Prayers for grief and loss
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.
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.
When you have just been told
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.
The first hour after the call
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.