Mourning Has Broken

by Erin Davis

  Wordlessly, I slapped the envelope onto the kitchen counter, its contents potentially as toxic to me in that moment as a letter sprinkled with anthrax. And with that, I left the room to take off the workday’s clothes, leaving Rob to open the grey envelope.

  Receiving something bearing an official government insignia tends to make us stop what we’re doing. Is it a bill? Did we mess up our income tax filings? Do I have to do something about my health card or driver’s licence? These questions and so many more will have the time to run through your mind before you can open it. But I can’t say that anything can prepare you for something with the word coroner on it. There can be no more stark a reminder that someone close to you is gone.

  Rob picked up the letter and opened it.

  This is how our marriage has always worked: when there’s negotiating with bosses or agents that has to be done, it’s Rob’s job. While I string words together and share them for a living, his end of the bargain has been to take care of the heavy lifting: the business end of things. To this day, I have not laid eyes on the actual report; Rob has always said that I don’t need to see it. He carries with him a burden, a weight that he hasn’t made me share, and I am grateful to him for that and so many other things. He spares me pain when he can and, if he feels he needs to, takes it on himself. He saw from my face when I came through the door that receiving that letter took me back to the hour when we first learned of Lauren’s death. The passage of those eleven months had helped us to stop thinking every minute of every day about losing Lauren. As we continued to learn new ways to survive this grief, this pain, we were able to imagine that our daughter was still alive and happily sharing the raising of her son.

  I’ve often been grateful that we were spared the pain of her living with us at the time of her death; I frequently hear from parents who struggle with the constant physical reminders of their child’s absence. We were able to shove reality to the side, and every day we got a little better at suspending reality. That shroud of shock that helps you to survive the first days and months after losing someone you love eventually wears thin. But the longer you can keep reality at bay, the easier it is to keep going.

  It’s not like we were delusional, even though every day I would click on an app on my phone, inviting our late daughter to join me for a drawing game we’d been playing just the day before she died. (I’ve since stopped, but only because the app rebooted and wiped our history.) But you do what you have to do in order to keep functioning in some version of what the world expects from you, and despite the constant reminders of her death because of well-meaning and kind-hearted listeners and journal visitors who would reach out to me on social media, I was able to do that pretty successfully some of the time.

  Rob and I already had a rough idea of the letter’s contents thanks to a call from the coroner to Phil several months earlier. How grateful we were that Dr. Earle so often took time out of a busy and undoubtedly harrowing day to keep grieving loved ones informed. Somehow, though, we knew that seeing his words more formally and in writing would make the stark facts even more difficult to digest. And perhaps worst of all, we didn’t get the answers we sought; the report only raised the same questions again.

  The doctor and his colleagues did every test at their disposal. They suggested that one of the possible causes of Lauren’s death was an undiagnosed congenital heart disorder and another was that medication had interacted negatively with her heart rate or rhythm. A third possibility, and the one the coroner listed first—chronic meningitis affecting the brainstem—wasn’t even heart-related. The report recommended that all of Lauren’s direct relatives be tested for heart irregularities; Colin has been tested and all is well.

  But try as he might, the coroner was not able to find one certain cause among these three possibilities, and Lauren’s cause of death was officially “undetermined.” He didn’t have the answers we so desperately sought.

  It’s in our nature as humans to try to make sense of the inexplicable. Ancient civilizations, after all, created gods to explain thunder, lightning and natural disasters. We cautioned ourselves about linking Lauren’s death to a medication, but at least in our minds, there was no other answer that made sense. Rob has an unusually slow and abnormal heartbeat; one surgery he was scheduled for was nearly cancelled because his doctors thought an electrocardiogram showed he had suffered a heart attack (he had not). I have a slight heart murmur. Did Lauren inherit one or both of these traits and could they have contributed to her death—with or without a possible medication interaction?

  Today we find ourselves in the uncomfortable but inescapable place of not knowing the answers to our questions about what killed our daughter. But we hope we will gradually come to a place of peace in knowing that we cannot always know why. It is not a matter of “closure,” a word that gets used so very often after the death of a loved one. No, knowing how she died will never explain to us why she had to be taken from us at such a young age—or at all. Things happen in life that we simply have to accept (or lose our minds), and all we can do is take what we have been given, make the best of everything within our power, love and appreciate her son for the gift that he is and continue to keep living in a way that honours his mother’s memory: with laughter, with love and with the occasional well-placed expletive. Because honestly, can you blame us?

  CHAPTER 6

  Moving Forward:

  Life After Lauren

  Lauren’s last pre–maternity leave broadcast on 580 CFRA

  Alison Sandor

  THOSE EIGHTEEN DAYS BETWEEN LAUREN’S death and saying goodbye to the guests who joined us for her second memorial (and, later, at a hotel bar just across the street for some tears, some laughs and a lot of hugs) were tremendously busy. There were the four-hour commutes between Lauren’s home and ours, the hours spent in bed alternating between crying and sorting through the pictures on my (and her) computer that would be used for the services and, of course, the overall business of putting together two events to honour our daughter and, more importantly, to give her friends and ours, plus family and other loved ones, a chance to grieve her and share their great sense of loss over this wonderful human being.

  We called the shock that befell us after losing Lauren a blessing and, really, we did feel grateful to be in that state for about a year. Often we would say, “Boy, if this ever wears off and what has happened really sinks in, we’re in big trouble!” But the layer of stupefaction lifted as gradually as a fog over our beloved Lake Simcoe after sunrise. We were allowed to step back into our lives in a slow, even pace—another debt of gratitude for which I’ll never be able to repay my employers. While Government of Canada labour laws dictate that only three paid consecutive working days off are to be allotted in the death of an immediate family member (beginning the day after the death), my bosses made it clear that I was to take as much time as I needed while beginning to recover from Lauren’s death. In early days, the question “Will she come back at all?” was raised. Initially, I wasn’t able to say when that return would be, but I knew that, as radio had been the river upon which my entire adult life had flowed, there was a certain inevitability in the fact that I would return to the medium that had given my family and me so very much.

  In the same way that listeners had celebrated Lauren’s birth, her marriage and the arrival of her son, they mourned with us and showered us with kindness. They sent us hand-knit prayer blankets, as well as books about how to deal with the grief and how to survive the loss of a child. We were sent countless cards, many with long, handwritten letters expressing sympathy and, in the case of those who had also lost a child, empathy. We were warmed and touched by the many different ways in which people we had never met reached out through email and messages left on one of the radio station’s voicemail lines that had been dedicated especially to those who wanted to connect with me, Rob and Phil.

  We later learned that, in an act of unexpected—but most appreciated—generosity, more than two hundred dollars was
collected for Lauren and Phil’s baby among the listeners we had left behind at that Jamaica resort on May 11. That money would be used to pay for the formula that was now needed to nourish Lauren’s seven-month-old. We would witness this kindness and generosity again and again in the days and months to come: beautiful, sweet gestures from friends and strangers alike. Even Rob’s hockey buddies in Toronto took up a collection to help Phil and Colin; one of them, actor/comedian Seán Cullen (he of Last Comic Standing, The Producers and Corky and the Juice Pigs), was particularly affected by Lauren’s passing and, even though he’d never met her, wanted to host a fundraising show to help Lauren’s boys. It was really the most astounding thing to experience, and I’m grateful we were in the moment enough to see what was happening around us. We would share these stories of generosity with Phil, and all he could do was shake his head in amazement. Lauren had grown up around these kinds of people; she knew how much a part of our family they were, and vice versa. I can only imagine how dumbstruck Phil was to be a part of this largesse. It’s almost impossible to believe if you haven’t worked to cement these ties for your entire career. Radio can be far more than a one-way medium, and we had long appreciated the benefits of that fact that were manifest in so many ways, now more than ever.

  It was all so astounding, in fact, that my mentor—respected author and international radio consultant Valerie Geller—was moved to respond that the experience I had with our station’s listeners made her reconsider her long-time belief that, as much as those of us who have been fortunate enough to make a living in the medium do adore it, radio does not love you back.

  She explained: “I did pivot a bit on ‘radio not loving you back. . . .’ But it’s not the industry, which can be cold, heartless and wonderful (but hey, maybe that happens in life as well). It is the kindness and caring of the people who listen, whose lives you’ve connected with and touched each day, when you’ve literally become a part of the cast of characters in their world. THOSE people CAN love you back. . . . It’s the people radio gives us (not the delivery system or the business around it) that can and do love you back.”

  Two days after Lauren’s Toronto memorial, Rob and I more or less ran away from home: we pointed the car south, then east, and headed for a small town in Connecticut. Fortuitously, I’d gone there the previous year, searching for a place where I could go “inward”: I practised meditation, Skyped with an addiction expert in California, did copious journalling and met a life coach who helped me find answers to many of the questions I was asking myself about my present and future as they pertained to my career. Ellen Wasyl would become a friend in need one year later. Even under the worst circumstances, I was grateful that Rob could meet this woman who reminded me of the actor Laura Dern and was a font of positivity, compassion and inspiration. She still is, to this day.

  What I learned in our week there is what I already knew: there is no set timetable or spreadsheet for how—or how long—one is to grieve. There are schools of thought that say six months, and others that are as specific as four years, as though anything as pernicious as the pain of a broken heart can possibly be measured or timed!

  When recovering from the same surgery, people do so at different paces—and there can be complications. Grief isn’t any different. In fact, in the years to come, we would learn about a psychotherapy model called complicated grief therapy. Bodies heal differently; some never do. As much as our “are we there yet?” and TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) lives demand or even expect a GPS for the route and duration of this trip through hell, we have to face it: there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to grief. Add to that the completely unnatural order of things when a child predeceases his or her parents, and it’s like trying to recover from a knee replacement surgery where you’ve woken to find that your new joints bend the wrong way. It’s going to take a long time to learn how to move in the direction you need to go. You know you’ve got the equipment to do the job successfully, but it’s just all wrong.

  And of course, there was the undeniable fact that people, as kind-hearted and well-meaning as they were, would always be reminding us of the tremendous loss we’d suffered. An encounter in Lake Placid, New York—where we stopped for a night on our way home from New England—provides an example of not only how far-reaching our grief was but also how small a world this truly is. As Rob and I perused the pottery in a quaint gift store on the town’s main street, a woman I thought I’d seen peeking at me over the shelves said,“Erin Davis?”

  When I smiled and said yes, she told me that she and her husband were on their honeymoon and had watched the video of Lauren’s memorial online just the night before. As she and I stood there with tears in our eyes, Rob couldn’t help but joke that there were definitely better ways they could have been spending their honeymoon! We all laughed—and Lauren would have agreed. But such was the openness of every facet of our lives, our very public lives. Just as people remembered hearing on the radio that our daughter had been born, they were there with us when she died and when we were saying our goodbyes. We were, and remain, grateful.

  Of course, reminders come in all ways, at all times. Many of them are unexpected, while others are as set in stone as the calendar. Some came via occasions we’d anticipated with joy until now—like birthdays, weddings and Christmas; others came on days that had never stood out as special before, but for which we now had to brace ourselves. I was astounded to find that, with one notable exception, the anticipation of those red-letter days—the elevens mostly—was worse than the day itself. I would feel a heaviness starting to approach as the eleventh of each month drew nearer and Lauren’s death was one month farther away. But I chose to return to work on an eleven: the eleventh of June.

  I had been on the air with my partner, Mike Cooper, and the rest of our wonderful morning team—producers Ian MacArthur and Gord Rennie and news host Steve Roberts—via phone a few weeks before. They’d wanted everyone to hear how I was doing, and I wished to thank them and our listeners for their incredible support for our family. In that phone conversation with Mike, I also admitted to something that was so ordinary that at any other time in our lives, we wouldn’t have felt it noteworthy: Rob and I had laughed.

  After the Ottawa memorial, we’d headed straight to our cottage to cocoon. Outside our windows, spring was settling in and making itself at home: robins built a nest on a light outside our front door and watched over its fragile blue contents, trees were dotted with buds and leaves, and our gardens were once more showing green signs of life.

  Apart from daily dog walks, Rob and I hid away inside the house with a wood fire that was far more for comfort than necessity. Then, almost like clockwork every evening, we turned on the TV to watch one of two things. The first was our stockpile of both recent and ancient episodes of NBC’s Dateline. Over time, I would come to refer to them as “grief porn” because of the show’s combined number of parents and friends talking tearfully of losing a beautiful, promising, smart young woman whom they loved desperately. You’d think that our watching that parade of pain, week after week, would be not just counterintuitive but downright masochistic, and I suppose, to a small degree, it was. Sometimes, when the parallels to our own loss were too much to ignore, I’d find myself gasping to catch my breath, crying as silently as I could into my bathrobe sleeve, my hand to my cheek to camouflage the tears. But more often, we’d watch these episodes experiencing an underlying feeling of gratitude that our daughter had died in what they tell us was a painless and peaceful manner. For all of the tragedy that had befallen us, there were still always reasons to be grateful. And, just as it helped us get through the first few days after Lauren’s death, that mindset helped Rob and me to keep going. To keep getting up in the morning. To keep from self-medicating.

  And then, there was what’s famously been called the best medicine of all: laughter.

  In a 2017 interview with Playboy, comedian Patton Oswalt opened up about how laughter (in addition to his young daughter and new fiancée
, now wife) had helped him survive the death of his wife of eleven years some sixteen months earlier. Just as our own daughter had, respected crime writer Michelle McNamara passed away suddenly in her sleep.

  Asked by an interviewer, “Could anything or anybody help you punch through the despair?” Oswalt responded that watching comedy and laughing helped him to heal and feel normal again.

  I highly recommend reading any of Patton Oswalt’s takes on grief and depression; he has spoken about them on numerous occasions. His hard-earned wisdom is matched only by his honesty and frankness about the sheer hell he went through after losing Michelle.

  Part of our way out of this thick fog of grief and pain came thanks to another comedian, a famous talk show host who was taking his leave of the public eye. Late-night star David Letterman was wrapping up his storied television career at the same time our world was falling down. But we had the presence of mind to set the PVR long-distance, and his final shows were waiting for us when we were ready to immerse ourselves in something other than our overwhelming misery. In the depths of our pain—and despite it, really—Rob and I found ourselves enjoying the final shows. While we were far from a time in our lives when laughter, with its wonderful accompanying burst of endorphins, would make us feel as good as it once had, we were ready for the diversion. In fact, later, Rob and I admitted to each other that we’d each felt quite self-conscious about laughing. And yet, how could we not? After all, it was Letterman!

  So it was that when I spoke with my radio family on the phone that week—and was asked, “How are you, really?”—I told them that I thought we’d seen the first signs that we were going to be okay, and then explained that we’d laughed while watching Letterman. I added that there had been a time when I didn’t know if we would ever truly laugh again, and we were comforted to know that we could. (It struck me later that, on a much larger stage, David Letterman had already played this role for all of America: in his first show after 9/11, he sat at his desk—no theme song—and just talked. He paid tribute to the fallen and the first responders; he expressed his sadness and even his quiet optimism. But most importantly, he made viewers feel as if things were going to be all right again some day—normal, even—and that we could all expect to laugh too. I’m grateful to him for helping us to realize that in 2015, just as he did for his viewing audience in 2001.)