So you must not be frightened...if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen. --Rainer Maria Rilke
To those who know Rich, it will be no surprise that he was good at putting together jigsaw puzzles. To those who know me...I'm not.
So, as a challenge, I once bought what I thought was an insolvable one: A cheese pizza broken into 1,000 pieces, mostly red (sauce) and (yellow) cheese, with pieces of brown (pepperoni) scattered throughout.
He set it on a table, and over a week or so, in his spare time, would neatly attach this section, then that, and within a couple of weeks -- done. He applied a coat of shellac, framed it, and mounted it on the wall.
"Rub it in," I said.
Looking at it made me not only a bit jealous, but also hungry. I could taste the hot cheese, sensuously stretching itself through teeth, lightly burning tongue. It became real.
But it was only a puzzle, not the real thing at all, soon to be broken down and eventually gone to the landfill. Even when brilliantly pieced together, puzzles are only broken pieces, inanimate and temporary.
And yet and yet -- this puzzle that is gone forever, the days of Rich and Candace -- is a sadness varnished and framed, bigger than life, terrifyingly real. I can still taste it, I am still hungry for it, at many moments I can't understand how we became nothing more than broken-down dead pieces.
What satisfies, a little, is knowing that puzzles are solved not with "why" but "how." How to move on...how his memory may continue to bring me (and others) joy...how to attach this piece to another and then someday say: Done.
Candace
1 comment:
Candace, this moved me profoundly.
It could be that you're not the whiz at jigsaw puzzles, I can't say, but I never met anyone better at putting together the puzzle pieces of the mysteries of life, making links, drawing threads, making things fit together, coming back around to where we started but at a new level and all the richer for the journey.
I know you can finish this puzzle, whatever "finished" means, because you persistently work at it.
I'm so glad you're continuing the blog. It needs to be there.
Maybe the puzzle of Rich and Candace is not gone forever, just changed form? The warmth, the glow, these are still in you. And in everyone who knew you. Knows you.
I just returned from 12 days in France, doing nothing. There was an absence of activity, of schedule, in my life during this time. But something else came into the space. A very active dream life, internal being still. Another way of living. "Who am I without (this person's physical presence) (this active schedule)(fill in whatever is the absence)?" Please don't misunderstand; the loss of a person is nothing like the loss of some activity. But vacuum shifts things and makes everything re-settle; different scales and emotional impacts to be sure depending on what or who is missing. What comes out from the re-settling, that is the mystery and the puzzle to be solved with patience, time, and exquisite observation.
Love to you,
Heather
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