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 health when they erected their gravestone--Rachael's name was simply a branch on the sprawling family tree etched on the back of the stone. As she puts it: I grew up in cemeteries.
At times heartbreaking and at others gently humorous and uplifting, We'll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down presents the unique, moving perspective of a gravedigger's daughter and her lifelong relationship with death and grief. But it is also a masterful meditation on the living elements of our cemeteries: our neighbors, friends, and families--the very histories of our towns and cities--and how these things come together in the eyes of a young girl whose childhood is suffused with both death and the wonder of the living.