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Grief is not a problem to be solved and these prayers do not try. They give you somewhere to put it, including the parts that are angry.
God, I have just been told. I do not know what to do with my hands. Stay near me while the room is still the wrong shape, and hold what I cannot hold yet.
Two short prayers from this page, ready to print. No account or email needed.
You may be reading this on a chair in a hospital corridor, or in a kitchen at four in the morning with the kettle going cold. Grief does not arrive in a tidy order. It comes as paperwork and phone calls, and then, with no warning at all, as their voice on an old message.
Nothing on this page will fix it. There is no prayer that undoes a death and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What prayer can do is give you somewhere to put the weight for a minute, and someone to say it to who does not need you to be coping.
Say these out loud if you can. If you cannot manage a whole one, say a line. If you cannot manage a line, sitting there counts.
18 prayers on this page, and 9 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
The first hours, when the loss is new and nothing has been arranged yet. It may have come as a phone call, or as a quiet room with a scan screen and nobody else there. You may not be crying. You may be making tea for other people. These are for that.
I keep forgetting and then remembering, and each time it is new. I am not asking you to make sense of this today. I am asking you not to leave while I catch up with it.
God, there are people I have to tell. Go ahead of me into those conversations. Give me the words, or let me manage without them.
I have lost a child nobody else met, and I am grieving in a house where nothing looks different. Do not let this be small to you. It is not small to me.
Grief keeps its own hours. If you are awake at three, going over the last conversation for the hundredth time, start here rather than with your phone.
God, it is the middle of the night and I am still awake. Stay.
I keep replaying it, hunting for the moment I could have changed it. Take the reel out of my hands. If there is something I have to face, face it with me in the daylight, not now.
This bed is too big now and I say goodnight to nobody. You know exactly what the silence sounds like at this end of the house. Be in it with me until I sleep.
Anger belongs in this, including anger at God. The Psalms are full of it and it disqualified nobody. Better said out loud to him than swallowed and left to go cold.
How long, God. That is it. That is the whole prayer. How long.
I am angry with you. I do not understand why this was allowed and I am not going to tell you it is fine. I am still here and still talking to you. Take it as it comes.
Somebody told me today that it was meant to be. I wanted to scream at them. Keep me civil and keep me honest, and do not let their words settle in me as truth.
The funeral is long done, everyone else has picked their life back up, and then a song in a supermarket takes your legs out. This is the grief nobody is asking about any more.
I have just put the basket down because I could not breathe. Nobody in here knows why. You do. Walk me out to the car.
I found their writing on the back of an envelope. Thank you that they were here. Thank you that I have this. It hurts, and I would not give it up.
It is their birthday and there is nowhere to put the day. I am going to say their name out loud to you, because I still want it said somewhere. Hear it.
Everyone is past this and I am not. Do not hurry me. Do not let me perform being fine to make it easier for the people around me.
For when the loss is not yours but you are the one sitting with them, driving them home, or standing in their kitchen with nothing useful to say.
God, keep me from saying something clever. Let me be the one who stays, makes the tea and says very little.
The house is quiet now that the arrangements are done, and that is when the real weight arrives. Be with them this week. Nudge me to ring on an ordinary Tuesday when nobody else does.
There are children in that house who have lost a parent and are being brave about it. Be gentle with them. Give the adults around them patience, and something honest to say when the questions come.
They have stopped praying and they feel bad about it. Count ours for theirs. Let them rest.
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
Jesus wept.
John 11:32–36: read the chapter
Mary comes out to meet Jesus and falls at his feet with something close to an accusation. If you would have been here. He does not correct her and he does not explain. He asks where they have laid Lazarus, and then, before anyone has taken him there, he cries in front of everyone, over a man he is about to raise. Whatever you have been told about faith and composure, God in the flesh wept. Nobody should hurry you past that to the ending.
For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David. How long, O Jehovah? wilt thou forget me for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
Psalm 13:1–6: read the chapter
David asks how long four times in two verses. Not what is the lesson, not what should I feel. How long. This was set to music and sung by a whole congregation, which tells you that complaint was a normal public act of worship, not a lapse. The psalm does turn towards trust by the end, and it takes its time getting there.
Mine eye wasteth away by reason of affliction: I have called daily upon thee, O Jehovah; I have spread forth my hands unto thee.
Psalm 88:1–9: read the chapter
This prayer does not brighten. The writer is exhausted, cut off from his friends, and says so, and the psalm ends in the dark without a resolution tacked on. It was kept anyway, copied and sung for centuries. That matters if you have been made to feel that a person with real faith would have found peace by now.
and he said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: Jehovah gave, and Jehovah hath taken away; blessed be the name of Jehovah.
This line gets quoted at bereaved people more than almost any other, usually to close a conversation down. Look at what surrounds it. Job has torn his clothes, shaved his head and collapsed on the ground. It is not calm theology, it is a wrecked man saying something enormous while wrecked. He then spends most of the book arguing with God, and God does not strike him down for it.
[It is of] Jehovah’s lovingkindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.
Lamentations 3:19–26: read the chapter
The famous line about mercies new every morning is verse 23, four verses after wormwood and bitterness, in a book written over a burnt city. It is not a sunny thought. It is something a man chooses to recall while he is still bowed down, because he has decided to say it, not because he feels it yet. You are allowed to borrow it on exactly those terms.
For his anger is but for a moment; His favor is for a life-time: Weeping may tarry for the night, But joy [cometh] in the morning.
Psalm 30:1–5: read the chapter
This is the verse people send on day three. On its own it sounds like a deadline. In the psalm it is a survivor looking back at something already over, not a forecast of how long your night runs. No date is given to anyone. If it has been months and no morning has arrived, you have not failed at grief and you have not failed at faith.
a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
Ecclesiastes 3:1–8: read the chapter
Read at almost every funeral, and often heard as an explanation, as though the death turned up on schedule because it was due. The passage explains nothing. It is a flat observation that a human life holds all of this, weeping next to laughing, and that no single season is the whole of it. Use it as permission to be in the mourning part for as long as it lasts.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed is a strange word to hear at a funeral, and it does not mean grief is good for you or that you should stay in it. Jesus is naming who is already inside God's kingdom, and mourners are on that list rather than being told to cheer up. Notice the tense of the second half. They shall be comforted. It is a promise, not a description of this afternoon.
But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them that fall asleep; that ye sorrow not, even as the rest, who have no hope.
1 Thessalonians 4:13–18: read the chapter
Half of this verse gets used to tell Christians off for crying. Read the whole clause. Paul does not say do not grieve. He says do not grieve like people who have no hope, which is a comparison rather than a ban. He was writing to a frightened church who thought their dead had missed out. Grief with hope in it is still grief, and it still hurts like this.
Quoted from the American Standard Version (1901), which is in the public domain. Every reference on this page was checked against the text. Chapter links open the same translation in our reader.
Grief attracts explanations. Someone will tell you it was part of a plan, or that they were needed elsewhere, or send you a line about joy coming in the morning while your morning is nowhere in sight. You do not have to accept any of it. Scripture does not explain your loss, and neither will we. If a verse arrives feeling like a rebuke rather than a comfort, you are allowed to put it down. Nothing here asks you to be finished with this by a certain date, or to be a better mourner than Job or David were.
If you do one thing today, take the shortest prayer on this page and say it out loud once, in whatever room you happen to be standing in. That is enough for today. Then drink some water and eat something, because grief is physical and your body has been carrying this too.
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