Prayers during a Pandemic: For those who mourn

Our family is taking time daily to pray about the current global health crisis. Our prayers will likely reference the Christian tradition, but we’ve written with an ecumenical and agnostic audience in mind.

If you’d like us to pray for you, let us know. If you’d like us to write a prayer for you or for a concern you have and share it here, just ask. You don’t have to share your name if you don’t want to, and we won’t share it or any other identifying details about you here or elsewhere.

Today we pray for people who are mourning the loss of a loved one.

Today we pray for all those who mourn the loss of a loved one. We pray for those whose losses are recent as well as those who have lived long with grief.

We pray for those we do not know as well as those familiar to us, including [Remember now the names of those who are grieving, including ourselves]. We honor the lives and memories of those they loved and miss, and we stand as witnesses the the challenges of complex grief over the loss of people whose actions were often hurtful or harmful.

We think of those who work with grief daily, including counselors and therapists, chaplains and pastors, doctors and nurses, funeral directors and death doulas. We are grateful for their training, labor,and dedication. We pray for them strength, stamina, and love for those they serve.

We pray for those struggling with the complexity of grief, for those who feel they are drowning in it, for those caught off-guard and pushed off-center by its sudden appearances, for those expressing grief as anger, for those feeling orphaned, for those feeling abandoned, for those feeling alone. We pray for them focus, rest, stable footing, insight and peace, comfort and good memories, companionship, and connection.

We mourn with those who mourn, without end; we pray that we can be brave to enter the grief of others when invited.

We are thankful for the vulnerability of those who grieve. We are thankful for lives of love.

Above, Death in the Sickroom by Edvard Munch (1893) shows seven people in a room, a bed at the center, several cups, including one of a bright red liquid on the nightstand next to it. At right, a man leans his hand against the wall. At right, a woman sits in a chair facing the bed. Several figures have their hands clasped as if in prayer, their heads bowed.