Book description
Rachael Hanel's name was inscribed on a gravestone when she was eleven years old. Yet this wasn't at all unusual in her world: her father was a gravedigger in the small Minnesota town of Waseca, and death was her family's business. Her parents were forty-two years old and in good…
Why read it?
1 author picked We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I grew up down the road from the small-town cemetery where my family was buried.
In contrast, Rachael Hanel's father was a small-town cemetery caretaker. As a child, she helped him collect the silk flowers so he could mow around gravestones. Rachael studied other people's grief and thought she was comfortable with it. Then her father suddenly died of cancer, and her perfect family disintegrated.
Hanel's Midwestern distrust of emotions is very familiar to me. Rereading this book—before and after my own father's death—completely altered the way it affected me. Be prepared if your own grief is still fresh.
From Loren's list on cemetery memoirs.
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