Puzzle pieces

Rosie Wareham - 18 Jun 18

This won’t necessarily be elegantly written – but hopefully you will get the idea!

Think of your life as a puzzle. Some of us have a nice, gentle 50 piece puzzle (not many I expect) and some of us have a hugely complicated 1000 piece puzzle. Either way your puzzle and the way it’s pieces fit together are individual to you.

When you lose someone you love, you lose a piece of your puzzle. We will all lose pieces through the years, there’s no avoiding it. Sometimes, as much as those pieces are a part of the puzzle and you love them, you can live with the puzzle as it is with a few holes. But sometimes you lose a piece that’s so important, it’s not just a hole in your puzzle, it’s like someone threw the whole thing up in the air and ran off.

Immediately after this happens, you will scrabble around trying to find all the other pieces and put them back together. But sadly, often you can’t. The puzzle doesn’t go back together as it was, and some pieces don’t even fit at all anymore. The piece you lost was so incredibly special and important that you cannot possibly remake the puzzle as it was, and nor should you want too. It’s not fair, you wanted the puzzle you had. What can you do with all the pieces now?

Eventually, you have to try to make a new picture. It’s not the one you wanted or expected, but you have no choice. As I said, some pieces might not fit at all anymore, they might keep trying to go back to their old place, seemingly unaware that you cannot do that.

Equally you will probably find new pieces, and certainly you will find that some become even more significant. All these things are ok, you can’t go back to the way things were and that isn’t your fault.

Building the new puzzle is really hard, there’s no picture on the box to follow and you are the only one who can work out what it will look like (with the support of some amazing family and friends who would stay in your picture no matter how much it changed).

In the end, you will build a new puzzle because you have too but every time you look at it you will always know that it is different – and it will hurt beyond belief. When this happens, take a look at the pieces you still have and how special they are. Try to embrace the new picture as much as you can – it’s what you have now and you never know when it might change again.

And what about the lost piece? It never stops being an integral part of your puzzle and you never stop wishing to have it back, in every moment of your life both happy and sad. Other people can’t see it anymore so they might not realise that, but you know it and the feelings between you and the person you lost can never ever be taken away. Those feelings are as they were, and always will be.

Your grief will live alongside the love and happiness you feel in your life, it won’t diminish your love for other people, but it will always be there.

I read that grief is just love with nowhere to go, which helps me understand why it is so powerful and never ending.

My puzzle

For me, that missing piece is my Dad, lost with no warning at all on 1^st April 2016. I could walk to the ends of the earth and I’d never find a piece to fill the hole he has left in my life. 2 years on and I feel I’m still building my new picture, with him forever the constant in my head and heart that he has always been.

However I also have two small pieces, Charlie and Louie, relying on me to build a puzzle that is happy, loving, full of laughter, happy memories and includes their Grandad Ice Cream Man, who they still deserve to know as much as ever before. And I don’t want to let them down because being their mummy has kept me going the last 2 years and motivates me to keep learning and growing.

The puzzle isn’t what I expected, or wanted and that is true for so, so many people. And one day will be true for us all, as we learn to accept that none of us are here forever. But I have also realised that you don’t need to follow the picture on the box – you can, and should make the picture that you want, with the pieces that are important to you.

Good luck and lots of love xx

Rosie Wareham

Mum of 2 boys, running a digital marketing business with my big sister and always planning the next holiday!

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