c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) After the death of her husband, a Maine state trooper, author and mother-of-four Kate Braestrup became a Unitarian Universalist chaplain. She now works with the Maine Warden Service, a cadre of game wardens who enforce hunting and fishing laws and ensure public safety.

Braestrup’s memoir about accompanying search-and-rescue missions in the Maine wilderness, titled “Here if You Need Me: A True Story,” hits stores in August.

Q: Your husband had planned on becoming a minister as his second career. How did it become your personal calling?

A: Both of us felt very strongly about being of service to the community and to the world and to the cosmos or whatever. He was doing that as a state trooper, and I was doing that through him.

There came a point about a year after he died when I realized it was not going to be sufficient for me to sit at home and write. I could no longer write about what I would have written about, because Drew was dead and that changed reality and changed me. On the other hand, I was no longer being of service in the world and that was a really, extremely strong pull that wasn’t being satisfied.

The experience of his death and the experience of losing him in the community I was in was such a profound experience _ not just of grief but of love _ that it was something that I somehow had to remain with and I couldn’t just get on as if that hadn’t happened.

I can’t really call it a conversion experience because the conversion had already happened, but it was certainly a confirmation that was too powerful to just ignore and it had to be explored and understood.

Q: Give us a sense of a typical emergency call that you go on.

A: Usually, I’ll get a call (such as) we had a drowning last night. I try to get there when the dive team is getting ready to go in so that I can spend time with them. Finding a body underwater can be kind of, it’s just big, particularly if it’s a child or a juvenile.

And then I will go to wherever the family is … and try to begin the conversations about what to do after the recovery has been made. That’s to give them time to think about: do I want to see the body, where do I want to see the body, what do I want done with the body?

Q: The Maine Warden Service recently established the chaplain position, for the first time in more than a century. Why is your work relevant in a secular, government-run field?

A: The warden service chaplaincy exists because the Maine game wardens created it. And that is really important to emphasize because otherwise it makes it sound as though I did this thing.

But I only come to scenes, I only know if they are happening, if someone calls me. So essentially, everybody in the warden service kind of keeps creating and recreating this ministry every time they call me. They’re in effect saying this event, whatever it is … has a dimension that the chaplain can address.

Q: And how would you describe that dimension?

A: They might describe it very practically, like “the mother of the victim is flipping out and I don’t want to deal with it. It’s hard, it’s painful, I wish Kate was here to do this.” Which is OK, because they could also just walk away, they could do it badly.

Everybody hates doing death notification. Everybody hates dealing with grieving parents. And in taking themselves off the emotional hook, they leave the families in a much harder place.

That’s why I’m so impressed the game wardens did what they did; they said, `We’re actually going to walk toward this problem. What could we do for them to make this less excruciating?’ It’s partly emotional, it’s partly practical.

Q: Your personal life was marked by your husband’s death, and your professional life deals intimately with death. What is your relationship with death?

A: It’s funny, I certainly don’t worry about it that much except at times when your kid is supposed to be home at 10 p.m. and they’re not home until 11 p.m., and you’re thinking, `Oh my God, they’re dead on the road.’

On a spiritual or theological level, I think actually we have a culture that has posed death as the ultimate human problem. When I learn about other religions, I realize actually death is not a huge problem in Judaism. In Buddhism, death isn’t a big deal insofar as you keep coming back and eventually you get to check out altogether. It’s life that’s the problem for them, not death.

In the field, the central question that people have when their loved one has died is not where is he? Is he in heaven? Is he with God? … The question is always how do I keep living, not what’s going on with them.

Q: Despite the gravity and sadness inherent in your work, you express much joy in what you do. Why do you love it so much?

A: You get to be with people in moments when they really are magnificent … I’ll be looking at, let’s say, a man whose son has just died, and he’s so amazing. And how open he may become to gratitude and recognition of who he is and who everybody else is.

There’s something that you would think would shut someone up into a little shell, and instead it breaks them open and they see things so clearly.

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