A Prayer for Comfort After a Funeral

Father, the funeral is over. The people have gone home, the flowers are wilting, and the casseroles fill a fridge I have no appetite to open. The busyness that carried me through is gone, and now I am alone with the silence and the loss.

While there were arrangements to make and guests to greet, I could keep moving. But the activity has ended, and the full weight of it is only now landing. The house feels hollow, and so do I.

I bring this after-the-service emptiness to You, the strange and aching quiet that follows when everyone else returns to their lives and I am left in the wreckage of mine.

Stay close in these days when the world expects me to be done grieving and I have barely begun. Fill some of the silence with Your presence. Steady me as I learn to live in this changed and lonely place.

You are the God of all comfort, the One who comforts us in our troubles so that the comfort can one day overflow to others. Pour that comfort into me now, in the long quiet after the goodbye.

I give You these empty rooms and this tender heart. Be near in the silence the crowd left behind. Amen.