Grief Puzzle
By Wendy Barry
April 15, 2024
April 15, 2024
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There are things I can barely remember--
the images like a dark room—the blackness deep and total, except for the lamp on the desk, shining a small light on the past, where you and I are sitting on the couch (those colonial 70s in blue and red!) in front of the bay window at Meadow Park, and you are working a puzzle on a card table you and Mom sometimes use to play bridge with friends. I am your lovely assistant and apprentice. The puzzle is a landscape. There are flowers, and sky and hills, and water, but not in their places. The pieces are half in the box, and slowly it is coming together. I am probably five. I know the rules already. We don’t look at the box on principle. We start with the corners. We find the four of them. (Once we found five!) We find all the edge pieces and connect them first. Sometimes we will miscalculate how long the edges are supposed to be. Straight edges can be deceiving; we can think that things fit, but they don’t. We will have to take things apart and begin again. We organize the piles of pieces by color and pattern. But we don’t look at the cover of the box. We look for color, both hue and shade, though I don’t know those words yet, and then we look for shapes. Innies over in this pile; outies over in this pile. A pile for pieces that are both innies and outies. At times we sit back and stare at the pieces, each individual piece, and we look until we see the shape we are looking for; we don’t try every darn piece on the table, but wait until we see what we see. When we try the piece, and it doesn’t fit, sometimes we put it back on the table, but sometimes we try to stuff it in and pound on it with our fists for comic effect. We sing. We don’t look at the box. We look for pieces on the floor. At times, we look for pieces on the floor, and then we panic about whether or not the dog ate them. Sometimes the dog did eat them. Pieces will stick to your sweater, when you stand up to go get something to drink, or fall and blend in with the carpet. Sometimes you will get to the end, and there will be pieces missing. You are done. You have put it together, but pieces are missing. You will never know where they went, if they were even in the box, if they slid down the cushions and have become part of the structure of the couch. The pieces will be lost. There will be a hole. You will wish it was complete. |
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Wendy Barry is a Connecticut Yankee living in South Carolina. She is the co-editor of The Annotated Anne of Green Gables from Oxford University Press. She is a poet, gardener, jewelry-maker, painter, teacher, and friend to dogs.
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Author's Note:
“Grief Puzzle” is about my dad, and about the things that he taught me in life, as well as the things his death taught me.