Lake Chelan Lutheran Church created a liturgy for precisely this moment. Over time, this liturgy has also shown itself to be a great help for the grief we carry about the times we were unable to accompany our loved ones in their dying days.

Peace at the Last was created and published through Augsburg Fortress. Building it took eighteen months and a team of eight or nine people, gathering prayers and blessings, choosing psalms members of the congregation found most meaningful, and setting the words to music written by their own musician, Rolf Vegdahl. An artist, Wendy Schramm, spent that same stretch of time painting a watercolor frame for each piece of the liturgy, some restful, some stark, matching the way grief actually moves.

When the liturgy was presented to a pastoral care class at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, students were invited to think of someone they'd wished they could have accompanied in dying. For most, it was the first time they'd let themselves face that grief since the isolation of Covid. We believe untended grief is part of what's driving so much of the anger in our culture today. This liturgy gives that grief somewhere to go.