It sounds like the opening for a Twilight Zone episode. In a small town – Friendship, Wisconsin, – just after the Civil War, a deadly diphtheria epidemic begins to spread. That's where Stewart O'Nan 1999 novel A Prayer For The Dying takes place.
Jacob Hansen is a town sheriff, undertaker, and preacher, all roles that will come in handy as disease and fire close in. He tries to hold his town together and also save what matters to him the most, his wife, Marta and their infant daughter. Told in a gripping second-person point of view that can be beautiful, haunting, and absolutely horrifying, the novel pulls us inside Jacob's mind as his sense of duty clashes with impossible choices driven by the desperate need for what we all want to survive.
It's been described as a cross between Stephen Crane and Stephen King, and that is an accurate assessment.
