The Nun who Longed to Return for one Hail Mary

Attribution: related by Blessed Alan de la Roche.

Blessed Alan de la Roche told of a nun who had always had a great devotion to the Rosary. For several years before she died she was bedridden and suffered agonizing pain, and at last she died.

After her death she appeared to one of her sisters in religion, and what she said astonished the living. "If I were able to return to my body," she told her, "just for the chance to say a single Hail Mary, even without great fervour, I would gladly go through the whole of my last illness all over again, in order to gain the merit of that one prayer."

From beyond death she had seen what a single Hail Mary is worth, a thing most of the living never stop to weigh.

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Source:

Simplified retellings of the miracle and conversion stories that St. Louis de Montfort gathered in The Secret of the Rosary, written in the early eighteenth century. These are paraphrased in plain modern prose, faithful to the substance of the traditional English translation but not word for word. Montfort himself called them "ancient but authentic stories about the holy Rosary," collected from earlier authors such as Blessed Alan de la Roche, and offered on human authority, not as articles of faith.