I lost my nephew Dawson when he was twenty-one. I still don’t have a clean answer for why, and if you’ve lost someone too soon, I’m not going to pretend I have one for you either. Anybody who hands you a tidy explanation for a tragedy probably hasn’t lived through one.

What I can tell you is what actually happened to my faith afterward, because it wasn’t a straight line. For a while I was angry, and I said so, out loud, to God, in the truck, on my route, in the middle of loading an oxygen tank into somebody’s garage. I don’t think that anger disqualified me from faith. I think it was part of it.

Hope didn’t come back all at once. It came back in pieces — a conversation with someone who’d lost someone too and didn’t try to fix me, a morning where the grief was quiet enough that I noticed the sunrise, a moment at my mother’s side realizing I still had her, still had time with her, and that time is the whole point. Those pieces added up slower than I wanted them to. But they added up.

If you’re in the middle of this right now, here’s what I’d say, the same way I’d say it to somebody I actually knew: you don’t have to rush your grief to prove your faith is strong. God can hold your anger. He held mine. The hope doesn’t erase the loss — it just eventually sits down next to it instead of being crushed by it.

Some things that helped me, and might help you: say the person’s name out loud, don’t tiptoe around it. Let people sit with you in silence instead of needing them to say the right thing. And give yourself permission to believe that this pain isn’t the end of your story, even on the days you can’t feel that yet.

Life is short, and some of the losses in it don’t make sense. But love outlasts the loss. That’s the part I hold onto.