Prayers for Grief and Loss

For the first hours and days after a death, when nothing is settled yet and it is hard to put a sentence together. It is short on purpose. If this is all you can pray, it is enough.

For the weeks and months afterwards, when the funeral is over, everyone else has gone back to their lives, and the loss is still there every morning.

For a friend, a husband or wife, a parent, a brother or sister, or a whole family in mourning. Say their name where the prayer has “N.” Comforting the sorrowful is one of the spiritual works of mercy, and prayer is where it starts.

For a mother or father whose child has died, at any age and in any way: before birth, as a baby, or as a grown adult. There is no word in English for a parent who has lost a child, and no prayer equal to it. This one does not try to explain anything.

Please do not carry this alone. A priest, a bereavement group for parents, and your doctor are all right to call on, and none of them takes the place of the others.

Grief and prayer for the dead belong together. Catholics believe the dead can still be helped by our prayers and that love does not stop at a graveside, so the most Catholic thing a grieving person can do is also the simplest: pray for the one who has died, by name. The Church’s own short prayer for them is the Eternal Rest.

The passages Catholics turn to most in grief, quoted in the World English Bible, Catholic Edition. Read one slowly and stop there; you do not need all of them.

Grief is not a lack of faith. At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus wept (John 11:35), though he knew what he was about to do. Saint Paul does not forbid grief; he asks Christians not to grieve “like the rest, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The Church’s funeral rite opens by welcoming the mourners with a word of consolation, which the Catechism reads in the New Testament sense of the Holy Spirit’s power in hope (CCC 1687).

Christian hope rests on the resurrection. The Christian meaning of death is revealed in the light of Christ’s death and resurrection, “in whom resides our only hope” (CCC 1681). The funeral liturgy says it in a line many mourners keep: for the faithful, “life is changed, not ended” (quoted in CCC 1012).

The Church prays for its dead. From its earliest days the Church has honoured the memory of the dead and offered prayers for them (CCC 958), above all the Mass (CCC 1032). Those who die in God’s grace and friendship but are not yet fully purified are assured of heaven and undergo a final purification the Church calls purgatory (CCC 1030–1031). So a Catholic funeral is a prayer for the person who has died, not only a remembrance, and in it the family learns to live in communion with the one who has “fallen asleep in the Lord”, praying for him and with him (CCC 1689).

Death does not end the relationship. The Catechism closes its section on funerals with an old Byzantine farewell: even in death “we are not at all separated from one another” (CCC 1690). Much of grief is the feeling that there is nothing more you can do for the person you loved. There is: you can pray for them, have a Mass offered for them, and ask them to pray for you, since our prayer for the dead can also make their intercession for us effective (CCC 958).

Faith and medicine are not rivals. Grief that does not lift at all over a long time, or that makes ordinary life impossible, is worth bringing to a doctor as well as to prayer.

The Church gives the whole month of November to the dead. It opens with All Saints’ Day on November 1 and, the next day, All Souls’ Day on November 2, when the Church prays for all the faithful departed. Many parishes read aloud the names of those who died in the past year and keep a book of the dead through the month, and it is the traditional time to visit a grave and to have a Mass offered for someone by name. If this is your first November since a death, it may be harder than you expect, and more consoling. All Souls’ Day explains the day itself, the liturgical calendar shows where it falls this year, and the prayers for the dead are the ones to take with you to the grave.