Saints for the Grieving

Before You Begin

Someone you love has died, and the world has the nerve to keep going. The mail still comes. People still laugh in the grocery store. The sun comes up as if nothing has happened, when everything has happened. If that is where you are, this book was written for you, and it was written slowly, with the door held open, because grief cannot be rushed and should not be.

You will not find any of the things that grief hates in these pages. No one here will tell you they are in a better place as if that settled it. No one will say everything happens for a reason, or at least you had them for a while, or it was their time. Those are things people say when they cannot bear your pain and want it to be smaller. Your pain is not too big. It is the exact size of your love, which was very large, and grief is only love with nowhere to go.

What you will find here is company. Seventy-two saints and holy men and women who buried the people they loved and walked on, not because it was easy, but because they had to, and because grace held them up when their own legs would not. A mother who stood at the foot of a cross and watched her Son die, and did not look away. A widow in New York who buried her husband in a foreign country and then buried two of her own daughters, and became a saint anyway. A father and mother in France who laid four of their children in the ground and kept believing they would find them again. A king who cried out his dead son’s name until the words gave out. These are not people who grieved lightly or got over it quickly. They grieved like you are grieving. And they are on the other side now, and they are telling you it can be carried, and that it does not have the last word.

A word about how to use the hope in this book, because hope handled carelessly can wound the grieving worse than silence. The Catholic faith makes an enormous promise: that death is not the end, that the ones who died in God’s friendship are alive, that we pray for them and they for us, and that we will see them again and be gathered up where God will wipe away every tear. That promise is true, and it is the deepest comfort there is. But it is not a way to skip the grief. Mary believed in the resurrection with her whole heart, and she still stood there and wept. The hope does not cancel the tears. It just means the tears are not the end of the story. Hold both. You are allowed to believe your beloved is safe and still be devastated that they are not here. Both are true. Both are holy.

You do not have to read this straight through. The saints here are sorted by the real terrain of grief, from the first silent hours to the long walk of years, from losing a spouse to losing a child to losing a parent, from the rage and the questions to the slow return of hope. When a day is unbearable, find the part that matches it and read the one who lived it. There is an index in the back for exactly that. If you have buried a child, if you cannot stop asking God why, if the anniversary is coming, if you feel guilty for something left unsaid, turn there, and you will be pointed to the saint who has been where you are.

One more thing, and it matters. Grief is not a sign of weak faith. It is not something to hide or hurry or apologize for. Jesus stood at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, a man he was about to raise from the dead, and he wept anyway. The shortest verse in the Bible is two words long: Jesus wept. God himself grieved at a graveside. So whatever you are feeling tonight, you are in the best possible company. Take your time. The saints are not going anywhere, and neither are the ones you love. They are only ahead, and the distance is not as far as it feels.

This book is a work of devotion and consolation. It is not medical or psychological advice, and it is not a substitute for professional grief support. Grief can be crushing, and there is no shame in needing help to carry it. If your grief feels like more than you can bear, please reach out to a doctor, a licensed counselor, a bereavement group, or a trusted priest or friend. The saints in these pages grieved, and they also let other people carry them. So can you.

If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available day and night. Outside the United States, contact your local emergency number or a national helpline. You do not have to carry the worst of this alone, and you do not have to carry it tonight.

Begin here, whenever you are ready. There is no hurry.

The First Hours

When the world goes silent

There is a particular silence that falls in the first hours after a death, when the phone calls are made and the people have gone home and you are left standing in a kitchen that looks exactly as it did yesterday, except that everything is different now. The saints in this part know that silence. A mother stood inside it at the foot of a cross. A woman carried it to a tomb in the dark. A widow walked behind her only son’s coffin through a village gate. They are the first company for the first, worst hours.

The mother who did not look away

Our Lady of Sorrows · September 15 · the Mother of Jesus, patron of those who mourn

She watched her Son die, and she stayed.

There is no grief in human history deeper than the grief of the woman standing at the foot of the cross, and the Church has never pretended otherwise. It gave her a title for it. Our Lady of Sorrows, the Mother of Sorrows, the woman whose heart a sword would pierce, as the old man Simeon warned her when Jesus was still a baby in her arms. She carried that warning for over thirty years, and then she watched it come true, slowly, over the longest afternoon in the world, as her Son was tortured to death a few feet from where she stood.

Notice what she did, because it is the first lesson grief can learn from her. She stayed. She did not faint, and she did not flee, and she did not turn away from the horror of it to spare herself. The Gospel puts it in one unbearable line: standing near the cross of Jesus was his mother. She stayed close to her dying child when every instinct in a mother’s body screams to either save him or not to watch. She could do neither. So she did the only thing love had left. She stayed, so that he would not die alone, so that the last face he saw would be the first one that ever loved him.

The tradition gathers her griefs into seven sorrows, a whole rosary of loss: the prophecy that a sword would pierce her, the flight into Egypt to save her child from a king who wanted him dead, losing him for three days in Jerusalem, meeting him on the road to Calvary, standing at the cross, receiving his dead body into her arms, and laying him in the tomb. It is, when you look at it, a mother’s entire catalog of fear and loss, from the first dread that something might happen to her child all the way to burying him. Every grieving parent has walked some portion of that road. Mary walked all of it.

For anyone in the first hours of a loss, Mary offers something no cheerful comforter can. She does not tell you it will be alright. She stands next to you in the not-alright, because she has been there, at the very bottom of it, and she did not look away. She is the patron of the grieving precisely because she is not above the grief. She is in it with you, a mother who knows exactly what it is to hold the dead body of someone she loved more than her own life. When you cannot pray, when there are no words, you can simply stand next to her the way she stood next to him, and let her keep the vigil with you.

And there is this, which she alone can say: she stood at that cross on Friday, and she was the one person on earth who never fully lost hope through the silence of Saturday, because she remembered everything he had told her. She grieved with the resurrection somewhere deep inside her, not as a way to skip the sorrow, but as the thin thread that kept her from despair. She can hold that thread for you too, when you are too broken to hold it yourself.

Pray it in the first silent hours: Mother of Sorrows, you stood at the cross and did not look away. Stand with me now. I cannot pray and I can barely breathe. Keep the vigil with me, and hold the thread of hope I am too broken to hold. Amen.

Carry this today: You do not have to be strong or say the right thing or feel the right way. Just stay in it, the way she stayed. Let someone sit with you. That is enough for today.

The one line to keep: She did not look away from the worst of it, and she will not look away from yours.

She came to the grave in the dark

Saint Mary Magdalene · July 22 · the first witness to the resurrection

She went to the tomb while it was still dark, because grief cannot wait for morning.

Mary Magdalene loved Jesus with a fierce, grateful love, because he had given her back her life. She followed him, she stood at his cross when most of the men had fled, and when he was dead and buried she could not stay away. The Gospel says she came to the tomb early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark. Read that line the way a grieving person reads it. She could not sleep. She could not wait for a decent hour. She got up in the black of the early morning and went to be near the body, because that is what grief does. It pulls you toward the grave, toward the last place they were, in the dark, before anyone else is awake.

And then the second blow fell. The tomb was open and empty, and in her grief she assumed the worst, that even his body had been taken from her, that she could not even have the small mercy of tending his grave. She stood outside the tomb weeping. When two angels asked her why she was weeping, she did not marvel at the angels. Grief had narrowed her whole world down to one thing. They have taken away my Lord, she said, and I do not know where they have laid him. She turned and saw a man she took for the gardener and begged him, if you have carried him away, tell me where, and I will take him. She was ready to carry a dead body by herself through the dark. That is how much she loved him.

Then he said her name. Mary. One word, her own name in the voice she knew better than any other, and the whole world turned over. She had come in the dark expecting a corpse, and she met the living Lord. She became the first human being to see the risen Christ and the first to carry the news, the apostle to the apostles, sent to tell the others that death had lost.

For the grieving, Mary Magdalene is the patron of the ones whose love will not let them stay away from the grave. If you find yourself drawn to the cemetery, to the closet that still smells like them, to the phone you cannot delete, you are not being morbid. You are being like her. That pull is love, and it is holy. And her story holds the promise that the grave, which looks so final in the dark, is not the end. She went looking for a body and found a living person. She learned, before anyone else, that the ones we bury in sorrow are not where we left them. They are risen, and they are ahead of us, and one day they will say our name.

Pray it when the grave pulls at you: Mary Magdalene, you came to the tomb in the dark because you could not stay away, and he met you there and said your name. Meet me in my dark. Let me hear, somewhere underneath the grief, the promise that the grave is not the end. Amen.

Carry this today: If you feel pulled toward the grave, the ashes, the photographs, go, and do not be ashamed of it. Grief that seeks out the beloved is love, not weakness. Bring your tears to the place and let them fall.

The one line to keep: She went looking for a body and found him alive. So will you, one day.

Behind the coffin of her only son

The Widow of Nain · commemorated in the Gospel of Luke

She had already buried her husband, and now she was burying her only child, and a stranger stopped the funeral.

We do not know her name. Luke tells her story in a few lines, and they contain a whole world of loss. She was a widow, which in that time and place meant she had already survived the death of her husband and the collapse of her security. And now she was walking behind a coffin that held her only son, her last protector, her one remaining reason, her whole future, being carried out of the town of Nain to be buried. A large crowd was with her, because everyone understood. This was the worst thing that could happen to a woman in that world, and it had happened to her twice over. First the husband, now the only child. She had nothing left to lose because she had already lost it all.

Jesus was coming into the town as the funeral was coming out, and the two crowds met at the gate. Luke records the detail that matters most. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. Not on the crowd, not on the situation, on her, the mother. He saw her. The Greek word for his compassion is a deep one, a being moved in the guts, the way you double over when grief hits you physically. God, walking the earth, saw a grieving mother and was moved in his very body. And he said to her the gentlest and most impossible thing anyone has ever said at a funeral: do not weep. He could only say it because of what he was about to do. He walked to the coffin, touched it, and told the dead young man to rise, and he sat up and began to speak, and Luke says Jesus gave him back to his mother.

For the grieving, the widow of Nain is the patron of the ones who have lost more than seems survivable, who have buried more than one, whose losses have stacked up until there is nothing left. She is proof that God notices exactly the person the crowd is worried about, the one at the center of the sorrow, the one whose whole world is in that coffin. He does not see grief as a mass event. He sees the mother. He sees you.

Now, God does not raise every son at every gate, and it would be cruel to pretend he does. The widow’s boy walked out of that funeral alive, and your beloved did not, and that difference is the whole ache of grief. But her story is not a promise that death will be undone here and now. It is a promise about who God is and where his eyes are. He is the God who is moved to his very guts by a grieving mother at a town gate. He is the God who walks toward funerals, not away from them. And the raising of that one boy is a small, blazing sign of the thing he has promised to do for all of them and all of us at the end, when he touches every coffin and gives every beloved back to the ones who wept for them.

Pray it when the losses have stacked too high: Lord who stopped at the gate of Nain, you saw the mother in the middle of the crowd and were moved in your very body. See me. My losses have stacked higher than I can carry. Be moved for me, and hold the promise that you will one day give my beloved back. Amen.

Carry this today: If people are treating your loss as one event in a busy world, remember that God sees the person, not the crowd. Say your beloved’s name out loud to him today. He is moved by it.

The one line to keep: God does not see grief as a crowd. He sees the mother. He sees you.