarkable job of bridging the urban-rural chasm that often impedes our understandings of each other and makes even close neighbors seem alien or undeserving of our sympathy. It’s a meditation on the creases and crossroads that bring lives together or split them apart. In just a few fifty-minute hours of reading time, Braestrup will remind you of the dark moments and the shining lights of our earthly days together. She’ll convince you, once again, that loving one’s neighbor is a strikingly fine idea, and she’ll recall to you Annie Dillard’s urgent and necessary instruction: “Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” Review by Mark David Bradshaw, July 26, 2007 Read about Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story
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