Visualizing mourning

Using watercolor to process grief

NOTE: Trigger warning: this speaks of miscarriage. This happened many years ago now. I’m ok and don’t need your consolation! I always feel slightly icky sharing such personal stories, but I’m sharing this as an example of how healing can happen through music and watercolor. Miscarriage is very common and I’m re sharing this just to be of help those who are deep in the throws of grief. You are not alone! And feel free to share with someone who is going through it.

YouTube was ultimately the first to know. There’s nothing like a diaper advertisement to snap you out of denial and send you to the pharmacy to get a test.  I couldn’t walk 2 steps without clutching my engorged breasts. The test looked like my husband’s new electronic cigarette which left our lives in a perpetual cloud of pina colada vapor.

It was positive. We spent the next couple of weeks riding a joy cloud and in an info exchange about the foreseeable future. No major life events can happen in France without three months of bank statements and self-addressed envelopes. I was on a bureaucratic frenzy collecting the paperwork needed to become a gestational surrogate for the French sesame seed growing in my stomach. I was now just a handmaid of the French Republique.  I was really just awaiting the virtuous hair and infinity nails that I heard that pregnancy promises.

Fear set in. My career finally started to take off and I was making a living as an artist. But we had no family around. Could we make it work?  My creative career and artistic personality weren’t always a stable combination. How could I go off antidepressants and alcohol? Maybe motherhood is enough to cross cancel out creativity altogether?

In needed a break from all the worries floating around in my head. I dusted off my old guitar hoping that music could be a sweet connection with the expanding glob of molecules growing inside of me. I started playing when I was 13 and haven’t improved since then. But a proto-baby would appreciate my repertoire of Six Pence None the Richer songs.

I committed to putting “Chelsea Morning” by Joni Mitchell to memory, reveling in the sweet sunshine kissed oranges and the music drifting up from the busy city streets, painting a room in rainbows. In a rare moment where I wasn’t stressing out about global warming or future life-work balance, I recorded myself singing in a rare, sweet moment where I was just present with the being within me. There are two types of people in this world. Those who like Joni and everyone else. It was my first duty in motherhood to make sure it was pro.

“So doctor, 2 months. It’s gotta be the size of a strawberry, huh?” I asked at our 2nd ultrasound. As a food illustrator, I loved following along with the fruit and vegetable pregnancy charts. Proud parent, it was now big enough to not be an element that could get stuck in one’s teeth. “Let’s take a look”. He searched and searched. It was just overlapping pockets of darkness. There was too much searched for it to be good news. “I’m sorry there’s no heartbeat”.  “Are you sure?” “There was one a couple of weeks ago? What happened?” “We will never know. It just didn’t have whatever it needed”.

My husband and I spent the rest of the day at the emergency room, completely shell shocked by the news. I had the foresight to buy all the ingredients for a boeuf bourguignon early on in the day when the future looked bright. After returning home from the hospital, I blasted Biggie Smalls and cathartically poured a bottle of red wine into the stew and myself. I did a belligerent side step to try to reclaim my body which no longer felt like something I had any control over. Maybe I’m naïve, but I never even considered miscarriage being an option.

A D&C was scheduled for the following week.  I was rolled out of surgery to recovery, scanning the room for some connection as they rolled in the other groggy patients washed out in a flood of fluorescent light. I stared at row of orchid decals on the stucco hospital walls, pitying the poor graphic designer who has no idea where their work is now. It was a sad attempt to brighten up the saddest room in the world. 

I spent the next week in a numbed state of shock. My own husband, more guarded and free of any hormonal rampage, assured me that we could have another. But I wanted *that* one. Others who had had miscarriages were sympathetic, but their trauma was dulled through time, no comparison to the urgency of the rage of my own. I wanted to burn something or punch a  wall. Some people I shared with brushed it off like it was just a technical glitch. The worst was when friends pried to know what happened exactly like I had any grasp on it myself. 

I couldn’t help but blame myself. I thought about the glass of wine I had while pregnant on my first Thanksgiving spent alone (how else would you get through?).  I thought of my work-induced stress, a fall out with a collaborator and the toll it set on my body. No one should live in those kinds of conditions, especially someone who didn’t sign up for it.  Longing for some catharsis, I started seeing embryos in all the watercolors I was painting. 

I had no idea how to wade through my grief. The only thing I could do was document every moment of the miscarriage in watercolor: the highs, the lows, the hormonal attitude shifts, the night sweats, the most fabulously poached egg on my French hospital lunch tray, the French pursed lips and judgements, the early denial of grief and real ways to comfort someone after the fact. My hope was to potentially share it with the 25% of friends who will surely be shocked to have the same news someday. Nonetheless, having a miscarriage puts you on a strange 9 month timeline.  Everything is some sick reminder of the loss. First haircut since (bye bye prenatal vitamin-kissed locks). “Expected due date.” “Was gonna cancel “this” because I thought I would be a whale at this point”. But after about 9 months, I feel like my body finally healed.  I donated generously to send an inner-city kid to illustration camp, something I would have loved to do as a child with humble means. Although everyone likes to time grief as if it’s quantifiable, I found a few friends I gave myself permission to vent to even when they were ready to plug their ears and unfriend. 

On my path to healing, I revisited that rare moment between Joni Mitchell, the baby and myself in the recording on my phone. I would listen to this every day on the Metro, the ultimate barometer of my mental well-being. I heard my husband prepping dinner in the background. He was surely creating his own culinary disaster zone but he was trying his hardest to take care of me. I could hear the twinkle of my eye imagining a shared musical bond. I thought of how to translate the beauty of Joni’s descriptions and the joy of seizing beauty during the golden hour and I meticulously painted the details of the song until they were just right. Through time, listening to this recording evolved from snotty-nosed desolation to finding a sweet takeaway of the sadness I thought I could never shake. The pain of the loss dulls throughout time but I was able to identify a visual takeaway moment, knowing I did my best to connect with a sweet life that sadly could never be.  

-jkw