Kate Braestrup is stretched out on her porch, petting the dog and watching her daughter play as she talks about the time she helped a family deal with the drowning of their 2-year-old child.

She remembers taking off her uniform jacket so the family of Brian Byford wouldn’t be reminded of her job with the Maine Warden Service, whose divers were combing the waters of the Kennebec River, looking for the boy’s body.

Braestrup hoped the grieving parents would instead focus on her white collar, part of her other uniform as a Unitarian Universalist minister.

Braestrup, 42, is the chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, only the second person to hold the position since the program began in 1999. She helps families and the game wardens themselves deal with tragedies that occur in the Maine woods.

“I’m always afraid people are going to find out what a cool job this is and take it away,” Braestrup said recently from her home in Thomaston. “At least in my job I never have to make anything worse.”

She’s been called to suicides, missing-person searches, all-terrain vehicle accidents and drownings. Braestrup was there when Ronald “Shorty” Wade went missing in Machiasport last year. She was there when wardens searched for Lewis Gardner and Mona Cole in Whiting earlier this month.

She counseled friends and family of Krystal Higgins in August during the weeklong search for the girl in Columbia. Debra Skeate, the mother of Higgins’ best friend, said Braestrup’s genuine concern helped her through a difficult time.

“She was just wonderful when Krystal was missing,” Skeate said. “She was just a sweet person. You just know she truly cared.”

It was a tragedy in Braestrup’s own life, however, that led her to the Warden Service.

Braestrup’s husband, Maine State Police Trooper Drew Griffith, was killed in the line of duty in 1996 when an ice truck hit his cruiser on U.S. Route 1 in Thomaston. Griffith, 34, was backing out of a driveway trying to catch a speeding car. He died instantly.

Griffith had planned to become a minister after retiring from the state police, and Braestrup took it upon herself to finish what her husband never had the chance to start.

“He would’ve been great,” Braestrup said. “In a lot of ways he was more spiritual than me.”

She put aside her work as a free-lance writer – she wrote a novel titled “Onion” when she was 24 – and enrolled at Bangor Theological Seminary. Her parents, her mother a homemaker and her father a combat correspondent for The New York Times and Washington Post, weren’t impressed.

“My mother was suspicious of religion,” she said. “I was kind of the religious fanatic of the family.”

With four children to care for, Braestrup took six years to graduate. Now she serves as minister at the First Universalist Church of Rockland in addition to her work with the Warden Service.

Braestrup figured she would end up as a chaplain for the state police, but the Warden Service asked first. She felt like the biblical prophet Jonah, spit up from the belly of a whale, she said. “I got puked up at the Warden Service,” she said.

Braestrup doesn’t look like a warden. The wool uniform jacket helps, but her slight frame almost disappears with the addition of the snowpants and boots she’s always changing into. She’s more of an indoor type, she said, today barefoot and dressed in ripped jeans and a pink blouse.

“I’m a couch potato. I’m becoming more outdoorsy,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like the Warden Service Barbie doll.”

It has worked out for the best, Braestrup said, because her relationship with the troopers is so personal. The wardens, on the other hand, could fire her without feeling guilty about it, she said.

It’s a job she’s still learning how best to do, Braestrup said.

“I don’t usually know what I’m going to do at the scene,” she said. “I’m getting better at not saying, ‘How are you?'”

Braestrup is paid for responding to investigation scenes and participating in stress debriefings with the wardens But much of her job consists of following up with families on her own time, she said. Sgt. Pat Dorian of the Warden Service said he calls Braestrup every time an incident is particularly tragic or stressful.

“Some of the situations we get involved in are very, very tough emotionally,” Dorian said. “I worry about her. The volume of stuff that she deals with is just extraordinarily difficult emotionally. I’ve told her I worry about her.”

Aside from involvement in stress debriefings, Braestrup helps wardens deal with their personal marital and family issues, Dorian said.

“She always has an ear for us. I call her the angel with the curly hair,” he said. “She has a gift, and we’re blessed to have her as part of our organization.”

Much of her work involves relaying information about investigations from wardens to victims’ families, Braestrup said, a process she experienced herself when her husband died.

“I remember being there – that at those moments … your need is so acute. I mean, I even remember it. It was like being blown open. You have no or very few defenses. This is bona fide the worst moment in your entire life, and there everybody is.”

Braestrup once tended to a woman who became overwhelmed as she watched a swarm of helicopters and divers search for her missing husband. Braestrup said she tried to help the woman understand that behind all the activity were wardens who desperately wanted to bring her husband back.

“I said, ‘All of this doesn’t look like love, but it is love’,” Braestrup said. “I’m always telling [victims’ families’], ‘I’m not the pie. I’m the whipped cream. The wardens do all of the work.'”

She remembered when a young man from New Jersey drowned in May in Millinocket Lake. She spent the day walking back and forth across the search site, leaving the dive boat to tell Michael Schafer’s friends and family that his body had been recovered.

Because the family was Roman Catholic, Braestrup recited final prayers, instead of last rites, as Schafer’s body was brought back to shore. The wardens stopped working for a moment and stood silently in observance, she said.

“I told the wardens, if you’re staying you’re praying, and they did,” Braestrup said.

As with Schafer’s family, most people she counsels during a crisis aren’t concerned with religious or denominational differences, she said.

“Catholics are actually very open,” Braestrup said. “It’s funny how little of an issue it is.”

Most people she deals with are “street Christians,” people who don’t belong to a faith community but rely on their religious beliefs during times of tragedy, she said. In those times they need someone to listen more than they need a specific ceremony or prayer, she said.

“In that moment you need the word ‘God,'” Braestrup said. “It should always be an offering, or it’s not ministry.”

It is the offerings of friends and neighbors, however, that continue to make Braestrup smile.

“You’re sitting there with a victim and it’s terrible and sad, and then the doorbell rings and the neighbors start coming in with the casseroles,” she said. “[They think,] ‘We can’t give you your husband back, but by god you’re not going to starve.”

The strength people find in unimaginable circumstances continues to impress her, Braestrup said. She recalled the mother who thought she couldn’t bear the death of her child, yet managed to call relatives and provide information while divers looked for her son’s body, Braestrup said.

“One of the cool things about it, actually, is seeing how strong people are,” she said. “There they are and something terrible has happened to one of their children and they’re functioning. They crash but they’ll come back up. I really admire them.”