A Prayer for a Funeral
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
— Psalm 23:1-3
Funerals ask us to do the hardest thing at the worst possible time: stand in a room full of people and face the fact that someone we love is gone. We put on the dark clothes and we drive to the church and we sit in the pew and we do all of this while the ground underneath us has not stopped moving since the phone rang.
This prayer is for the morning of the service. For the drive. For the moment in the parking lot when you are not sure you can walk through the doors. For the moment after the service when you are standing in the fellowship hall holding a cup of coffee you do not remember being handed. It is short because the morning of a funeral does not have room for long prayers. It is plain because plain is what holds up when nothing else does.
Lord, I cannot do this, and I am doing it anyway.
Be in the room before I get there. Be in the words I hear and the hymns I try to sing and the silence that comes after.
Hold the person I am burying in whatever place you hold the ones who have left us. I do not need to understand it today. I just need to know they are held.
And hold me, too. Hold my hands when they shake. Hold my voice if I have to speak. Hold the ground steady under my feet, because it has not been steady in days.
Get me through this morning. That is all I am asking. Just this morning.
Amen.
There is no right way to grieve, and there is no right way to get through a funeral. Some people weep. Some people are dry-eyed and wonder if something is wrong with them. Some people laugh at the wrong moment and feel guilty about it. None of this means you loved the person less, or more, or wrong. It means you are a human being in the worst week of your life, and human beings are not predictable, and the Lord knows this about us even when we do not know it about ourselves.
The Twenty-third Psalm is the funeral psalm, and it has been the funeral psalm for as long as I have been alive. There is a reason for this. It does not explain death. It does not promise that death will not come. It says the Lord is with you in the valley of the shadow. The valley is real. The shadow is real. And the Lord is there, and that is the whole of it.
A prayer for the graveside
The graveside is shorter than the service and it is harder. There are fewer people. The words are brief because there is not much left to say. And then it is finished and everyone stands there on the grass not knowing whether they are allowed to leave yet.
Lord, this is the part I have been dreading.
Not the church. This. The ground open, and the chairs on the grass, and the sound the wind makes out here when nobody is talking.
Be here in the open. You were in the sanctuary and I could feel it. Be here too, where there is no roof and no organ and nothing to hide behind.
Receive what we are giving back to you. We kept them as long as we were allowed.
And when it is over, and the cars start, walk me to mine.
Amen.
A prayer for the funeral of a mother
Your mother was there before your memory starts. There is no part of your life she is not standing somewhere in the back of. Burying her is not only losing a person. It is losing the one who could tell you what you were like before you could remember being anything.
Lord, she was here before I was.
I have never once been in the world without her in it somewhere, and I do not know how to stand in a room where that is no longer true.
Thank you for her hands. For whatever she taught me that I still do without thinking. For the things she got wrong and the things she got right and the fact that she stayed.
Hold her now the way she held me then.
And be patient with me today. I am somebody's child and I have no idea how to stop.
Amen.
A prayer for the funeral of a father
A good many fathers of a certain generation did not say much. They showed up. They fixed what was broken. They sat in the same chair every evening. And now the family is expected to stand up and put words to a man who spent his life not using many.
Lord, he was not a man of many words and I am short of them myself today.
You know what he did not say. You know what he meant by the things he did instead. The early mornings. The work. The showing up when showing up was the whole of it.
I am not going to pretend it was simple. Some of it was not.
Take him as he was. You made him that way, or you allowed it, and either way you understood him better than I managed to.
Give me the words I need for today and let the rest keep.
Amen.
A prayer for the funeral of a husband or a wife
Everyone at the service lost someone. You lost the person you were going to tell about the service. That is the particular cruelty of it, and there is no way around it, and anybody who has sat in that pew knows exactly what I mean.
Lord, I keep turning to tell him and he is not there to tell.
That is the whole of it. Everybody here has lost something today. I have lost the one I would have talked it over with tonight.
I do not know who I am in a house that quiet. I have not found out yet.
Hold what we made together. The years of it. The ordinary evenings nobody else would think to mention.
Get me through this day and then the evening after it, which will be worse.
Amen.
Ruby has written more about the long middle of this kind of grief in a prayer for comfort in grief.
A prayer for the funeral of a child
There is nothing to say about this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is out of order. Every instinct a person has says it is out of order. I have never heard an explanation of it that was worth the breath it took, and I have stopped listening for one.
Lord, this is wrong and you know it is wrong.
I am not going to stand here and tell you it makes sense, because it does not, and I think you would rather have the truth from me than the polite thing.
Take this child. Hold this child. Whatever you are and wherever you keep them, keep this one close, because they were so small and they were so loved.
I have no faith left this morning that is not anger. Take that too. It is what I have.
Amen.
A prayer when the death was sudden
When there is no warning, there is no goodbye, and the last ordinary conversation you had turns out to have been the last one. Nobody knew to make it count. That is not a failure on your part. That is what sudden means.
Lord, there was no warning and there was no goodbye.
The last thing I said was nothing in particular. I would give a great deal to have known, and I did not know, and I cannot go back and do it differently.
Take the words I never got to say. You heard them anyway. You hear the ones that never make it out.
Steady me today. My mind is still catching up to a thing my body already knows.
Amen.
A prayer before speaking at the service
Somebody asked you to speak, and you said yes, and now the morning has come and you are not sure you can do it. You can. Not gracefully, maybe. But a shaking voice at a funeral has never once bothered a single person in that room.
Lord, I said I would do this and now it is time to do it.
Steady my hands enough to hold the paper. Steady my voice enough to be heard. If it breaks, let it break, and let me keep going.
Do not let me make this about me. Let them hear the person we lost and not the person at the front of the room.
Give me the one true thing that needs saying and let me leave the rest alone.
Amen.
If you are still working out what to say, Ruby has written a plain guide to how to write a eulogy.
This prayer is yours to keep. Print it. Fold it and put it in your pocket. Carry it into the service if you need to. Ruby writes a short devotional every morning in the same spirit: Scripture, and a few plain words from someone who has been there. You can subscribe, it's free, or stay a while and read more of her writing.
If you are carrying grief right now, Ruby has written about it often:
- A prayer for comfort in grief. For the dark days and the harder nights.
- Ruby on grief. A collection of devotionals on loss, carrying, and what remains.
- How to write a eulogy. If someone has asked you to speak at the service.