Christians still cry at funerals. Hope doesn’t cancel grief; it keeps grief from being the end.

Believing something good about the future does not make a loss hurt less now. Hope and grief are not rivals, and holding both at once is not inconsistent. Crying hard at a funeral is no failure of conviction, it is what love does when it has nowhere to go. What hope offers is not a shortcut around sorrow but a floor underneath it.

If you are carrying a loss, you are allowed to let it be as heavy as it is. There is no version of this you are supposed to be performing. When you can, say the person’s name out loud to somebody who knew them.