Humpty Dumpty

We all at certain times in our lives find ourselves broken. True strength is found in picking up the pieces. ~Jill Hanna

I look in the mirror each day. It looks like the old me, the me I was before. Perhaps with more wrinkles, and a touch more silver, but still I don’t seem so different. I look somehow whole, put together, in tact.

But I am not. Below the surface I resemble Humpty Dumpty after the fall. My father’s suicide has left me fragmented, fractured, broken. Pieces, so many pieces…

The me that I was before that devastating phone call, I will never be again. The me that will emerge through the healing process, and the complex & painful layers of grief, I do not yet know. So I am simply in a state of becoming. Becoming feels somehow fragile. Some days I feel held together by super glue, other days by scotch tape and still, on many days, simply by spit & a prayer.

To lose someone to suicide, I have read, is to have a grenade, loaded with shrapnel, tossed into the center of a family. The damage inflicted is far reaching, devastating and destructive. Only the doctors cannot stitch the wounds back together. All the kings horses & all the kings men….

I look in the mirror. I see a facade. I am not whole. Look beneath the surface and you will see, the cracks, the fissures, the brokenness that I carry within.

I pray for shalom, for wholeness, to return. I know that I will always carry the scars, but the wounds won’t be so raw, so painful. I pray, and I strive. I journey through the grief, step by step.

I pick up the pieces of a shattered heart. I search to hold on to fragments of the old me. And as I journey through the grief, I recognize that never again will I look the same beneath the surface.

And when I find healing, what new pieces will I carry within? How will they fit into the changing canvas of my soul? An abstract collection of before, during and after. A new mosaic will emerge. I will look for her, I will search for her and I will tend to her. I pray that she will be stronger in the broken places.

I will carry within all the pieces of me. Those that were shattered, and those yet to be. They will remind me of what I have lost & what I have gained. They will shape me, though they will not define me. Outwardly I will look the same. Inwardly I will not.

But one day, it will not take such great effort to hold those pieces of me together. One day they will simply find their place, alongside of one another. There they will settle, there they will be rooted and there, they will lay a foundation of strength… A new mosaic.

So for now, I hold tight. And when I need to, I simply let go–falling to pieces. Crying, raging, talking, grieving, grappling and struggling. Then I begin again-grasping, holding, healing…. All the pieces of me.

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
― Rumi