When a piece goes missing

If you think about the day you were born, it’s a bit like a puzzle box that has been eagerly tipped upside down with all the puzzle pieces scattered everywhere. The puzzle gets built as your life develops and with every new experience another piece helps the puzzle take shape…. Birth Childhood Kindergarten Turning 10 Sports Music classes Dance lessons First date First breakup Sweet 16 First car First love Marriage Divorce Kids Career First home Death…. And on and on it goes. With every new experience, lesson or loss, the puzzle gets bigger and in some areas, deeper and three dimensional. Each piece snugs up with the other and some sit waiting for their future connection and completion. Our puzzles are on display everyday for everyone to see. Family and friends add new elements, careers develop, life happens and the puzzle becomes more colourful, complex and less scattered. What we never count on, is for a piece to go missing. We believe when a piece is added, it is locked in place surrounded by others and it simply isn’t possible for one to pop out. When it does, it can never go unnoticed and there is no other piece to replace it. At the heart of the puzzle, are the ones we treasure most…the ones we hold near and dear. When a piece goes missing, the puzzle suddenly becomes incomplete. It doesn’t need straight edges , it doesn’t need perfection but it needs the pieces that form the heart of the puzzle.

There is a very important piece of my puzzle missing and that is Mark. He has left a gaping hole that can never be filled. The trouble with that is it makes me wonder everyday where I fit in my own puzzle… where I fit in my community, where I fit among friends and family when he is missing.

Losing a puzzle piece is never one dimensional, it affects everything at every level of life and nothing, absolutely nothing is the same.

It took me 54 years to build my first puzzle I call Version 1.0. Losing Mark means I somehow need to build Version 2.0 which means I have to keep putting my feet on the ground and step outside everyday. Sounds easy but believe me it is hard to find your fit sometimes.