Jigsaw Puzzle

We started with the edges, digging for them where they lay buried among other pieces in the big cardboard box that David had brought home for Christmas. We took turns sifting through pieces, until we started dividing them by color into big, ceramic bowls.

Half of solving a jigsaw puzzle is sorting the pieces. Or at least it is when the puzzle is a nine-thousand-piece reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch’s fifteenth-century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Being a triptych, it has three panels, and each one looks different enough from the next: Adam, God, and Eve on the left; earthly delights in the middle; Hell on the right.

We assembled the puzzle on the biggest table in my mother’s house, in a room where, early last century, she said, a wake would have been held.

We weren’t having a wake. We don’t mourn at my mother’s house—not formally. There had been a funeral for Miles, David’s son, when he died four months prior, but at my mother’s house we do things like puzzles, as we sit by the fireplace and talk about dogs. I drink beer.

As we worked through the first day, Stefanie, pregnant with our second daughter, wandered in a few times to put some pieces in place. Moriah, our first daughter, stood on a chair and scattered to the floor all the pieces she could reach with her little arms, for no reason. I took her away.

On the second day, some of our cousins came to help with the puzzle. Sue helped. Maggie helped. Chess came and assembled half the ferns on the left-hand panel before he had to go. Mostly, though, it was David and I who sat hunched over the big table in the room where we were not having a wake.

We hunched for hours. My neck hurt.

I don’t know what Bosch meant the whole triptych to do or say, but the intent of the right-hand panel seems plain, depicting as it does the torments that lie in wait for sinners like me (I like beer too much) when they die. If you’re not careful, then in the next life you might be swallowed and excreted by a man-bird. You might get attacked by dogs.

I had no trouble putting together the man who was crucified on the strings of a harp, presumably for having enjoyed music. The parts most readily solved, it seemed, were the human figures looming big in Hell’s foreground. A hand’s got to connect to an arm, after all, a leg to a foot.

But for every puzzle piece that had a human face or foot on it, which made it locatable on the triptych, at least five had nothing on them but a solid color. There was pale, green grass and pale, blue sky—lots of both—and for a busy puzzle an expanse of solid black took up an awful lot of Hell.

There must have been eight hundred pieces of darkness visible. I tried assembling it. I didn’t get far. Before long, I was staggered by the sheer emptiness of Bosch’s Hell. That was the whole idea, and as I lost myself in the Hell of the right-hand panel I thought that if our grief were a jigsaw puzzle it might be the shattered windshield of Miles’s RAV4, the pieces of which wouldn’t stick together even if you could gather them all from the side of the road in Pennsylvania where his car leapt off the road, we don’t know why.

You could never finish the grief puzzle, no matter who came to help solve it.

We thought we could do the Bosch puzzle in five days, if we put our minds to it. On the third day, though, we faced a harsh truth. The table where we had assembled not even a quarter of the puzzle so far wasn’t big enough to hold the finished thing. We’d measured it, prior to starting. We’d measured wrong...