The Puzzle That Will Never Be Finished...

and the Courage to Choose Closure

Apr 16, 2025

We’re taught that understanding brings peace — that if we can just find the missing piece, the heartbreak will make sense. But what if closure isn’t about making sense at all? What if it’s about finding the courage to walk away, even when the story feels unfinished?

The Trap of Searching for Closure

There’s a stage of grief no one really warns you about.

It’s not denial.
It’s not anger.
It’s not even sadness.

It’s bargaining — but not the "Kübler-Ross certified" kind where you plead for another chance.
It’s quieter. Trickier.
It’s the belief that if you can just understand why something happened,
you can somehow make the pain hurt less.

I live here more than I should admit.
Thrive here, actually, bargaining in my head.
If I can just keep turning things over in my mind like a Rubik’s Cube,
I can safely avoid feeling anything real for weeks.

If I can decode my ex’s inconsistencies,
if I can map the strange emotional distance of my mother,
and my personal favorite — if I can chart the ongoing failures of the people and institutions I once trusted,
then maybe, just maybe, the grief won’t feel so sharp.
Maybe it will feel logical.
Manageable.
Survivable.

But it doesn’t work that way.

Understanding doesn't erase loss.
It only postpones it.
It keeps you tethered to a puzzle that won't ever snap cleanly into place.

And the longer you search for an answer that will make the heartbreak feel "reasonable,"
the longer you postpone the one truth you don’t want to face:
some things will never make sense.

The More It Doesn’t Make Sense, The Harder It Is to Let Go

The deeper the contradiction, the harder it is to walk away.
Not because we don’t see the truth —
but because we believe that if we can just understand it,
we might be able to make peace with it.

We want the world — and the people in it — to respond rationally.
We want pain to have a clear cause.
We want heartbreak to have a clean explanation.

Because if it all made sense,
maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much.

This is the real trap:
The worse the betrayal, the more irrational the loss,
the more our minds desperately search for the missing piece.
We assume the heartbreak must be fixable — if only we could find the logic behind it.

I see it everywhere with what’s going on in America and the ripple effect it has throughout the world:
In conversations with friends dissecting the news late into the night.
In the endless scroll of op-eds trying to diagnose how we got here.
In the quiet internal war between what we see happening and what we wish made sense.

It's human nature:
If something hurts badly enough,
we assume it must at least be explainable.
It feels intolerable to accept that sometimes people — and countries — can self-destruct without a rational reason.

But life isn’t logical.
Not always.

It’s hard to hold contradictions:

A parent who says you are loved but whose actions are cold or cruel.
A partner who promises commitment but consistently abandons you in small, wounding ways.
Leaders who inherit thriving democracies and proceed to light them on fire.

We keep believing there must be an answer that ties it all together.
That the heartbreak could be made bearable — if only it could be made sensible.

But often, there isn’t.

People are messy, irrational.
They are a tangle of contradictions — words that don’t match actions, instincts that betray stated values.

And sometimes, the healthiest thing we can do
is stop trying to find the missing piece.
Stop trying to stitch a rational pattern into the chaos.
Stop demanding that the betrayal justify itself to us before we let it go.

Because some heartbreaks are irrational.
Some losses are senseless.
And some puzzles were never meant to be solved.

We aren’t just grieving the inconsistencies in the people we loved.
Many of us are grieving the collapse of the myths we were raised to believe —
that love would be consistent, that goodness would prevail, that logic would guide decisions.

Watching those illusions fall apart is its own kind of heartbreak.
It leaves us not only mourning what was lost —
but mourning the story we once believed we were living.

The Trap of Intellectualizing Grief

This is what I finally understand:
My need to process was actually my refusal to grieve.

If I could just make sense of my ex’s passivity,
maybe I wouldn’t have to feel the pain of accepting he never truly met me.

If I could understand my mother’s hoarding and emotional withdrawal,
maybe I wouldn’t have to mourn the mother I never really had.

And if I could decode the unraveling of democracy,
maybe I wouldn’t have to sit with the loss of what I thought my country stood for.

If I could find a philosophy to neatly rationalize the vagaries of life,
maybe I wouldn’t feel such an acute sense of existential dread.
Maybe I could believe — even falsely — that the world still operates according to some just and orderly plan.

But that’s an illusion.
Closure isn’t the product of understanding.
It’s the decision to stop searching for an answer that will never come.

Choosing Closure, Even Without Answers

I don’t need to understand my ex’s avoidance anymore.
I don’t need to psychoanalyze my mother’s neglect.
And I don’t need to spend another moment trying to decode the motivations of billionaires and politicians who operate on an entirely different plane of reality.

Their choices are not my puzzle to solve.

Closure isn’t about finally having all the answers.
It’s about accepting what is — and choosing to move forward anyway.

And that’s the hardest thing about closure:
It doesn’t arrive like a revelation.
It’s a quiet, deliberate choice.
The choice to stop re-reading the same chapter,
to stop analyzing the past as if it will rewrite itself.

I’m making that choice now.
Personally. Politically. Existentially.

I’m setting down the weight of needing to understand why something is broken,
just to accept that it is.

Healing begins when we realize:
some puzzles are never meant to be solved —
not because the answers don't exist,
but because even if they did,
they wouldn’t change what happened —
or what is still happening.

Closure isn’t an answer.
It’s the moment you finally stop doing puzzles,
walk away from the table,
and start living.

The puzzles may remain unfinished —
but I am not.

The final piece to the puzzle was never the answer.
It was understanding that understanding won’t save you.

If this resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Have you ever found yourself clinging to understanding as a way to postpone grief? Feel free to share your story in the comments or send me a note—I'd love to connect.