Mourning Has Broken

Love, Loss and Reclaiming Joy

Erin Davis

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781443454643
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

“A gift of love to others who are seeking solace.” —Olivia Newton-John

On the morning of May 11, 2015, Erin Davis, one of Canada’s most beloved radio personalities, suffered a devastating blow

Erin was on set in Jamaica when she received the news that her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Lauren—who had marked a joyous Mother’s Day just hours before—had failed to awaken to her baby’s cries. Thus began Erin’s journey of grieving out loud with her family, friends and listeners, and of demonstrating how to pick up and keep going after experiencing the worst loss a parent can endure. Struck with grief and unable to find the answer to why Lauren had died, Erin and her husband, Rob, started down the long road through loss, determined not only to survive but also to reclaim the joy in their lives.

Inspiring and unflinching, Mourning Has Broken charts a way forward after life has dealt a crushing blow. It reminds us that we are not alone in grief, and that although life is unpredictable and unfair, we can survive and return to joy.

 

CHAPTER 1

A Very Special Child

(Just Like Yours!)

Cover of Today’s Parent magazine, November 1993

Rogers Media Inc. All rights reserved

OUR HEARTS WERE FULL OF EXCITEMENT THE morning of May 9, 2015, as we boarded a plane bound for Jamaica to host the winners of an annual contest on Toronto adult contemporary radio station 98.1 CHFI. Trip winners were to arrive the next day, but my husband, Rob, and my radio partner and our producer were being given a chance to settle in and become familiar with the all-inclusive luxury hotel a day in advance. The tradition was to greet our listeners with big hugs, cool towels and cocktails as they emerged from their air-conditioned buses at the resort. It was almost always a highlight of these events.

On a few listener trips, we’d been lucky enough to bring our little daughter along, and I’d even tried to entice her as an adult to come with us for extra hands-on help. But this year in particular, she had her own hands full at home with her new seven-month-old son.

That was fine with me. I knew that when the week was over and we were on our drive home from the airport to our cottage (probably in the dark), the journey would be brightened by a long phone conversation with Lauren, catching up on her week’s adventures with Colin and Phil and bringing her up to speed on our trip. And we always had countless emails and texts; her last text had reminded me to have fun and be sure to have “a virgin piña colada for me.” That was the plan, anyway. The best part of coming home from a trip was always knowing that Lauren—at any age at all—was waiting to see us or talk to us. Every ending was a new beginning.

Ask any mother if her child is special, gifted or extraordinary in some way (or many) and there’s little chance you’ll get any response other than “of course!” Even that one on the playground who insists on celebrating the perfect fit of finger and nostril at every opportunity—as well as the child whose knack for public meltdowns makes every outing seem like a (tenser) sequel to the bomb-defusing scenes in The Hurt Locker—has a mother, father or grandparent who will attest to just how amazing that child is.

It will come as no surprise that Rob and I were pretty much in awe of our offspring too. And now that we count our time without her not in weeks or months but in years, we have come to adore her even more, if that’s at all possible. As the saying goes, hindsight may indeed be 20/20; there is a certain amount of gentle airbrushing that the heart and mind undertake when remembering someone who was so loved.

Just let me give you a few reasons why we felt we had every right to be the proudest parents in North America from 1991 onward.

We knew we had someone special in our midst before she even arrived. At twenty-one, Rob, having considered other options for birth control during his first marriage, had undergone a vasectomy. When we married some twelve years later, Rob decided he wanted to be a father after all. Two vasectomy reversal attempts later, Lauren was conceived. She literally came to be out of joy and laughter (we tried to embrace the adventure of attempting to conceive against the odds, rather than feel pressure or angst), as well as a deep desire to bring a child into our happy little family.

Her arrival nine months later was also comical in its way: my water broke on a busy Saturday in a shopping mall because, well, that’s how I roll. We were in the mall on that chilly spring morning to replace a video camera we’d borrowed to shoot aspects of the baby’s arrival—modestly, of course. When we tested the camera, we found it to be malfunctioning. Although I wasn’t supposed to give birth for three more weeks—Lauren’s due date was April 12—we wanted to make sure we had a camera that was in working order when the big day arrived. Told by the department store clerk to go away for a bit while they found a replacement for us, we wandered off.

Rob and I had been sidetracked from our other errands by my sudden desire for an Orange Julius, a fruit-flavoured shake available in many food courts but, as we would learn, not in this mall. We never did find one—because somewhere in the middle of the search, I felt a slow, warm trickle of amniotic fluid beginning to dampen my fleecy track pants. My water was breaking! Rob steered me by the elbow into a stationery store, where I breathlessly asked to use their washroom. Inside the tiny staff facilities, I ascertained that what I thought was happening was indeed occurring. I padded myself up with some toilet paper, took a deep breath and headed back into the mall. Before I did, though, I thanked the people behind the counter for the use of their washroom. I also pointed to their overhead speakers and thanked them for having our radio station, 98.1 CHFI, on in the store, which is also how I roll. Rob and I then returned to that department store with a much more urgent request for a replacement camera. Fortunately, they came through for us. Since labour hadn’t actually started yet, we were in a state of “calm before the storm.” Perhaps it was shock or disbelief, but we were both remarkably chill about the event that was about to change our lives forever. We drove our minivan home—a thirty-minute trip—where I made a pasta lunch. Then I had a bath, determined to be as well-groomed for the event as possible. “Ready for my close up, Dr. Addison!”

As we made our way back downtown to the hospital we had toured months earlier, reality began to set in. “I’m not ready for this!” I told Rob. Perhaps no couple about to become parents for the first time really is, but goodness knows we were excited to bring home the baby that two or three ultrasounds had assured us was almost definitely a girl.

We arrived at the hospital in the late afternoon and parked our van, its baby seat anchored and ready to protect our precious little one whenever she was ready to come home. We thought it might be in a day or two, but once again, things were not going to run on our schedule. In another one of those “are you kidding me?” moments, as I stood filling out paperwork in the admitting area of the hospital, a radio on a nearby desk was playing my station. Rob’s eyes met mine as we heard my voice in a pre-recorded piece saying, “I’m Erin Davis, and here’s what’s on in Toronto tonight. . . .” Rob turned to me and said, “Guess what else is on in Toronto tonight?” We both laughed quietly.

Except Lauren wasn’t going to arrive that night. In fact, at about 11 p.m., the nurses had given me a pill to help me sleep and advised Rob to go home. I strongly objected. It was March, sketchy winter driving conditions could return at any time, and Rob faced a forty-five-minute trip each way. There was not a chance I was going to spend that night alone or risk giving birth solo. So, on a slab of foam we had brought along for just such an eventuality, Rob snored quietly on the floor while I went through what I can only describe as light labour all night. At 4 a.m. the real effort began, and three hours later, there she was—all six pounds and twelve ounces of her, delivered by the ob-gyn who had shepherded me through the pregnancy. How lucky we were that he happened to be the doctor on duty in the overnight and early morning hours of that Palm Sunday, March 24.

Oh, and remember that video camera? Watching the tape later, we discovered that as Lauren emerged, there appeared on tape a burst of static that seemed to stun the camera for a few moments. We’ve always wondered if it was a sign of the great energy of this powerful being’s arrival.

I told you she was special.

The very next day—and every day that week—I was on the phone doing live on-air segments with my radio partner, who was in the studio only a few blocks away. Our producer played especially fitting songs like Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” and the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” An ad was placed in the Toronto Star the next day, welcoming CHFI’s newest listener (a photographer had come to the hospital to take a picture of our new baby—who, of course, seemed to wear a sweet little smile for the occasion). The ad also reminded our audience that I would be broadcasting from home the following Easter Monday.

And I was. Rob had devised a plan for me to do my part of the radio show from our home, through telephone company lines into the house. As a producer, he’d experienced success with this practice—not done over the phone exactly, but through phone-line technology that made a news commentator broadcasting from his apartment sound as if he was in the radio station’s studios. It’s not such a big deal these days, when seemingly everyone with a microphone and some egg carton–like acoustic foam has a podcast, but in the early 1990s it was still pretty recent technology.

To this day I have no idea how it worked; I only know that in these pre-WiFi days, they had to dig into our front lawn to make it happen and that Lauren arriving three weeks early meant that the phone folks hadn’t even been summoned to our address yet. We had come up with this show-by-remote solution the moment we got a positive result on our pregnancy test; having just started to gel in the past two years with my radio partner, and with climbing ratings to show for our chemistry, despite the many differences between us, I was reluctant to step away from the show for any prolonged period of time. After all, this was “show business,” and at this station, with this partner, I was achieving heights of which I had dared not dream. Top ratings on the top station in the country’s largest market? Pinch me.

Doing the show from home would be the perfect compromise: I could sleep in a little later than our usual 6 a.m. start, I would not have to take maternity leave (or the lesser salary that would accompany it) and the show would remain intact, for the most part. I set up cushions as a backdrop to our office desk to absorb sound and eliminate the echo that hard surfaces can cause; my weather forecasts and music sheets would come into our home via fax machine. A talkback line was installed between the radio station studio and our house, whereby I could communicate with our producer and get a “coming up” cue from him as a warning to get ready to go on the air. And we came up with a “code” so that my partner and I knew that a bit or conversation was ending—we’d tell the time. It worked out seamlessly and helped to link our family further to the families (especially other young mothers) who were out there listening. I held Lauren in my arms as I did the show, wearing my often milk-stained terrycloth bathrobe, and occasionally I would answer her mews and cries by feeding her. Imagine how surprised the radio-listening audience would have been at that! On second thought, it might not have been a surprise to every listener; I was told years later by a fellow mom that when Lauren would cry on the radio, she would begin to lactate. That is one powerful medium, Mama!

For a radio station that was perceived to be aiming at an older audience—even if we were going after the same twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-old demographic as everyone else—this new arrangement was also a win from a corporate standpoint. Because they’d agreed to the idea and were allowing a new mom to broadcast from home, CHFI was seen as a forward-thinking radio station. This unusual but successful arrangement hadn’t disrupted our morning show too much, and everybody was happy—except for the few listeners who called the station to say how terrible it was that they’d made me come back to work so soon after giving birth. These listeners, unaware of our new set-up, thought that I had been forced to return to the studios just a week after having our baby. My goodness. I’m sure there were plenty of media outlets that rushed their on-air talent back to work, but this was simply not the case. I got back on the air as soon as I could because I wanted to. I welcomed this arrangement.

Throughout her life, Lauren was reminded by listeners of just how memorable her arrival had been: at almost every station event (and sometimes just in the grocery store checkout line), people who met Lauren would tell her, “I remember when you were born!” That connection with our little family, felt by so many people, continued throughout her life: from the milestones of marriage and her own motherhood to the day her death was announced on that same behemoth radio station’s airwaves. She didn’t choose to be born into the spotlight, but she came to understand what it meant to our family—this gift of being cared about by perfect strangers. Her own son has had, and continues to have, this same kindness extended to him.

Whether it was a case of nature or nurture, Lauren was verbal very early—a gift for expression that extended to a singing ability well beyond a toddler’s usual scope. At just over two years of age, Lauren was singing—not perfectly, but almost in their entirety—the Canadian and American national anthems (and, yes, there’s video proof). I was often fortunate to be invited to perform the anthems at various sporting events, including those of Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays, the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League and the Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League. In some cases, the anthems are pre-recorded and lip-synched at game time, so as to preclude any visits by the eff-up fairy. Lip-synching can be tricky, and the last thing I wanted was to be caught “faking it” on the giant stadium screen, so I would practise while driving. Little did I know that, strapped into her seat behind me, my preschool prodigy was learning the lyrics and melodies too. That early work paid off; Lauren and I were thrilled and honoured to sing the anthems together twice at Mother’s Day Toronto Blue Jays games before she was even in her teens. Both times, there was a very real risk of me bursting with pride right there near the pitcher’s mound. There should have been a tarp ready, just in case.

A child who picks things up so easily can also be a source of concern, although, at the time, we didn’t know we should be worried. We ought to have been more careful; by way of warning, my mother often reminded us of the old saying “little pitchers have big ears.” Once again, Mom was right. By the time she was safely into her teens, Lauren laughed as she confessed to us over dinner one night that she had frequently been paid off in little erasers and even coins for swearing “on command” for her kindergarten and first-grade schoolmates.

All right. If confession is good for the soul, I might as well lay bare my own now: our little girl learned the most unexpectedly interesting words from her mother, a one-time squeaky clean Catholic school girl who easily leaned into the power of the colourful metaphor in order to fit in with her older colleagues in a smoke- and testosterone-filled radio newsroom. My high-school uniform kilt had barely lost its pleats when, in 1982, at nineteen years old, I found myself surrounded by hot-tempered men who elevated swearing to an art form with cleverly crafted adjectives into which filthy syllables were seamlessly spliced. I often thought it was part of a daring game not to get caught using these words on the air—words that, at the time, had the potential to end a career. Now, of course, you’ll hear many of them squiggling from a fellow traveller’s earbuds. But then? A kid could earn extra cash or even the precious toy contents of a chocolate Kinder Surprise egg by tutoring peers in the casual placement of a swear word. Did this make Lauren an early paid professional communicator? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that one of her Montessori teachers had never been overly warm toward Rob and me, and we finally were able to figure out why. To any parents of children born around 1991 who came home with vocabulary skills that extended beyond school curriculum: I’m sorry. Or you’re %&*#-ing welcome. Whatever’s in order. Ahem. Lauren also had a razor-sharp sense of humour. One example that still makes us laugh, because she did it so often: she’d gaze in my direction and say, “I love you!” I’d respond with a gushing thank you. And then she’d say, “I was talking to Daddy.” How they laughed about that, those two. I’d just shake my head, glad to be in on a joke that underlined their closeness while also having a laugh at my own expense. We helped hone that humour, so I didn’t mind being the brunt of it so many times. I deserved it!

Her sharpest and often funniest barbs came through a character she created called the Coughing Critic. In a raspy voice, as though she were trying to clear her throat, she’d say things like, “You suck!” at the exact moment she thought the voice in my head might be telling me the same thing—like, say, if I burned something in the kitchen, which is not an infrequent occurrence since High is the only setting I seem to know. The Cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue: Mother’s Day: The Exit Interview
• Chapter 1: A Very Special Child (Just Like Yours!)
• Chapter 2: We Are (REaL) Family
• Chapter 3: The End of the Beginning
• Chapter 4: Saying Goodbye
• Chapter 5: No Easy Answers
• Chapter 6: Moving Forward: Life After Lauren
• Chapter 7: Soul Survivors
• Chapter 8: Surviving the Worst That Could Happen
• Chapter 9: I’ll Drink to That: My Own Personal Rock Bottom
• Chapter 10: Purposeful Mourning
• Chapter 11: Dreaming a Little Dream
• Postscript: The Story of “Our” Hummingbird
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher