The Color of Grief: A Very Different Mother’s Day Tale

§   I  passed those months in the Valley of the Shadow…  §

Long after my mother’s passing, I attended a grief support group. Despite the length of time—years—that had elapsed since my mother’s death, I nevertheless gained much benefit from the class, learning a great deal about the varied and painful paths people must take on their long walk to healing, and why mine was not so unusual after all.

But my mother’s death, while it had a profound effect upon my life, was far from being the worst grief I had ever experienced. Because our relationship had been so difficult, I mourned her actual passing less than I grieved the woman who could have been, and never was.

But I had already experienced a grief so deep, a mourning so overwhelming, that it required interminable months of recovery. I went through this dark and harsh landscape of heartache when I miscarried my first pregnancy in a terrible event known medically as a “missed abortion”. Put simply, the fetus that I carried died, but my body refused to miscarry. I carried my longed-for baby dead, knowing it to be dead, for a full three weeks before medical intervention became necessary to prevent infection.

Never in my life have I done anything harder than carry my potential child, dead, for three weeks. My mourning began the moment the doctor said the words, “You do not have a viable pregnancy,” and did not end for months after the D&C had scraped the useless contents from my uterus.

Other than having left work early on the day I began bleeding, and for two days following the actual surgery, during those three weeks I held my head up and struggled into the office every day, working in a haze of emotional and physical pain so deep that it now leaves me breathless, remembering. (A few months later, my supervisor would grade me down on my annual review for using too many sick days…) But, beyond coping with my grief, the hardest thing I experienced during that time was not the necessity of dragging myself to my job, or being deemed a slacker, or even the agonizing process of packing up all the baby items I’d already purchased or crocheted.

It was dealing with the fact that I lost all my color vision.

Never, never have I read anywhere, then or since, of this inexplicable phenomenon that I experienced, when the grieving process stripped nearly all the color from my vision. All hues become muted; some were nearly  invisible. Wrapped in the dark cloak of my mourning, I didn’t really notice at first. But after a few days, I recognized that my vision had changed. A coworker wearing a strident hot pink dress seemed to me to be clothed in a pale ash rose. The normal blinding white of typing paper appeared a muted ivory. The burgeoning spring weather, with with flowers bursting into bud and trees cloaked in green lace, seemed to me almost as greyscale as the end of winter had been. Everything I looked at was filtered through a lens of grey and sepia.

I wondered idly if I should see an optometrist, or if the change would be permanent. But it didn’t matter; nothing really mattered. I scraped through the days, always thinking about how far my lost pregnancy would have advanced had I not miscarried, and wondering if I would ever have a child.

Then, finally, my grieving process began to wind to its natural close. Slowly, almost like spring appearing in fits and starts and regressions, normal tints and hues began to return, albeit palely, to my world. Finally, one day I looked at the indicator on a positive pregnancy test—and awoke the next morning to vision that was once more capable of seeing the world in a Disney-esque “paradise of color”.

I had passed months, though, in the Valley of the Shadow; in a world that was as dim and muted as though filtered through cloudy lenses of pale brown and subtle grey.

As I say, I have never read of this phenomenon anywhere, although I’ve researched it since, many times, looking for some explanation of the loss of my color vision for those  months. I suppose a psychiatrist would diagnose some type of conversion disorder—what would once have been termed a hysterical syndrome. Hysterical blindness and deafness have, I believe, been well-documented for centuries. So why not hysterical color-blindness? That may be as good an explanation as any.

But for me, looking back on the long weeks that I dealt, silently, with the loss of all the color in my world, the phenomenon was a blessing. Seeing a world of vivid, bright, beautiful spring and summer colors during my weeks of bitter anguish would have been almost more than I could bear.

It was, perhaps, a strange way to grieve for my lost child. But it helped me heal. And I will always remember the wonder of the newly-bright world on the day when the color returned.