The Puzzle
The movie Frequency changed my life.
It came out in 2000, when I was fifteen years old. I had already lived through what was, and still is, the worst day of my life. Six years earlier, my dad had died.
In the movie, a grown son is given the impossible gift of speaking to his father thirty years in the past. He gets the chance I dreamed about for years: to save his dad.
As a fifteen-year-old girl who had already lost hers, I watched believing I already knew how the story should end.
Save the dad.
Save the life.
Surely everything would be better.
But that isn’t what happened.
Saving his dad didn’t save his life.
It simply gave him a different one.
I had spent years believing that if my dad had lived, every difficult part of my life would somehow disappear. My family would be different. I would be different. I wouldn’t be “the girl with the dead dad.” I imagined I would be more confident, more secure, less wounded.
I imagined grief was the one missing piece keeping my life from becoming the picture it was supposed to be.
The movie quietly challenged that belief.
For the first time, I wondered if the life I didn’t get wasn’t automatically the better life.
That thought felt almost disloyal.
Even now, thirty years later, it still does.
Because if I could trade everything I have for one more afternoon with my dad—to hear his laugh, to see his eyes, to hug him one more time—I would.
Without hesitation.
And yet…
Over the years, another story has slowly been unfolding.
A puzzle I never expected.
The first piece appeared when my mom remarried.
If my dad had lived, I never would have known my stepdad.
He chose me.
Not because he had to.
Not because we shared DNA.
He chose me simply because he loved my mom and decided I came with her.
There is something profoundly sacred about being chosen by someone who had every opportunity not to choose you.
Most people know what it feels like to be loved by a parent.
Fewer people know what it feels like to be chosen by one.
I don’t take that gift lightly.
And still…
I would trade it all to have my dad back.
Both things are true.
Another puzzle piece appeared when I realized my dad’s life insurance paid for my education.
That education introduced me to lifelong friends.
One of those friends invited me to church.
That church reshaped my faith.
That church introduced me to a boy with a guitar who changed my love story.
That church eventually built a school.
That school hired me.
And that job has become one of the greatest gifts of my life.
One piece led to another.
And another.
And another.
None of them erase my loss.
None of them make me thankful my dad died.
But they have changed the way I see the picture.
As a little girl, I believed the worst day of my life only took from me.
Now, thirty years later, I can also see what quietly grew in its wake.
Not because the loss was good.
It wasn’t.
But because God has a remarkable way of creating beauty in places I was certain could never hold it.
I still have the fantasy.
The nine-year-old inside me always will.
She believes life with her dad would have been bigger somehow.
Warmer.
Safer.
More complete.
Honestly, I hope she never completely loses that fantasy.
It’s one of the ways she still loves him.
But I don’t want that fantasy to become the only story I tell.
Because if all I ever do is imagine the puzzle that might have been…
I’ll miss the beautiful one still being assembled in front of me.
I don’t believe life is either/or.
I think it’s both/and.
I can miss my dad with everything in me…
while also being deeply grateful for the people, places, and experiences that found me because my story unfolded the way it did.
I don’t know why some storms become part of our lives.
I probably never will.
But I do know this:
The older I get, the less interested I am in asking,
“What was taken from me?”
And the more interested I become in asking,
“What has God quietly been building all along?”
Maybe that’s what healing has looked like for me.
Not forgetting the worst day of my life.
Not pretending it was anything other than heartbreaking.
But learning, piece by piece, to see that even broken stories can become beautiful puzzles.
