I have a confession.
I hate puzzles.
Twenty years ago I watched my friend Tami put together complicated multi-piece puzzles—a pastime she took up thanks to doctor-ordered bed rest when she was pregnant with her first child. Candy Crush and Words with Friends were still a decade away from being invented, and she didn’t have cable.
I watched the cardboard depictions of exotic places and adorable animals take shape as I held my own newborn and chatted lazily with her from my place on her couch. (Yeah, I wasn’t much help.)
After Tami gave birth to a healthy baby boy (the real labor of love), she put the puzzles away for good. (“I never want to see another puzzle again!)
Two years later, Tami got pregnant with a baby girl. No bed rest this time. Her textbook pregnancy resulted in a full-term, healthy newborn.
Then a few years after that, that precious baby girl got cancer. And even though Tami wasn’t sitting on the floor physically putting together the pieces of a puzzle, she spent many nights poring over a diagnosis that had shattered her heart into a thousand pieces.
In that dim hospital room with the blinking lights and buzzing machines and offending smells, I believe she was trying to make sense of an impossible future.
She approached a never-ending stream of questions from every angle.
And the answers didn’t quite fit.
I think that’s why I hate the puzzles so much. So much trial-and-error. The process takes time. And determination. And patience. So much patience.
I dump out the box, and to me it just looks like a big mess.
I want to organize everything into neat and tidy piles. Border pieces first. Then the interior. Blue ones here. Yellow ones over there. Is that a part of a face? Let’s group those pieces here.
I’m doing things my way, the right way. There’s got to be a method to the madness.
Tami’s daughter survived the cancer diagnosis, but many of her friends didn’t. I once heard a dad who lost his own daughter say, “Everything just feels wrong all the time.”
The patience and determination of a thousand Tamis will never heal his broken heart because there will always be a missing piece.
IT’S ALL WRONG, ALL THE TIME.
When I was talking to Tami about this idea, she told me that the puzzle is really a metaphor for life, not just cancer. We want all the pieces to fit. We crave meaning and purpose. Our hearts long to find beauty in the ashes.
The optimist in me wants to cheer: “Just keep praying! Good luck, friend! You can do it!”
The pessimist in me knows that missing pieces often stay missing.
Humans are works-in-progress.
Recently, Tami told me something I had forgotten; that her pregnancy with Audrey wasn’t “textbook.” Early on, doctors told her she was probably carrying an ectopic embryo and would likely miscarry. She spent weeks weathering that storm, only to then be told Audrey might have Trisomy 18, a rare and life-threatening genetic condition.
Tami spent nine full months fearing the worst.
Her dreams for the new life growing within her broke again and again.
And all this before the cancer diagnosis.
DREAMS, LIKE PUZZLES, ARE FRAGILE.
A thousand-piece puzzle isn’t put together in a day. And neither are we.
We spend years creating a life we think we’ll love, the one we’ve modeled after the picture in our heads. But we break. Pieces get lost. The pictures don’t match.
Is it still possible to create something beautiful?
The View From Here
Tami is wise. She said we’ll never see the complete picture this side of heaven. And when we get there, maybe our questions will be answered and maybe they won’t. “Probably,” she said, “by then we won’t even care.“
One year it rained while we were on vacation, and I packed a puzzle “just in case.” I’m not sure what prompted that bit of foresight because I’m telling you, I don’t like puzzles. At first, no one wanted to help, but once I set up the work space and began organizing the pieces, members of my family started tiptoeing over one-by-one “just to watch.” Soon, everyone was pitching in to help.
Maybe puzzles aren’t so bad after all.
There’s a sense of accomplishment that accompanies a completed puzzle, a healthy sense of pride for being plucky enough to stick with it.
We were almost done with the puzzle at the beach when we realized a piece had gone missing. One piece! We looked everywhere, and it was just…GONE. I remember being really irritated because I was so proud that I had COMPLETED A PUZZLE. (Let me clarify: I almost completed a puzzle. I was missing one piece.) Was it a defective box? Did we drop it on the floor? Was it hiding under a rug? Or worse: Was one of the kids in the house just messing with me?
The world will never know.
I loaned the puzzle to my sister-in-law during the pandemic, and when she returned it, she said nothing of the missing piece.
“I forgot to tell you…” I started.
“You forgot to tell me! We looked everywhere for that piece! I thought I lost it!”
“Joke’s on you,” I said. “I just forgot.” I shrugged.
The older I get, the less clear I see the photo on the box in my head.
UNLIKE PUZZLES, OUR LIVES ARE FLUID.
Moments of joy and loss shape the way we live, love, parent, and work. The broken pieces don’t always go back together like we want.
And the missing pieces will always drive us crazy.
Tami said we won’t see the complete picture this side of heaven, but even if we can’t see it, we can trust God to fill the empty place. He’s the master of creating beautiful things, after all.
There’s another thing about puzzles that’s pretty cool. Working them with friends is infinitely more fun than working them by yourself. When we link arms with one another, we make each other stronger. We help put the broken pieces back together. We fill empty places.
Until piece-by-piece, compassion emerges and our collective humanity takes shape.
And we are whole.
