Here If You Need Me

Just a quick note to recommend a book that basically everyone should read. It's called Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup. It is her personal story of the death of her husband, her seminary education as a grieving widow with four children, and her ministry as a chaplain with the Maine Warden Service. She intertwines these themes in a way that made me laugh and cry almost at the same time. She works with those who, for the most part, are not very religiously connected to churches, but who are spiritually connected to the forest, to the Maine landscape. She touches something very deep inside me, reflecting a theology very close to my own.
About the grief she and her children experience: "We discovered that...You can cry while ordering a pizza over the telephone, although the conversation will be longer and more confused than it otherwise is...You can weep while coloring...Peter discovered that it is possible to weep while emptying rainwater from garbage cans. Zach wept while taking out the compost, while folding pillowcases."
About asking "where is God?" when a warden pulls a dead 4-year-old girl's body from where it had broken through the ice on a pond: "The death of the little girl with red mittens is not God's will or plan. It is physics and biology, the bearing capacity of frozen water, the point at which hypothermia causes a small body's systems to fail. ... Here is my answer to theodicy problem in a nutshell: Frank took the child out from under the ice with his own hands, tried to give her his breath, and his heart broke when he could not save her life. Frank IS the answer."

It's a quick read, full of weathered, grounded humor, and maybe one of the best books I've ever read.