by Erin Davis
I lay down on the carpeted floor of the room, crying into the crook of my arm, sobbing over the desperation of the whole situation. I guess I wasn’t crying as quietly as I thought. When Phil came down, baby in his arms, to console me, I gathered myself and my dignity and stood up. As we turned off the light to leave the room, Colin said something he’d never said before, despite Lauren’s ongoing efforts to have him mimic her. Very clearly, Colin said the word “mama.” It’s entirely possible—likely, even—that at seven months old, his lips had just made that sound quite by accident.
I looked at Phil in disbelief. “Did he really just say that?”
His eyes as wide as mine, Phil shook his head and said, “That would be too sad.”
Then again, what wasn’t? Years would pass before he would say more than just a few discernible syllables.
Rob and I had checked into a room that became our home base for making arrangements and fielding calls and emails from concerned friends and co-workers while we awaited permission to take our next shaky steps. It took four days for the coroner’s office to release Lauren’s body to the funeral home; despite his initial suspicions, the coroner was completely at a loss to explain how an otherwise healthy twenty-four-year-old woman could simply stop breathing. On Friday of the same week that had begun in Jamaica, we found ourselves in a funeral director’s office, holding a paper bag containing the pyjamas our daughter had been wearing when she died, along with a dryer sheet that they had tossed in; funny, the things you remember.
Although we had all agreed upon cremation for Lauren’s body, we had also asked to see her before that took place. It was a tall order, especially considering the extensive autopsy that she had undergone, but we were determined to have one last visit with the body we had made and that had held such an incredible spirit.
As we numbly watched Colin sleeping peacefully in his baby carrier in an office corner, Phil was first to go and say goodbye to his wife. After ten minutes it was our turn. The young, gentle-mannered funeral associate led Rob and me down a hallway to a private visitation room. She opened the windowless oak doors and told us that she would be right outside if we needed her; as we closed the doors, we could see her taking a seat in the hallway.
Across this sparsely and simply furnished room, resting on a platform, was a rectangular plywood box. A panel of wood covered the lower part of our daughter’s body to just below her chest; her hands rested atop one another on her torso. She wore the dark blue stretchy Calvin Klein pyjamas we’d given her for her birthday just two months earlier—the ones I knew would make nursing Colin a little easier. For this day, I thought they would be somehow comfortable for her (yes, I know how illogical that sounds) and easier for the funeral home to do whatever needed to be done. Anyway, it made sense to us.
I haven’t seen a lot of open caskets in my life, but I remember that when our friend Kathy Morrison died of brain cancer in her forties, she appeared in her casket very much as she did in life: beautiful. Peaceful. Our Lauren was not so fortunate.
Despite what I’m sure was the funeral home staff’s best attempts at cosmetically hiding it, we could easily make out the raised ridge that ran across her forehead where the coroner had opened her skull and closed it again. Although it shouldn’t have been a surprise to us, it somehow was. Of course, on a conscious level, we knew there had been an autopsy—one that provided no concrete answers, to our great distress and chagrin—but I suppose, in the interests of preserving what little sanity we were clinging to at the time, we had chosen not to think about its invasiveness to our daughter’s body. The funeral home’s cosmetologist was able to camouflage the facial bruising Phil said he had seen the morning she died from where she’d lain on her side for hours before he discovered her, partly off their bed. Her chest was stuffed to the point of looking barrel-like, no hint of shape beneath her dark blue buttoned-up pyjamas. Truly, the staff had done all it could, we knew, but this was not our daughter, so bursting with passion and sparkle and laughter and music. So full of life.
Yet, it was all we had left, this damaged vase. It was to us as though a once-beautiful vessel had tipped and broken, its formerly colourful blossoms spilled out and left to wither. Despite valiant and honourable attempts to glue the vase back together, the shattering had been utterly and horribly complete. The vase was simply no more. It would hold no more flowers.
As Rob and I knelt in front of the box holding her body, we sobbed quietly so as not to be heard by the woman in the hall (be on your best) and talked to Lauren in hushed tones of our pride in all she was and had accomplished, in her beautiful spirit and her generous heart. We promised our daughter that we would help her son to grow up to be the boy and man she would want him to be. We stroked the cold, smooth and pale young skin of her hands, those hands that were the first thing the delivery nurses commented on when she was born twenty-four years earlier. “Look at those fingers!” they’d said, marvelling at their length. We called them “piano fingers,” so delicate and long were they. She had such beautiful hands, and she used them to span octaves on a keyboard, form bar chords on a guitar and reach for distant notes on the long, smooth neck of a cello. How we loved those soft, sweet hands.
Then Rob and I did something we hadn’t done with Lauren since she was a child.
I’m not sure if it’s something other families do, but we had a fun game we called “twenty kisses.” To be truthful, I think I made up this game so that Lauren would let me shower her with the affection and love I so badly wanted her to accept. Her tendency to deflect my admittedly over-the-top gestures (impromptu songs and poems that included her name; high-pitched calls of her many nicknames that echoed through the house) was, in a way, part of our dynamic: she knew how much I loved her, how desperately I wanted that same love in return, and she would get a kick out of pretending to withhold it, just to bug me.
This time, this last time that Rob and I played “twenty kisses” with our girl, I leaned down to kiss her firm, cool skin. Then Rob did, and we alternated our light pecks on her cheeks and on her ridged forehead, now wet with our tears, until we’d done it a total of twenty times. How we wanted to stay and just keep kissing. But that clenching pain in the pit of our stomachs told us that the lady outside, and back in her office, Phil and the baby, had probably waited for us long enough.
Reluctantly, we said our last goodbyes, and I groaned as we backed out of the room with the slow, heavy steps of a death march that you’d expect to accompany one of the worst moments of two devastated people’s lives. I wished with all my heart that, like Abraham Lincoln had done with his own deceased son, I could steal back in and cradle her body, holding and rocking her in my arms again one more time. But despite the incredibly cruel twist our lives had taken, the real world still turned, time kept its constant pace and there would never, ever be enough hours in which we could say goodbye, no number of tears or words that could be shed and said that could make leaving Lauren any easier. And so, with one last look at the beautiful girl with whom we’d shared so much love, we took a deep breath, opened the door, stepped into the hall and prepared ourselves for our next steps: the public goodbyes. We would make preparations and then head back to Toronto to pack, to prepare a visual element for the first of her two services and to spend some time in our own bed. After saying our private farewells, it was time to do this publicly.
* * *
I KNOW that Lauren was with us on our journey to Ottawa for her memorial on May 19. How? She told us. Sitting in the passenger seat as I tapped away on my laptop, I received a Facebook notification that Lauren was “poking” me. Now, I know that there is likely some logical explanation for that poke at that particular time, but I have no idea what it might be. And I might point out that it never happened again. It doesn’t seem illogical then to choose to interpret that timely little random social media gesture as Lauren’s way of getting through to me to say she’d be at our side for yet another excruciating day. But that wasn’t the only way she tried to get o
ur attention.
As we travelled the four-lane highway on the outskirts of Ottawa, while I continued to marvel at what had just shown up on my computer, we were passed by what we remember to be a white car. The colour of the car matters little, compared to its licence plate. Rob pointed it out to me; I’d been looking down at my computer screen, answering listeners’ emails.
“Did you see that?” he asked with incredulity.
“See what?”
“That licence plate. It said PURE JOY.”
For a moment, the two of us were speechless. Those two words were exactly what Lauren had said when I asked, during our Mother’s Day interview, how she felt about motherhood. Pure joy.
We don’t know why we saw that licence plate at that time on that road on that day. But we do believe Lauren was again reminding us that she was with us and always would be. And, oh, how we needed that nudge and the accompanying feeling that she had her arms around us and would hold us up during the difficult hours, days and years to come.
We had spent the days between Lauren’s passing and the first of the two memorial services preparing a digital photo display with the same dedication and attention to detail that we’d brought to planning her wedding less than two years earlier. Rob and I tackled the gruelling task of putting together the right pictures to show during musical selections, as well as a continuous stream of pictures from various moments in the lives of her and her family. And the technical gods were not playing nice.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Mercury retrograde, or if you believe it’s a thing, but many people do, including us. According to multiple sources, it’s an astronomical phenomenon that occurs a few times each year, and it can have mysterious and negative effects on many forms of communication and technology. We were right in the thick of it for the entire second half of that month. Computers would unexpectedly and inexplicably shut down, screens would freeze, work we’d done would disappear and we were seriously worried that we were going to lose everything.
Our technological challenges did let up briefly, however, when Rob was able to hack into Lauren’s laptop and retrieve pictures and music files. He figured it out simply by looking up online how to do it. I shouldn’t have been surprised: this is the guy who once managed to crack the combination on luggage we thought was ours, only to find that we had inadvertently picked up someone else’s identical new set of London Fog bags on the airport carousel. Getting into Lauren’s files was just a different sort of challenge, and one for which we had Phil’s kind blessings.
Through it all, Lauren gave us strength. In fact, many days after her death, Rob told me that she came to him one evening in our cottage kitchen, where so much love and warmth (and Lauren’s baking) had been shared. He says he heard her say, “I’m sorry you have to go through this, Daddy.” In those early days of preparing for her memorials, she made her presence known in the most unusual of ways. We were lying in our bed in a room overlooking a spring scene on Lake Simcoe. On his laptop, Rob played me the audio he’d prepared for the memorial, with Lauren’s voice singing, then talking, and baby Colin full-on belly laughing. It was so perfect and so sad that I just held a pillow to my face and screamed. A full-out, wall-shaking cry that was the one and only time I let out that rage and sadness. My throat felt raw, and my first thought was, “Okay, that wasn’t smart . . .,” since my voice was—and to some extent still is—my living. But I had to release that terrible pain somehow.
Rob, otherwise paralyzed by his horror at not being able to help ease my pain, held me as I sobbed. And then, as each of us did so many times in those early weeks and months, I sat up, dried my eyes and took some deep breaths. But I smelled something unusual.
I asked Rob if he smelled anything, and he echoed what he thought the aroma in the air might be: the smell of baking. Something warm and sweet, like a cake or rolls or cookies. But here’s the thing: our neighbours at the cottage several metres away weren’t home that day. No one came to our door. I don’t bake; Lauren was the one who would put my mixer to use and toss and replace my ancient baking powder and ingredients to suit her needs. The sweet, comforting aroma came to us when our hearts were the closest they’d come to breaking. If there’s a Cinnabon in heaven, I’m guessing our daughter came from there to visit. At least, that day she did.
* * *
THERE are a few things from the first gathering in Ottawa that will always stand out in my memory. First, the persistent wails of Lauren’s inconsolable baby, his bottom raw from the sudden change from breast milk to formula. Colin was giving voice to the stabbing pain we were feeling in our hearts. Understandably, his overwhelmed father had forgotten to replenish the supply of diapers in Colin’s bag, and no one staying with or helping him had thought to prepare for the day in that way, so a quick trip to the store was necessary before the actual memorial began. Fortunately, there were plenty of arms eager to try to console the little boy dressed in a sweet outfit of dark pants, a dress shirt and button-on tie. I recall being in a total fog, wandering the aisles of a store looking for something a seven-month-old should wear to his mommy’s memorials. What an obscene thought! It reminded me of the oft-played “Christmas Shoes” song where the little kid wants to buy shoes for his dying mother so she can look nice when she meets Jesus. I mean, what on earth is the point in any of it?
And yet, as I shopped, I looked at the other mothers and grandmothers sharing the aisles of the store with me. I thought, If they only knew . . . What pain we were going through. How awful life can turn in a heartbeat. How lucky they were. If they only knew.
The second thing we recall, and something that genuinely surprised us, was the number of people who came to console Phil and remember Lauren: some two hundred people stood (while Phil, Rob and I sat facing them) for the casual forty-five-minute service. We’d debated whether holding two services was perhaps too much, but our worries were unfounded. Their friends and co-workers in Ottawa—the city they called home—deserved a chance to say goodbye to Lauren on that Tuesday afternoon, just as our own friends and families would ten days later, some 450 kilometres away.
We sat there, Rob, Phil, Colin and I, facing the crowd of sad friends and family who had gathered to hear tributes, and to add their own, for our dear girl.
As pictures of Lauren at many stages of her life quietly rotated on screens in the funeral home, we remembered a twenty-four-year-old mother, daughter, wife and broadcaster. Morning host (and my former boss) Steve Madely, who’d accidentally called her “Erin” on the air, told that story and shared how Lauren was discovered while attending a local college. At our request, Steve also read the achingly sad “Stop All the Clocks” by W.H. Auden, also known, appropriately, as “Funeral Blues.”
That sombre piece, featured in both services, set the tone perfectly for the depths of our grief and seeming hopelessness; however, we endeavoured to turn that tone to one of hope later in the service with a Celtic poem called “She Does Not Leave.”
Her friends and co-workers spoke tearfully and with fondness of her passion, preternatural maturity, preparedness, eloquence, enthusiasm, fearlessness and kindness. They talked about her humming quietly to herself in the newsroom in the midst of a flurry of breaking-news activity. When a co-worker mentioned it, Lauren was startled and asked if she should stop. He told her to continue. Somehow it gave those in the newsroom the sense that it was all going to be okay and that they were family.
They spoke of an Ottawa police officer hugging and consoling one of Lauren’s tearful co-workers on the street outside their radio station. They mentioned Lauren’s insistence on helping out the Salvation Army with their kettle campaign and of donating blood as regularly as she was allowed, even jokingly competing with another on-air staffer who also gave blood as soon as the designated waiting period was over. (In Canada, we volunteer to give blood; there’s no remuneration except for perhaps a cookie and some juice and a really good feeling.) Co-workers and friends shared how, after Lauren’s passing, callers spoke to on-
air staff of feeling that they knew her from listening to 580 CFRA, where she did a daily midday news package, just as so many more felt they knew Lauren in Toronto from listening to my stories of her, and those told in her own clear voice during the course of her childhood and young adult years.
Rob and I had carefully prepared remarks for the memorial, but doubting that we would be able to deliver them coherently, at least at this point in time, we had recorded them in our home studio. It turned out to be a wise choice. We sat, heads bowed, as our recorded voices spoke of gratitude for the fact that she did not die after her husband had slipped away to work; she hadn’t been carrying her baby on the stairs or driving with him in the car when her heart stopped. We talked of the beauty of Lauren’s spirit, the countless reasons we loved her and how proud we were of our girl. We looked ahead at the impossible notion of life without Lauren.
Our underlying theme was the question we had asked ourselves so often, and now more than ever: “Why couldn’t she wait?”
Then it was her husband’s turn to speak. Also a broadcaster (he and Lauren had met in Algonquin College’s radio course), Phil smoothly and seemingly calmly delivered his remarks off the cuff and spoke of how Lauren was his everything, how easily and wholeheartedly she had embraced motherhood and, in a vein similar to our own, how impatient she was! To illustrate that point, he lightheartedly asked for a show of hands to see if any other husband had been proposed to by his girlfriend. There were great laughs when Lauren’s father—my Rob—raised his.
“That makes total sense,” Phil exclaimed, eyebrows raised as he laughed when he looked at Rob and me. And then, in a moment of extreme tenderness, Phil shared with us Lauren’s last words to him, spoken just after midnight that Monday morning of her death: “I love you.”