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Prayers for someone who is dying

For the bedside, the last days, and the first hours after. Read them aloud if you can. It is all right if your voice goes.

There is a chair by the bed and you have been in it a long time. The breathing has changed. Nurses come and go and are kind and cannot tell you how long.

Praying in a room like this is not like praying anywhere else. You may find you cannot manage more than a few words at a time, and that the same few words come back round and round. That is enough. Nobody is marking it.

The prayers below are short on purpose. Some are for saying out loud at the bedside, some for the corridor at three in the morning, some for the hours after, when the house is full of people or far too quiet. Take the one that fits and leave the rest.

18 prayers on this page, and 9 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.

At the bedside

For the hours in the chair, when the room is quiet and you have run out of things to say. These are short enough to say over and over.

When you have run out of words
God, I am here. He is here. I have nothing left to say. Stay in the room.
A prayer said over someone sleeping
Lord, she cannot hear me now, or maybe she can. Either way I am saying it. She is yours. She has been yours since before I knew her. Hold her while she sleeps, and hold whatever is coming next.

Bible verses about death and resurrection hope

What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Psalm 23:4–6

This is a shepherd's song, and the valley is a real place a flock walks through on the way to somewhere else. Notice what it does not claim. It does not say nothing bad happens in the valley. It says the walker will not be afraid there, and it gives one reason only. He is not walking it by himself. The rod and the staff are a shepherd's working tools, carried by somebody who knows the road. Read at a bedside it is a claim about company, not about outcome.

My flesh and my heart fails, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Psalm 73:23–26

Most of this psalm is a man furious that the corrupt are doing well while he suffers. The line arrives after the complaint, not instead of it. That is why it works for someone whose body really is failing. It does not deny the failing. It says the failing is not the last true thing about them.

Precious in the LORD’s sight is the death of his saints.

Psalm 116:12–15

Commonly turned into the idea that God wanted this person, took them because they were precious to him. The psalm is a thanksgiving from someone who nearly died and did not. The line means God does not hold the deaths of his people cheap, that they are noticed and costly to him. Say it to mean noticed. Never say it to mean arranged.

The Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces.

Isaiah 25:6–9

Written to people who had lost their country, and set at a feast on a mountain for everyone, not just for their own nation. Look at what the image assumes. The tears are already on the face. God is pictured close enough to reach them. Nothing in it tells anybody to stop crying now.

I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies.

John 11:17–27

Martha meets Jesus with an accusation, that if he had been there her brother would not have died. He is late, he knows it, and he does not correct her. A few lines later he stands at the grave and weeps. Whatever this passage offers, it is not composure, and it was said to someone in the fourth day of grief.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Could oppression, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

Romans 8:31–39

Paul is writing to a church under real threat and his list is the things that were actually killing people. The claim is narrower than it sounds, and better for being narrow. Not that these will not happen, because they were happening. Only that none of them can cut a person off from the love of God.

For if we live, we live to the Lord. Or if we die, we die to the Lord. If therefore we live or die, we are the Lord’s.

Romans 14:7–9

This comes out of an argument about food and holy days, which is not where you would look for it. Paul is saying Christians belong to God rather than to each other's opinions. It ended up in funeral services because it says the plainest thing anyone can say over a dying person. They are not going anywhere God is not.

we don’t want you to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, so that you don’t grieve like the rest, who have no hope.

1 Thessalonians 4:13–18

The most misused verse on this subject. It does not say do not grieve. It says do not grieve like people who have no hope, which is a comment on the hope and not on the volume of the crying. Paul is answering a church frightened that their dead had missed out, and he finishes by telling them to comfort one another, which assumes they need it.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more.

Revelation 21:1–5

Written to churches under pressure, describing a city that is coming, not the room you are in. The tense matters when somebody reads it aloud to you three days after a funeral. It says a day is coming when mourning stops. It does not say your mourning should have stopped by now.

Quoted from the World English Bible, British Edition, which is in the public domain. Every reference on this page was checked against the text.

Questions people ask

What do I say to someone who is dying?

Less than you think. Their name works. Saying you love them works, and so do thank you and I am sorry, which are the two most people leave too late. If you want to pray out loud, ask first while they can still answer. If they cannot answer and you have no reason to think they would mind, go ahead. If you know this was not their faith, or not something they would have wanted, pray silently. It is no less a prayer for their not hearing it. Talk to them rather than about them across the bed. Long speeches are usually for us, not for them.

Can they hear me if they are unconscious?

Nobody can tell you for certain in a particular case, though the nurses looking after them may have a view worth asking for. Hospice staff often say hearing seems to be among the last things to go. So say it anyway. If they cannot hear, you have still said it in front of God and in front of yourself, and afterwards it will matter to you that you did.

Is it wrong to want it to be over?

No, and the answer runs two ways. If you are the one dying and you have had enough, that is worth saying out loud to your palliative or hospice team and to whoever is closest to you. Wanting to stop is not giving up, and it is not something you have to settle alone in your head at four in the morning. Said out loud it can change what you are offered and how much pain you have to carry. If you are the one in the chair, asking God for a gentle release when someone is suffering and is not going to recover is an old prayer, not a betrayal, and people have prayed it for as long as they have sat up with the dying. Notice the difference between wanting their pain to end and wanting your own ordeal to end, and if both are in there, say both. Decisions about treatment stay with the person, their family and the medical team.

What about someone who did not believe?

Honestly, nobody knows. Anyone certain about where a particular person is now is telling you more than a human being can know. What has been prayed at deathbeds for centuries, across many traditions, is commendation. You put them into God's hands and you leave them there. Christians differ over whether that prayer carries on after a death. Some pray it freely, others hold that prayer is for the living, so follow your own tradition here. Either way it is not a dodge or a compromise. It is the most that can be done for anyone, including ourselves.

Should I keep praying for a miracle?

You can. Plenty of people do, right to the last hour, and it is not a failure of faith to stop either. Hold it loosely enough that you can still say the things that need saying now, because a goodbye cannot be postponed until you are sure. Praying for recovery and preparing for a death are not opposites. Hospice staff watch families do both in the same afternoon.

Prayers for someone who is dying

At the bedside

When you have run out of words

A prayer said over someone sleeping

For a gentle going

When you have to leave the room

When you are the one dying

I am frightened and saying so

For the people I am leaving

Into your hands, and nothing else

When you are tired of holding on

When the waiting goes on

At three in the morning

When part of you wants it over

For your own body to keep going

In the first hours after

The first thing you say after

Commending someone into God's hands

Before the phone calls

When you were not there

When you are angry about it

Telling God it is not right

When people say the wrong thing

When you cannot pray at all

Bible verses about death and resurrection hope

Where these verses get misused

Questions people ask