My mother died in the spring and the days since have been unmanageable. Getting up, eating, answering messages: none of it works the way it used to. What do I actually do?

“And Joseph fell upon his father's face, and wept upon him, and kissed him.”

Genesis closes with Joseph, the second most powerful man in Egypt, broken down over his father's body. He had authority, resources, and a nation depending on him, and none of it made the moment smaller. The text does not hurry him along; it records seventy days of mourning before anything else happens. Losing a parent undoes people who are otherwise capable, and Scripture treats that as ordinary rather than weak.

“But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.”

Paul is writing to a young church in Thessalonica that had started to panic about members who had died. He does not tell them to stop grieving. He tells them not to grieve like people with no hope at all, which leaves room for grief that is loud and long and Christian at the same time. Hope changes the horizon of your mourning. It does not shorten it.