Jigsaw Puzzle

I'm stealing the following analogy from a book I'm reading, although I've rephrased it in my own words.

Grief is like being forced to put together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. It takes lots of time, endless energy and patience, concentration, and lots of help. Most of the time it is very frustrating, and it's the last thing you want to be doing with your time. Sometimes there may be rewarding moments, when you can start to see some of the big picture. The majority of the time, though, it's simply too overwhelming, and you wouldn't be working on it except for the fact that you are forced to. You want to walk away from it, but you can't. You don't have a choice. The puzzle is your life, and you cannot ignore it and let it stay in shambles.

There are many times where you feel like you are beginning to place pieces together that fit and are perhaps even making some progress, but then it is as if someone comes and knocks your puzzle onto the floor, and all the pieces come apart and are scattered (some may even become forever lost underneath furniture). This happens not only once, but sometimes weekly, sometimes daily. Imagine having to pick up the pieces of this gigantic puzzle and start all over, again and again and again. Sometimes you're just too tired to work on it, but if you don't pick up the pieces, you have a mess on your floor.

After this happens so many times, you may begin to identify certain pieces that fit together quicker than you did at first, so putting the puzzle back together may not be quite as labor intensive as it was originally. Perhaps even some of the pieces stick together after they fall off the table and you don't have to redo that part of the puzzle.

But not for me. For me, the entire puzzle is sent flying into the air, and I'm left to start over from scratch, each time. Again. There is no worse feeling, nothing else that sends me into despair quite like this.

O God, have mercy. Remember me!