A Prayer For The Dying is an actual prayer. Reading this short, powerful work is like listening to a priest as he says his prayers for a world burning around him. Told by an unknown narrator, Prayer is a vision of a post-civil war apocalypse in the small Wisconsin town of Friendship. The main character, Jacob Hansen, is the town sheriff, undertaker and pastor and the narrator prays for Hansen as if he is a good friend from the past. 

“You know He is just and merciful and that there is a purpose in all His works, even this… you see the hope of all this balancing out, of some justice or salvation from what seems pain and chaos. You believe.” 

A Prayer For The Dying is a communion between the past and the present, a narrator envisioning a plague, a fire and the death of a town. A plague is creeping up on Friendship and Hansen is the first to find the bodies withering in their homes, fallen from horses along the side of the road, hidden in trees and shrubs in the forest. Hansen tries to control the inevitable and slow the process of death for the town, but he finds it is beyond both his power and comprehension. He delicately tries to balance his roles as sheriff and pastor and lastly, undertaker. He is like the captain of a sinking ship as bodies pile around him, and as people try to leave the infected town they find they have been quarantined from surrounding communities.