by Erin Davis
Years later, when that same sportscaster approached our show’s producer, asking if it would be worth him applying for a position on our highly rated morning team, he was laughingly reminded of that comment. He expressed incredulity, saying, “Wow. She has a good memory.”
I guess that, in his mind, I was supposed to take it “like a man,” roll with it and just let it go, as he’d surely had to do about his own looks over the years. He never did apply for that job. And, yes, I recognize that my memory for slights is far too good for my own well-being. But even grown-ups need to be reminded that words hurt.
Nothing I did—no number of hours spent in therapists’ offices—could prepare me for the most acidic correspondence I would receive at any time in my career. It came, as so many gentle and comforting pieces of mail did, in a rectangular white envelope. It arrived at my workplace a few months after Lauren’s death. Someone had clearly been biding their time, waiting for just the right day to post a card that was so benign in appearance that I’d never suspect the verbal poison that it contained. I opened it just after 8 a.m. A song was playing on the air, and my partner, our producers and I were each working away on our own: answering emails, poring over music logs, planning the next on-air segment. To the side of my computer keyboard sat a small stack of mail that had been retrieved from the station’s reception area that morning. My name and address appeared in neat handwriting. Next to that, written on a slant, was the word Personal. There was also a return address (which turned out to be fake)—all in all, nothing out of the ordinary.
I tore open the envelope and pulled out a dollar-store pink card decorated with wild roses and a butterfly. On the outside were printed the words With Deepest Sympathy. Here’s what was written inside in neat, curly—and highly legible—handwriting:
Dear Erin,
May the enclosed words bring you peace at this time.
Lovely enough, yes? The card seemed to echo the sentiments of the dozens of others that came our way after May 11. But it was the computer-printed letter tucked inside that made me throw my hand to my mouth and gasp, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” I’ll share the contents with you now. I wouldn’t even let my husband read this letter, so horrific were its contents. But there’s nothing like shining a light on the darkness to overcome it, and at the risk of giving the monster who wrote this the satisfaction of knowing I read it, I’ll expose this now for the raw sewage that it is.
Dear Erin,
Please excuse this typed letter, my handwriting is just too hard to read.
Every day I have to listen to you on the radio—no choice at work.
Every day I am subjected to hearing all about your journal from my cubicle mate—it is easier to just nod along rather than asking her not to tell me.
Day after day I hear bout [sic] your plight with your dead daughter. Boo hoo, every day there is death.
I’m sure you must be struggling to answer the “why” question, why did she die? I bet you know the power of the universe, and here is the answer. For years you pined to be the best . . . top of the heap . . . best ratings above everyone else—and you’d do or trade anything to be at the top. All Erin, all the time. On the radio, blogging, guest speaker, never a moment without Erin. (By the way, how does it feel to think about how you told all those poor sad people to just live their best life ever after you had a lay off . . . don’t your [sic] feel like such a hypocrite thinking about your “wisdom” to those people with real pain, now that you are experiencing real pain).
So the universe came calling to make you re-pay your debt. You can’t ask for something big and not trade big.
Your daughter will be remembered by a handful. She wasn’t a brain surgeon and she didn’t change the world. She dropped out of college, married young, had a job and had a baby. She loved and she was loved. The two who deserve the sympathy are the son-in-law and the baby. They lost their future, you had enough time.
The letter goes on from there with a few more paragraphs disparaging my career and the radio station in general. When our producer Ian checked on the address—he did so in person, driving to the place from which the card and letter were supposedly sent—he determined that the street number was non-existent. We assumed then that the name was also not real. Typical, that: the meanest ones rarely give you a chance to respond.
I wish I could tell you that the thousands upon thousands of kind words that flooded our way—like the lovely, welcoming email from Tracey Morse—outweighed the few hundred vile ones, but I’m just not that evolved. The forethought and cruelty that went into writing and mailing that handwritten card and accompanying typed letter are almost unimaginable to me; only in transcribing that letter for you here have I taken the time to read each sentence. The day that it arrived I was only able to skip from one paragraph to the next, gleaning with each phrase its despicable contents.
Having read it in full now, as you just have, all I can say to whoever wrote this (and took the time to come up with a fake name and address) is: You don’t know me and you most certainly don’t know my family. You are wrong—dead wrong—especially about how we would move into the future. But you’re most wrong about our daughter. She was not a brain surgeon, but she had a bright and promising future (the very reason she left college) and the opportunity to change lives. She made more of a difference in her twenty-four years on this planet than any poor, pitiable, anonymous troll who claims to have been exposed to me by force and third-hand while having far too much knowledge of the details of my life for that to be true.
Let’s not forget the reason this person said they were typing the letter, which was that their handwriting was too hard to read. However, the writing on the card and its envelope was perfectly legible. Just maybe there were concerns that I’d recognize that handwriting, do you think?
Of course, when the name and address are fake, there’s no chance to answer. But I’ve taken the opportunity here to do so, as is my right. I’d tell them to go to hell, but from the tone of that letter, they’re already there. Imagine feeling you have to defend your love, your grief, your pain and your dead child, all because of one person’s letter. That’s exactly how I felt. And, of course, there was no way to respond, even if I’d somehow found the words or felt the desire to do so. Lauren died because I was ambitious and successful. Just try to wrap your head around what kind of mind it would take to come up with that.
I’d be lying if I said that a tiny, nasty part of me didn’t feel that way right after her death, though, and that is perhaps why the letter bothered me as much as it did. I feared it might contain an element of truth. In my incoherent hours and days after Lauren’s death, I kept saying to Rob, “It’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’” He hadn’t studied this short story by W.W. Jacobs, but I’d never forgotten it from my high-school literature course. A horror-filled cautionary tale set against the backdrop of three wishes, it basically warns that if you mess with fate, you’ll have a steep price to pay.
Rob tried to convince me again and again that Lauren’s death was nothing like this. There was no punishment, no karma. We had done nothing to bring this tragedy upon ourselves; it had just happened. Blame the lessons of catechism from growing up or the guilt I have felt most of my life for nearly everything beyond my control, but I somehow wondered what I had done to make this happen. The words of that horrible letter blaming me for seeking the limelight and paying with our daughter’s life just served to underline the inanity of my own self-incrimination. I guess what I was trying to express was my deep-seated expectation that there was going to be a price for the blessed life I’d been given.
For so many years, I thought my own theme song echoed that of Maria from the famous musical and film The Sound of Music: I wondered what I’d done so right in my youth and childhood to deserve the life I was living. Since marrying Rob and having Lauren, I had always felt so very charmed. My mother always asked me why, with the good fortune I had, I never bought a lottery ticket. And I told her straight o
ut: “Mom, I have already won the lottery.” I enjoyed a great career. I had a wonderful husband (on the first try!). We’d raised a daughter who was everything we could have hoped for and then some. Who could ask for anything more?
So you see, I never stopped being grateful, nor did I ever once take it for granted. Had I worked hard and sacrificed much, including, at times, my mental health? You bet I had. Rob had sacrificed too, sometimes wondering when I would retire and he could “have his wife” to himself. But I wouldn’t have traded any of it for the world. We were financially secure. I had risen to a place I could not have imagined, and life was so good. So damned, unimaginably good. We were content, having found as much balance in our lives as a workaholic and her husband could muster, and I wanted for nothing except a few more hours of sleep each night. That was all. So how could I have brought this on myself ?
People will always judge how you handle something as tragic as the loss of a loved one: how much you suffer, how quickly you recover, how appropriately or inappropriately (in their opinion) you mourn. Your job is to try, try, try not to care.
You may recall that there were pages upon pages of comments devoted to the subject of how quickly Patton Oswalt rebounded when, some fifteen months after the sudden death of his wife, he began dating and was soon engaged to writer Meredith Salenger. Oswalt responded to these (mostly) anonymous critics by echoing the sentiments of a blogger who basically said that no one gets to sit in judgment of what a widow or widower does when their own partner is perched right next to them. No one who hasn’t had the routine of their daily life turn into a living nightmare gets to have a say in how a survivor chooses to pick up the pieces.
In the same way that Patton Oswalt had after his wife’s death, we expected Phil to quietly begin dating again after Lauren’s passing. When it happened, though, we found out in an almost tragicomical way. Preparing to babysit Colin one evening, we’d done a text-connection test with Phil before he went out. A while later, Phil inadvertently texted some particularly warm and affectionate words to me—the mother-in-law! Of course, he meant to write them to the woman he was then seeing, a woman we would come to love for the companionship she provided to Phil, and the mother figure she became to his son. But at that moment? Talk about awkward—except that we didn’t talk at all! Because I found out about her presence in his life in a way I know he wouldn’t have chosen, we wanted to spare his feelings, and we waited until our next visit to Ottawa to bring up the subject. The last thing we wanted to do was make Phil feel bad in any way or say the wrong thing to him. After all, this would be a big adjustment—no matter how positive—for all of us.
That period also gave us the breathing space we needed in order to let this development sink in. We’d known it would only be a matter of time before Phil moved into another relationship, and although his doing so was one of the signposts showing more distance accumulating between our daughter and the present, we welcomed the relief that Phil would have, both from loneliness and heartache, and also from the heavy responsibilities that came with parenting Colin all on his own. Not only had he raised a baby to the best of any parent’s abilities, but he’d also gone above and beyond, continuing with the arduous practices that Lauren had begun with such enthusiasm: making his own natural liquid laundry soap for the cloth diapers that Colin wore, and preparing and sterilizing bottle after bottle for his boy’s countless batches of formula. Any parent in his position would be excused for switching to disposable diapers in a flash, or finding other ways to cut corners, but Phil did not. It was like he was keeping a promise to both his son and the boy’s mother. Colin was the only thing that mattered to Phil now; we could all see that. And we were in awe of the job he was doing, even though life just kept coming at him like a wrecking ball.
Phil endured more than losing his wife; he also lost their home. It happened just one month after Lauren’s death. And, as bad luck would have it, with Lauren dying in the hours after Mother’s Day, disaster struck Phil on his first Father’s Day. He was in western Toronto on bereavement leave from his job as a radio producer and staying at his dad’s home. Back in Ottawa, an anxious dog had chewed through a neighbour’s toilet plumbing line, sending water pouring into Lauren and Phil’s townhouse. This diluvial development would have been damaging all on its own, but when you add to it the fact that no one from the townhouse development reached Phil until two weeks later, you have a full-on catastrophe.
There’s never a good time for a flood, but this one came at a moment when Phil had gathered his strength and was preparing to move back to his home and to rebuild upon what was left of his life in Ottawa. He was ready to begin again, and then found himself set back in a way that had all of us asking, “What next?” (A psychic I later spoke with said Lauren was taking complete credit for it, having caused the flood to get Phil to move out of that house and start anew. “I did good, didn’t I?” she crowed.)
Ready to pick up the pieces of his life but with nowhere to live back in the city he called “home,” Phil, and Colin, were moved by their insurers into a two-bedroom downtown Ottawa hotel suite. They had lost almost all of their possessions—Lauren’s too—and what hadn’t been destroyed by the flood had most likely suffered water and mould damage. Months passed before the house was rebuilt, repainted, inspected and deemed ready for occupation. But that didn’t mean Phil was prepared to return to the home where his wife had drawn her last breath. As his days and nights in that dark and cluttered hotel room came to an end and the move-in date finally drew near (months and months after initial projections), Phil levelled with us and said he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to go back to that house.
For us, that was all it took: we encouraged him to find another house and to make a new start. We would do anything we could to help Phil and Colin to move forward. We just love them that much, and we recognized that they had suffered for too long: Colin taking his first steps in a hotel room. A washer and dryer pushed to their limit by the number of cloth diapers that needed cleaning and drying every day. Walls spattered with uneaten puréed vegetables whose bowls had been thrown into a sink in frustration. Evenings spent trying to quiet kids who were practising their slapshots in the hallway before hockey tournaments. Nights spent alternately preparing and bottling formula while simultaneously consoling a baby who had awakened to sirens in the downtown streets. It was all too much, but, conversely, so was the prospect of moving back into that house. The light at the end of the tunnel was no light at all. So, together, we decided that, at long last, Phil deserved a break. It came in the form of a newish, larger home that offered sunshine, a guest room for grandparents’ sleepovers and the hope of new beginnings.
Weeks passed between that misdirected text from Phil to me and our next visit with our son-in-law. We brought up the fact that we knew there was someone else in his life, and we gently told Phil that it was okay and that we understood: time within the vortex of grief stands still. It could have been six months since Lauren had died, or it could have been a year or five years. Everything stands still or moves at a crawl. Those on the outside who are scrolling through the calendar of a regular life simply don’t get it. How can the passing of hours, days, weeks, years have any meaning when you’re struggling with what your entire life and survival are about? Nothing makes sense, not even the simplest, most basic rules of our existence, including the inevitable march of time.
We were grateful—happy, even—that Phil had found someone with whom to have a close friendship and romantic relationship. He, of all people, deserved every possible shot at happiness. Even if we had not felt positively about the addition to his and Colin’s lives (and we most certainly did—and do—feel it has been a positive and welcome step forward for everyone), what possible right could we have to criticize, judge or admonish him for moving on? After all, when Rob’s mother died from an adverse reaction to a trial menopause drug in the early 1960s, his father remarried just over a year later. Rob was nine years old, his older siblings
had left for university by then, and his dad was completely at a loss as to how to raise this boy on his own. A child can live on cheese sandwiches for only so long!
As a result of his father’s remarriage to Margaret, a nurse and educator whom he’d met through church, Rob eventually helped welcome a new half-sister. Over the years, his relationship with his stepmother deepened to the point that when we were expecting Lauren in 1991, Margaret went through the steps of formally adopting Rob, just so that Lauren would be her very own grandchild. Rob and his older siblings had not stood in the way of their father’s happiness and security; and where our son-in-law and his girlfriend were concerned, we wanted to take the same approach, and in doing so, look out for the well-being of the little family Lauren loved so well and left behind.
What a gift that girlfriend, Brooke, has come to be in our lives in a relatively short time. Almost daily she sends us a photo or video of Colin doing something she knows we’ll find amazing (so, that’s pretty much anything), and she keeps us up to date on what he’s learning, how he’s getting along at school and funny things he’s done around the house. It’s been a wonderful thing to gradually get to know this young woman who loves Colin fiercely and isn’t at all afraid to stand up for him if she feels that his needs aren’t being met outside their home. Brooke is a seemingly perfect fit for Phil and, like him, a caring, dedicated parent. We have nothing but praise and respect for the way she has taken over a mothering role that Phil worked so hard to make sure Colin wasn’t missing. And with every day, every text and message from her and Phil, we love and appreciate Brooke more. She’s allowing us to keep and strengthen our connection with our only grandson while we also build one with her. And we could not have hoped for anything more.