After her husband, a Maine State trooper, is killed when a truck crashes
into his patrol vehicle, Kate Braestrup decides to become a Unitarian minister, since that was what her husband had been planning to do when he died. She ends up as a chaplain working with the Maine Warden Service. These wardens comb the woods, fields and sometimes bodies of water looking for lost children, hikers, hunters and fishers who due to some tragic misstep never find their way back. And sometimes they track someone who didn’t want to come back, who wanted to end it all. .
Kate may wait with the family or accompany the search, wherever she can be of most assistance. If she is present when a body is found, she kneels and says a prayer, sometimes out loud, sometimes silently. Braestrup’s faith in God is tentative, which makes her an odd candidate for the ministry, but Unitarianism allows her to form her own simple creed: God is love, and somehow exists in the midst of tragedy. Whether it’s God or just love that exists is not Braestrup’s concern. What she values is that this path keeps her sane and keeps her going, doing what she can do in her husband’s stead.
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