The Eternal Rest — Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine — is the oldest and most universal Catholic prayer for the deceased. It takes its name from the first words of the Requiem Mass and has been prayed over the graves of Catholics since the early Church. It is the prayer you say when you pass a cemetery, the prayer you say when a death is announced, and the prayer the Church places at the center of every funeral liturgy. "Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord" — the request is simple and total: not comfort, not healing, not reunion, but rest. The rest that only God can give. The light that never fades.

St. Gertrude the Great was a 13th-century Benedictine mystic at the monastery of Helfta who received a specific promise regarding this prayer: that each time it is recited, 1,000 souls would be released from purgatory. The prayer does not ask for the release of any particular soul — it offers Christ's Most Precious Blood for all souls in purgatory, for sinners everywhere, and for those in the Church and in one's own family. It is the most powerful prayer in the Catholic tradition specifically for the deceased, and it takes thirty seconds to say. Many Catholics pray it daily, particularly in November. The promise attached to it by tradition makes it an extraordinary act of charity with very little effort required.

The Divine Mercy Chaplet carries the most specific and direct promise in the Catholic tradition for the dying and the recently deceased. Christ told St. Faustina: "When they say this Chaplet in the presence of the dying, I will stand between My Father and the dying person, not as the just Judge but as the merciful Savior." If you cannot be present at the moment of death, pray it from wherever you are — the promise is not contingent on physical presence. The Hour of Mercy is 3pm: the hour of Christ's death, when the mercy of his Passion is most directly invoked. Pray the Chaplet at 3pm for the person who just died, or who is dying, and trust the promise he made.

Our Lady of Sorrows is the title given to Mary in her role as the mother who stood at the foot of the cross and watched her son die. She did not flee. She did not cease to be his mother. She stayed. Her seven sorrows — the Presentation, the Flight into Egypt, the Loss of Jesus in the Temple, the Meeting on the Way of the Cross, the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, and the Burial — mark every form of grief a person can experience. The Stabat Mater hymn, prayed in her honor, is one of the most consoling prayers in the Catholic tradition for those who are in acute grief. She knows exactly what it is to lose someone. Her prayer does not take the grief away. It accompanies it.

The souls in purgatory are the Church's most neglected members — not because they are forgotten by God, but because they can no longer merit for themselves and depend entirely on the prayers of those still living. They cannot pray for themselves in the same way the living can. They are certain of heaven; they are not yet there. The tradition of praying for "all the faithful departed" — not only those we personally knew — is one of the oldest and most specifically Catholic acts of charity. Every soul released from purgatory by our prayer enters immediately into heaven, and enters as someone who knows who prayed for them. The tradition holds that these souls become powerful intercessors in turn.

The Magnificat is the prayer of someone who has received something they did not fully understand and chose to trust God with it anyway. It is the Church's Evening Prayer — prayed every day at Vespers — and it is the prayer for grief in its later stages: when the acute pain has passed and what remains is the long work of trusting that the person you lost is held by God in a way that transcends everything you cannot know. "He has filled the hungry with good things." Not all hungers are satisfied in this life. The Magnificat is the prayer that holds what remains unsatisfied, and leaves it in God's hands rather than one's own.