Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

Grief and hope are not opposites, and they are not stages you move through in order. You can be flattened by a loss and still expect something of the days ahead, and the two live in the same chest. Hope here is not cheerfulness, and it is not a belief that the loss was acceptable. It is the quiet sense that this is not the whole of what your life will be.

If you are mourning, you do not have to choose between feeling it and carrying on. Let one small thing this week point at later rather than at now, and let it be small.