Sharks, Loss and Snowflakes

Remember that story about the girl from Hawaii who had her arm bitten off by a shark? I realized today that I feel like that girl. I'm missing parts of myself. Every loss, big and small, has taken a piece out of me, until I'm like a paperdoll with tattered arms and legs, missing feet, rips and gouges. I'm no longer whole, no longer unrumpled.

And I'm not the only one. I thought of my friend whose baby died last year, just two weeks before her due date. My husband called at dinner time to let me know he'd be late because just five minutes before he arrived for a scheduled home visit, the fifty-year old woman he was to visit died. I thought of 2-year old child I know whose parents are divorcing. It seems that everywhere I turn, people are facing loss, some small, some heartbreakingly enormous.

We have all lost someone or something irreplaceable. All of us, everyone. We all have holes and gaps and empty gaping wounds. Loss is part of life from the moment we come squalling into this cold world, having lost the safety of the only warm place we've ever known.

The vacant spaces define us. I saw myself primarily as a child of divorce for many years. And when the pain of that began to fade, I lost my dad for good when he died just a couple weeks after he turned 47. I was 24. Then I became a girl without a dad.

I became a woman who could not get pregnant. I became the writer who could not get published. I became the lonely outsider in a small town. What I didn't have framed me, rather than what I had, what I accomplished, what I was. Do we all try to hide the wounds and disguise our empty spots, while we secretly despair over the ripped out parts in our lives? Or is it just me?

This morning, when I contemplated myself as destroyed paperdoll with missing chunks, the unbidden image of a paper snowflake fluttered into my mind. I realized that the missing parts, the losses, the empty spots are part of a greater design. Look at the snowflake. The cut out parts don't destroy it. The scissored out triangles and circles enhance the beauty of the snowflake. They make it what it is.

When I think now of the empty spaces in myself, I won't concentrate on just the ragged scars. I'll see a snowflake, shaped by loss, but not destroyed. The losses feel random and unfair sometimes, but I have faith that God has a plan, an intricate, one-of-a-kind design for my life.

I'm not the holes in my life. I am wholly in the hand of a loving Creator. I am whole, despite the missing pieces.