Ruby on Grief
Ruby's Kitchen Table is a free daily devotional about faith, grief, and the ordinary mornings in between. These are Ruby's devotionals on grief — written by someone who has lived with it for a long time and does not pretend to have answers.
I have written about grief more than I planned to. I did not set out to be a woman who writes about loss. But Earl died seven years ago, and my mother is gone, and my father is gone, and enough people I have loved have left this world that grief has become a room I know my way around in the dark.
I do not write about grief because I have answers. I write about it because I have lived with it long enough to know that the answers people give you in the first six months are mostly wrong, and the real comfort comes later, and quieter, and from the people who do not try to explain it.
If you are here because you have lost someone, I am sorry. I will not tell you it gets better. I will tell you it gets different. The hole does not fill in. You learn to walk around it without falling in every morning. Some mornings you fall in anyway, and that is all right. That is how it works.
These are some of the mornings I have written about grief. They are not advice. They are one woman sitting at her kitchen table, telling the truth about what it is like. If one of them finds you at the right moment, that is enough.
Prayers for grief
If you are looking for a prayer to hold onto right now, these are written for people in the thick of it.
A prayer for comfort in grief — For the dark days and the harder nights.
A prayer for a funeral — Short enough to carry with you. For the morning of the service.
A prayer for peace — When the grief has settled into something quieter but will not leave.
On losing a husband
The other chair — The chair across from me at the kitchen table is empty. What the empty chair teaches about the shape grief leaves behind.
I drove out to the cemetery this morning — What happens when you visit the place where someone is buried, and what you carry home.
Fifty-two years — A wedding anniversary without the person you married. What remains when you reach the date and he is not there.
Seven years — The anniversary of Earl's death. What seven years of grief feels like from the inside.
The man in the barn — A memory piece. Earl as the working man. The truck in the barn, the dust on the dashboard, the things he left behind.
On watching someone else grieve
A woman at church — There is a woman at church whose husband is dying. Ruby sees her grief before anyone says a word.
The woman at church — Still praying. Still watching. The long middle of someone else's grief.
Someone took it to me — The husband has died. Ruby makes a casserole and carries it to the house. What the casserole is really about.
On losing a parent
A letter to my father — A letter Ruby never sent. What a daughter says to her father after he is gone.
At Trinity on Father's Day — Father's Day at church when your father is no longer in the pew beside you.
Ruby writes a short devotional every morning — Scripture, and a few plain words from someone who has been there. You can subscribe — it's free.