I found this prayer of mourning comforting today. It is my sister’s birthday. She would have been 48.

It is hard to speak of oneness when our world is not complete,
when those who once brought wholeness to our life have gone,
and naught but memory can fill the emptiness their passing leaves behind.

But memory can tell us only what we were, in company with those we loved;
it cannot help us find what each of us, alone, must now become.

Yet no person is really alone;
those who live no more echo still within our thoughts and words,
and what they did has become woven into what we are.

We do best homage to our dead by living our lives fully
even in the shadow of our loss.
For each of our lives is worth the life of the whole world.
In each one is the breath of the Ultimate One.

In affirming the One, we affirm the worth of each one whose life, now ended,
brought us closer to the Source of Life, in whose union no person is alone and every life finds purpose.