When Grief Taught Me to Pray the Rosary

On the Feast of St. Dominic, a Grieving Mother Reflects

on What the Rosary Finally Taught Her

On the feast of St. Dominic, whose Order of Preachers has been associated for centuries with the spread of the Rosary, I find myself thinking about what this prayer has meant in my own life.

I learned the words as a child. I prayed them for decades—no pun intended. But it took grief for me to begin to understand the Mother whose prayers I had been asking all those years.

For 286 days, the voice guiding me through this Rosary journey has belonged to Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR, host of Ascension’s Rosary in a Year podcast. I actually began the journey longer ago than that, but personal illness caused me to miss a few days along the way.

Fr. Mark-Mary is a member of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, a community founded in 1987 with a particular commitment to prayer, evangelization, and service to the poor. That Franciscan spirit comes through in the way he teaches. He doesn’t simply explain the mysteries of the Rosary; he invites us to slow down, enter into them, and contemplate the life of Christ with Mary.

His daily reflections have made these months of praying the Rosary especially fruitful for me.

On a bonus episode of Rosary in a Year, Fr. Mark-Mary was joined by Dr. Edward Sri, a theologian and author who has written extensively about the Rosary. But what struck me most was not Dr. Sri’s credentials. It was how human he sounded—frank, warm, and real—as he talked about praying the Rosary in his own family life.

Central to Dr. Sri’s teaching on the Rosary is its deeply Christ-centered character. Drawing upon St. John Paul II’s apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, he explores how the Hail Mary is not simply an intercessory prayer. It is a prayer centered upon Christ, one that repeatedly speaks the name of Jesus and gives Him praise.

That reframing matters. For those of us who have prayed the Rosary for decades—sometimes faithfully, sometimes mechanically, sometimes desperately, sometimes it can transform familiar words into something newly alive.

My own experience with the Rosary has changed over the years, but it has remained a constant in my prayer life.

When I was a little girl back in the 1960s, my mother belonged to a Rosary group. Every few weeks, she would host the group at our house. Of course, we children had to participate—and be on our best behavior.

I remember one evening when the telephone rang. I jumped up from my knees to answer it, picked up the receiver, and said, “Hail Mary, full of grace—I ugh—mean, hello!”

I was so embarrassed. I don’t remember who was on the other end or any of the other details, but I remember feeling like a complete fool.

It was very funny, though.

After several years, the Rosary group came to an end, so we were on our own when it came to praying it. As a child and teenager, I was only partly faithful to the Rosary.

Later, as a young married woman, I learned from my mom that the Rosary was aired frequently on EWTN. I began praying along with the Holy Land Rosary with Father Mitch Pacwa at 6:30 every workday morning. It became part of my routine and helped keep me faithful to the prayer.

Fast-forward about thirty-five years.

COVID happened.

The lockdown came shortly after my son died. Churches were closed, access to the sacraments was limited, and my priest was not as readily available. I felt lost. I desperately needed the closeness I had known from sitting before the tabernacle or visiting with my priest.

So, I turned more deeply to prayer.

In addition to my morning Rosary, I began praying a Scriptural Rosary using a booklet I had, or the Seven Sorrows Rosary. That devotion touched me so deeply that I eventually made a Seven Sorrows Rosary for myself.

We watched Mass on television or online. We participated in a course through Red Bird Ministries on Zoom. I spent time making Catholic devotionals while listening to Catholic podcasts.

These became lifelines.

It was the only way I knew to survive, because whenever I was idle for any amount of time, the grief became overwhelming. I was working remotely then, too, but even work wasn’t enough to keep my mind off my son.

Years later, when Fr. Mark-Mary Ames read the manuscript of my book, Holy Grief: Encountering Christ in the Sacredness of Loss, he described my story as a testimony to “the capacity for God’s grace to enter into the most profound of sufferings, even the loss of a child.”

Those words meant a great deal to me, particularly because the Rosary had been one of the places where I first began to experience that grace for myself.

For years, I had heard people talk about having a devotion to the Blessed Mother. When they spoke about Mary, their faces would light up.

I wanted that.

I wanted to love her that way. I just didn’t know how.

At one point, I bought a huge piece of artwork of Our Lady holding the Child Jesus for my living room wall. I loved it, but it didn’t change anything. Even all those years of praying the Rosary hadn’t brought me to the kind of relationship with Mary that I saw in others.

But after my son died, everything changed.

I began looking at the Pietà differently.

I could see Mary not only as the Mother of God, but as a mother who had held her dead Son in her arms, just as I had held mine.

Her Son is God—and yet, she is still His mother.

And He died.

In that moment, she had not yet seen the Resurrection. She knew the weight of loss.

And I knew that weight, too.

This is something I think many people misunderstand about Catholic devotion, especially those who struggle with our use of statues and sacred images. For me, the Pietà was never an object to worship. It became a window into what Mary experienced and a reminder of how closely my own suffering, as a mother, echoed hers.

Praying the Seven Sorrows Rosary touched something deep within me. Slowly, almost quietly, the devotion to the Blessed Mother that I had wanted for so many years began to grow.

Even in my work creating Catholic devotionals, I seek out the most beautiful images of Mary I can find. I am not talking about her physical beauty. I look for images that somehow reveal her heart—her tenderness, her sorrow, her love for her Son.

It has become a very intimate part of my work.

On this feast of St. Dominic—the 13th-century priest who founded the Order of Preachers and whose spiritual descendants have been closely associated with promoting the Rosary—it feels right to reflect on what this prayer has cost and what it has given back.

I think about Jesus and His Passion. I think about how He suffered and died for my sins.

I look at Him on the Cross, and I can see the love He has for me.

How could I ever have doubted that He loved me?

It was through His Mother that I was able to get there. Through Mary, I could come close enough to her Son to begin to see and feel His love.

This is when the healing began.

I also think about Mary—His Mother, our Mother—and what she experienced that day. Her own sorrow.

I know something of that sorrow. I have been there.

But I also believe, as she did, in the promises of God. I believe in the Resurrection of the body, and I believe that on the last day I will see my son and my two babies again, reunited in heaven.

And that brings me back to St. Dominic.

There is an old and beautiful Catholic tradition surrounding St. Dominic and the Rosary that feels worth pausing over on his feast day.

The story comes to us particularly through Blessed Alan de la Roche, who lived more than two centuries after St. Dominic. According to this tradition, Dominic had spent years laboring against the Albigensian heresy with little fruit. Exhausted and discouraged, he withdrew in prayer and penance, begging for the help of the Queen of Heaven.

Tradition holds that Mary appeared to him and directed him toward the Rosary as an instrument for preaching the mysteries of Christ and calling people back to the faith.

The Rosary itself developed over centuries, so it would be too simple to say that St. Dominic “invented” it. But the Dominican Order became deeply connected with its spread and promotion, and the tradition of Mary placing this prayer into Dominic’s hands has endured in Catholic spirituality for centuries.

Perhaps that story has remained with us because it expresses something true about prayer.

The Rosary comes to us when words fail.

According to the tradition, Dominic had labored and preached and struggled—and still found himself confronted by what he could not accomplish on his own.

And there, in his poverty, Our Lady handed him the beads.

That is not so different from what many of us have experienced.

The Rosary did not find most of us in our finest hours.

It found us in the woods—lost, on our knees, begging for help we did not know how to ask for.

It found me in grief.

And in the tradition handed down about St. Dominic, it met him in discouragement.

What Mary offered was not an explanation.

It was a prayer.

Bead by bead.

Mystery by mystery.

A way to stay close to her Son when nothing else was working.

Eight hundred years later, that same prayer is still being handed from one broken heart to another.

Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with you,

Blessed are you among women,

and Blessed is the Fruit of Your Womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

pray for us sinners now,

and at the hour of our death.

Amen.