by Erin Davis
For months after our daughter’s heart stopped beating I would awaken from a restless night’s sleep and look at the clock wondering, Is this the time she died? It was as though I felt I should have known, somehow, that our daughter was leaving this earthly realm at the exact time that she did. How could I have slept through the tearing away of part of myself from this life? How could any mother? How did my heart not stop too? I wondered again and again. I asked myself and the universe how my own life could have come to what seemed like such a screeching halt without my even stirring in my bed. I was her mother. I should have felt it happening. I was there when her life began, and I wasn’t with her when it ended. I didn’t even know.
At the time that Phil was trying to wake Lauren and then frantically calling 911, Rob and I were trying to get just a few more hours’ sleep before one of the more stressful aspects of an already tightrope-walking-over-hot-coals kind of job: doing a live radio show from a foreign country in a hotel ballroom filled with fifty or sixty contest winners, and a much larger radio audience at home. Along with co-host Mike and producer Ian, and with headphones on, listening to instructions from our home base in Toronto, we pounded back coffees like shots at a bachelorette party and got ready to begin the first of that week’s live remote morning broadcasts. Deep into preparation mode, I barely noticed when our lead promotions staffer approached the head table broadcast set-up with a concerned look on her face. (I wouldn’t have been alarmed at her expression even if I had noticed; worry is a constant state of being when you’re staging a remote broadcast. In fact, it’s pretty much a job requirement.) As Rob sat near me, helping to download show material onto my computer, Jackie Gilgannon stood in front of the table and addressed the two of us.
“There’s a Patricia somebody on the phone from Toronto who wants to talk to you,” she said in a vaguely confused voice.
“Shirakawa?” I asked, knowing that Lauren’s stepmom-in-law was the only Patricia who might be trying to reach us.
When Jackie nodded in the affirmative, we both wondered aloud why on earth Patricia would be calling during a broadcast. Rob rose to take the call in the lobby. In what is—or was—so typically “me,” as God is my witness, I thought it was some kind of good news. That’s my nature: like the kid who’s digging joyfully through the manure pile because she’s sure there’s a pony down there somewhere, I’m always expecting something wonderful to happen. After all, that’s how my whole life had unfolded. And so it didn’t occur to me to worry when five minutes ticked by and Rob hadn’t returned.
One, maybe two songs played. I don’t remember if we did a live break or were waiting until after the 6 a.m. news to begin our broadcast. Often we would record that first half-hour while we tested the transmission lines and found our footing. Finally, standing up at the table, I said to no one in particular, “Where the heck is he?” There were stories to track down and print and, as always, preparation to do. Like an unpaid extra staffer on the show, Rob was always my right hand on these trips, if only to help keep me fully caffeinated (bless him), just as he did at home, day in and day out.
I recall moving through that ballroom filled with sleepy but happy listeners, many of whom raised their coffee cups in anticipation of a fun show and smiled as I passed by, offering up a cheery, “Good morning!”
In a few moments, that party trick ability to recall details and each listener’s name would fail me; quite frankly, I’m not sure it has returned to this day. Maybe it never will, and I suppose I’m grateful for the inability to remember some of the worst moments, but I’ve managed to piece together what happened next by sweeping up shards of memories and trying to place them into some kind of cohesive order. Because outside those ballroom doors, our life—one blindingly bright, shimmering and perfect orb of music, laughter, joy and fulfilled dreams—shattered on the humidity-dampened tiles of a hotel lobby floor into more razor-edged pieces than we could ever count or hope to reassemble.
This is where things start to slow down, where I can watch it happen from above again and again. The instant that everything changed. But this is how those shards appear.
When I emerged from the ballroom and into the hotel’s dimly lit lobby, I spotted Jackie again, tears streaming down her reddened cheeks, her eyes filled with what I can only describe as horrified compassion, her mouth open in shock.
Hmm, I thought, this isn’t good.
By then I was convinced it was bad news (does any good news come at six in the morning when no one you know is expecting a baby?), and my mind started to race. As we do when we’re trying to make sense of an unexpected experience, I rapidly sorted through the people to whom this bad news might be connected: Had something happened to my eighty-two-year-old father? No, that would result in a call from one of my three sisters. This was Patricia Shirakawa calling. Our son-in-law’s stepmother at the time. It had to be about Phil’s dad, Kevin. That was it, I decided. Had to be. But why would Patricia call while we were doing a live radio show in another country to tell us about one of our in-laws?
Shoulders slumped, Rob was sitting on a bench opposite the front desk, which was empty except for one or two staffers who had pulled the early shift or were perhaps still working the overnight. The graveyard shift. How inadvertently appropriate.
As I approached Rob, I couldn’t see his face; the lights were low. The only sounds were of birds and tree frogs.
“Is Kevin okay?” I asked him gently.
Rob responded, “It’s Lauren.”
“Lauren? What’s happened? What is it?”
And looking up at me, tears on his face and his voice choked and high, he said the words he knew would deliver as much pain to me as he had only just begun to bear: “She died in her sleep.”
Rob tells me I repeatedly cried out, “No!” He recalls how the sounds of our anguish echoed through the open-air lobby and into the pre-dawn darkness of a tropical morning. Fearing, I suspect, for the hotel guests’ peaceful sleep as much as our sanity, a staff member gently told us she had opened the luggage storage room next to the front desk, if we needed privacy.
As if going into some kind of autopilot mode, remembering the “be on your best” mantra, I shook off the suggestion and said that I was okay. I took a big breath and headed back toward the ballroom, where listeners awaited and, at the other end of our remote connection, a Toronto audience was waking up with an expectation of our usual blend of friendly and laughter-filled conversation, information and adult contemporary hit music. Rob followed close behind. I wonder what our faces must have looked like. Because I swear to you, what was going through my head was that I had a job to do, a lot of people were counting on us, and I would sit down and do that radio show.
Now, I know that a statement like that ought to be accompanied by the oft-used needle-ripping-off-a-record sound effect. But when a bomb suddenly goes off next to you, you cling to the steadiest and most stable thing you’ve got. For me, that was the day-in and day-out of a radio show, the place where I had to be positive and focused. Where I wouldn’t have to think about what had happened to our family, to Phil’s family and to our worlds. Admittedly, the show wasn’t going to rescue me on that day, but in time it would.
I made my way behind the broadcast table to where our producer, Ian, sat, wondering why we’d left the room. Off air, and in as calm and emotionless a voice as I have ever used, I spoke these words: “Well, Lauren’s dead.”
Ian’s face—and that of Jackie before him—would come to be among the first few of many that day that would reflect back to us the utter impossibility of what had happened: an awful, slicing shock that I wasn’t able to begin to comprehend. Ian had known Lauren since the day she was born; his mother had moved into an apartment across the street from our home north of the city so that she could care for Lauren when she was a baby. Ian and his wife, Anita, were so fond of our daughter—a mutual affection—that we’d asked them to raise her if anything happened to Rob and me. I am so sorry for the cruelty with which I dispa
tched such awful news to him. “Don’t f—king kid about something like that!” he snapped.
I’m sure there was a gentler or better way to have shared the news, but in that instant, I wasn’t able to grasp it. I know I also told my radio partner in that first minute; I just don’t remember the moment. Mike’s response—echoing almost everyone else we told that day—was to keep repeating the word “What?” as though somehow the brain could not comprehend what the ears had just taken in. Like Ian, Mike knew and loved Lauren. She was as much a part of our radio station’s family as I was.
Despite my numb insistence that we do our remote show that morning from Jamaica, rather than leave the station and its sponsors in the lurch, saner heads (which would be all of them) prevailed. Mumbling apologies as we passed by our listeners, Rob and I retreated to our room.
Those first moments alone, keeping our voices down so as not to bother other hotel guests, are a blur. I know I kept asking what was to become of us—as though I knew full well there would be no living without our Lauren. We lay on the bed and cried in each other’s arms. We hugged, we cried some more and then I wailed into a pillow. Rob rubbed my back and tried to comfort me as best he could, broken as he was.
We soon realized that there were people we would have to tell—people who needed to hear this horrific news from us. And quickly.
Our first concern was those friends and family who might find out about Lauren’s death through social media, radio or television. Unbeknownst to us, Lauren’s sudden death was about to make national headlines, and within an hour her name was trending on Twitter. Although she was described in many headlines and stories as my daughter, she was an accomplished broadcaster in her own right, on maternity leave from her news duties at that Ottawa news/talk radio station.
The first person we called was the one most likely to learn of Lauren’s death through media, social and otherwise: my long-time friend and media sister Lisa Brandt. Lisa was doing her morning radio show in London, Ontario, and I knew she would be among the first to see the news come across “the wire,” the antiquated term we still use to refer to information channels. She refused to believe what we were telling her. Lisa loved Lauren. I had confided in my friend during Lauren’s teen years, and also during the early days in her radio career. The news of Lauren’s death hit her hard; she had to leave her own news and co-hosting duties mid-show.
Then we called Rob’s older sister, with whom Lauren had shared so many wonderful sleepovers. We are forever grateful to Sue for agreeing to make the ninety-minute drive to Ottawa to be with Phil and Colin, since she was the family member who lived closest to them. When Sue arrived, the police were in the midst of attending to the bedroom where Lauren’s body still rested, and she marvelled at the compassion of the liaison officer who was comforting Phil. Sue also bore witness to the quiet kindness of the Salvation Army and Red Cross workers who slipped in with groceries and made sure a distraught father had what he needed to care for a small baby.
I called my three sisters, and two of them sprang into action. Cindy and Heather paid my elderly father a pre-dawn visit to spare him what we feared might be a potentially lethal shock over the phone. You see, not even two years before, my father had stood up beside the minister at a small country church near our cottage and helped to marry his granddaughter to her dear Phil. Using a silk rope, he literally “tied the knot” loosely around their clasped hands. Only five months earlier, we’d all shared Christmas together. Dad couldn’t make sense of it; it just couldn’t be his granddaughter who had died.
Gradually, we got through what we thought was the entire list of people who needed to be notified, with one most unfortunate exception.
There is a list of regrets that I harbour from that darkest of days (led, of course, by Lauren’s death itself), and a sin of omission is one that stands out. My aunt and uncle, who happen to be near Rob and me in age, and are extremely close to us as a family, have three children, all just a little older than Lauren. In fact, their youngest daughter, Karen, is the one who was Lauren’s so-called big sister and had spent a lot of time with our little family when we all lived in the Toronto area. Because they were living in British Columbia at the time, three hours behind the Ottawa and Toronto time zone, it was the middle of the night, and my sisters thought that perhaps Laura and Vern shouldn’t be awakened with the news of Lauren’s passing. Unfortunately, by the time they opened their Facebook pages a few hours later, Lauren’s death had already been widely posted. That is how they learned of their dear great-niece’s passing. Just add that to the litany of regrettable events on that awful day.
Arrangements were made for Rob, me, Mike and Ian to return to Toronto that afternoon. Jackie and the rest of our station staff would stay in Jamaica to entertain listeners during the week-long trip they’d won. The swift and horrible changes that had been made to everyone’s plans that morning cast a pall over their free vacations, no doubt, but we were heartened to see pictures of listeners raising a glass to us.
While we awaited our transfer to the airport, Rob and I called Jackie, Ian and Mike and invited them to join us in our room, if they wanted to come by. They did; we shared fruit slices and copious carafes of coffee. I can’t remember what we talked about, but the heavy weight of shock had settled on us all.
Soon it was time to leave the resort we’d called home for such a short time. Before we left, Rob and I took a walk down to the ocean we had gazed at, numb, from our balcony that morning as we’d made our excruciating phone calls. Truly, fortune had bestowed upon us a most surreal backdrop for the black cloud that had descended on our lives. The calm ocean, the skies dotted with soft whiteness, the warm sunshine and light breezes were all so violently out of tune with the crushing devastation Rob and I were feeling. Silently, hand in hand, we made our way along a boardwalk and then a pier jutting out into the impossibly turquoise Caribbean waters. I was struck by a feeling of nausea, as though I’d been delivered yet another gut punch by the reality of the morning’s events. I asked myself how the worst possible thing in the world could happen to us in one of its most beautiful settings. I felt an urge to find a way off the pier so I could stand in the ocean or feel my feet in the sand; do something—anything—to immerse myself in the grace and warmth of this place that might provide a soft memory to take with me into the days and weeks ahead. Yet in the next moment, I wanted to fall to my hands and knees and just scream until I had no more voice. I needed the world to know that this person stepping mindfully along the pier with her husband was definitely not okay. That she was losing her mind. That it was never going to be okay. That our lives were over and, from that moment onward, anyone who saw me was looking at a dead woman walking.
But I did none of those things. Checking my watch, I sighed to Rob that it was time we went back. Like zombies, we waited in our room until the bellman arrived to take our bags, and then we quietly shuffled back to that cursed lobby—where we discovered that the drama in that particular part of the hotel wasn’t yet over.
As we were getting set to climb into the van taking our small, nearly catatonic party to the airport, a large man, whose eyes were almost equally as expressionless as ours, demanded to see my transfer ticket. I wasn’t even sure I understood what I was hearing, or what he was asking.
“I need to see your ticket. You cannot leave without it.”
I told him politely, and in as coherent a way as I could manage, that I didn’t understand; we didn’t have any tickets. He didn’t seem to hear us, and he sternly demanded the tickets again.
I decided to try to reason: I elaborated and told him that we had just learned of our daughter’s death a few hours earlier, and we were leaving right away on an unscheduled flight home. He just kept looking through me, as if this were a dream, and said, “I need to see your ticket.” As I repeated that I didn’t have one, and wasn’t sure what he was talking about, he once again repeated his automaton-like demand. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. Why was he doing this t
o us?
It was at this point that Jackie, from CHFI promotions—who, along with a travel agency representative, had come to see us off for our hastily arranged trip home—completely lost it on this man. Charged with helping to get thousands of winning listeners to and from resorts year after year, she had dealt with more red tape than most of us have to climb through in a lifetime. I was proud of her for the way she tore into this man for his lack of sensitivity and comprehension of the fact that we did not have, in her words, “any f—king ticket!”
I have often reflected with genuine wonder and gratitude upon the way Jackie handled our tragedy that morning, as well as the demands put upon her in the week that followed. She stepped up in a way that no one ever should have to, and, to make matters even more precarious, we would later learn that she was in the very early weeks of her first pregnancy! How glad we are that the shock of what happened on that trip did not interfere with her own good health and safe delivery, some eight months later, of a beautiful son named Jackson. Throughout our decade of working together, I always felt something of a maternal closeness to Jackie (perhaps it was because she was not much older than my own daughter). And on that awful day, in the worst of circumstances, she was as compassionate, professional and, yes, belligerent as any child would be on behalf of a mother who had been left nearly witless with grief.
I do not recall how the issue of our missing tickets was resolved—I was too mortified that it was even happening to pay attention after Jackie took control—but, finally, we did board that small van and headed off to the airport.