by Erin Davis
There have been other incidents that I’ve chosen to believe Lauren had a hand in making happen, from the presence of a bright but rare (for us) Baltimore oriole on the first anniversary of her passing to a full rainbow on my birthday; that smell of cookies baking (when there was no one anywhere near us) and a blackbird (Beatles) fluttering in our fireplace. Dimes have appeared where there were none a moment earlier, and feathers have shown up when I’ve been thinking of her most strongly. All of these things can be explained or waved away, I know. But when you’re grasping for a lifeline, you take whatever is offered and you make it work. Sometimes it’s just enough to get through another hour of another day. And if that’s magical thinking, make mine a double.
There’s a certain bit of that kind of rationalizing that goes on when people are trying to find the words to console you too. But as Ronan Keating sang in the pop song (written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz) featured in Notting Hill, sometimes “you say it best when you say nothing at all.”
When people would write or say to me that God needed another angel, my immediate thought was, What a pile of garbage! That little boy needs his mother more than any omnipotent being in the sky needs an angel. I wasn’t buying that one, but I would smile and nod, same as when people said it was part of “God’s plan.”
I mean, who am I—who is anyone—to say what “God’s plan” is? But I do have to wonder what kind of cruel being would take a mother away from a little baby, a wife from her loving husband, a daughter from her adoring parents. I realize that true faith probably means never having to ask these questions. And I wish I had the deep foundation of beliefs that carries people through events like this. I recall seeing Marie Osmond onstage in Toronto in the year after her eighteen-year-old son, Michael, died, having jumped from an eighth-storey balcony. While the rest of her words that night have faded away, I do remember her saying, “I believe—no, I know—that we will be together again.” Her Mormon religion gave her strength when she needed it most, and isn’t that really what faith is for? To be there for the hardest times and help you to survive them? Not just to hope but to be absolutely certain that there will be light and love and forgiveness and joy again? A reunion with the one you’ve lost?
In a way, the community gathered around Rob, Phil and me like a congregation and gave us the same support and will to go on—that same belief that things would get better and life would one day feel worth living again. We received religious artifacts, including prayer cards and promises of masses to be said in Lauren’s name in perpetuity. We also were sent three shawls that had been lovingly knitted or crocheted while their makers prayed. Each item sent our way was gratefully and humbly received, no matter what denomination. In fact, one Toronto church became directly involved in forwarding mail to us, all thanks to confusion over an address. It is a story we’ll always cherish.
Even in this age of emails and texts (or, perhaps, especially because of it), Rob and I were touched to receive boxes filled with cards and letters that had been sent to the radio station in the month of my absence from the airwaves. The pieces of mail were carefully delivered to our condo and set aside for a time when we would be ready to open them and pore over the sentiments therein. But one very kind woman took it upon herself to make sure we got every piece that had been sent our way.
The secretary at a nearby church wrote to tell us that because of the similarities between their address and that of the radio station, she had received a lot of mail having to do with (she guessed) the recent death of our daughter. She took the gracious step of forwarding it to me at work. She went on to include some of her own touching words of condolence. Fortunately, I was able to phone the church, speak to this woman directly and thank her in person for her care and kindness.
Included in those boxes of correspondence were a laminated, handwritten poem, small plaques and bookmarks, angel medallions and books. Lots and lots of books. People who had come through their own darkest chapters of grief wanted to share with us the writings that had offered them the most comfort, solace and wisdom. I’ll apologize now for those works that may have been lent but were never returned; so much of that time is just such a blur that it’s a wonder we made it to the next calendar year. But a few stand out; they resonated with us and helped us immensely. One was I Wasn’t Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One by Brook Noel and Pamela D. Blair.
But the book that had the most impact on us—it actually turned us around 180 degrees and pointed us toward the future—was Journey of Souls by Dr. Michael Newton. With a doctorate in counselling psychology, Newton (who died in 2016) used hypnosis in an effort to provide counselling and therapy to patients suffering from PTSD. What he learned was that some of the trauma they’d endured had not happened in this life; he was able to regress them to previous lives. And then—stay with me here—Dr. Newton took some of his patients into the spaces between lives.
I’ll pause while you shake your eyeballs so they point ahead again. I know this sounds a little like “straw grasping.” I get that. But of everything we read, heard and even studied as children and adolescents (I was raised a Roman Catholic, Rob a Baptist), this resonated most loudly. What if, as souls before we got to this life, Lauren, Rob and I had made a pact—an agreement—that this was how this lifetime was going to be? That we were all going to experience whatever it is that we were here to learn? And what if that is why we took no moment for granted, why we had no bucket-list item left unchecked, and why Lauren was on such a fast track to accomplish everything that she did? Just . . . what if ? How are our what ifs any different from those of organized religions?
Maybe this is just more of that magical thinking that keeps us going, that keeps us taking one step at a time and continuing to breathe. Or maybe it is more. Maybe Colin really was brought here with a special purpose; we have to wait and see and do everything we can to facilitate his development into whatever person he’s meant to be. And we have to hope that somehow his mother is watching over him and guiding his soul in this journey, just as his father is doing with his son’s physical presence in this lifetime. We will wait a decade or two to discover what Colin’s destiny on this earth is. But for now, we’re planning on using our voices and Lauren’s death as a way to help others. In her “Homage to Age and Femininity,” published in O magazine, American novelist Anne Lamott summed up our lives and our future beautifully:
You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.
I suppose it’s appropriate that when one has a limp, one seeks the counsel of a doctor. And it so happens that we found one who had a profound effect on our lives in those early, raw months of searching and suffering.
To paraphrase mindfulness meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein, we didn’t just do something, we sat there. A local private clinic that happened to offer weekly meditation classes reached out to me shortly after Lauren’s death (the recruiter was a friend I knew through charity fundraising). What I at first thought might be a poorly timed attempt to sign me up for their executive health care program turned out to be an immense gift. We were taken under the wing of Dr. Randolph Knipping, a former coroner and emergency health doctor who was vastly experienced in a variety of areas, had opened Canada’s first Cleveland Clinic and was now running a private executives’ clinic in Toronto. The strongest reason for our personal connection with the compassionate and insightful doctor came every Tuesday evening: a veteran of forty years’ experience in meditation practice and instruction, Dr. Knipping taught Rob and me the power of stopping, of breathing consciously and of sharing our thoughts and feelings with the other eight or so practitioners in
his downtown office. It was a circle of trust and confidence, of understanding and sympathy.
Another doctor played a large role in helping Rob and me in the early months of our grieving and recovery. Psychiatrist Dr. Henry Rosenblat was there from the first moments of our bereavement; thankfully, the doctor and I already had a professional relationship. As time went on, he aided us in navigating the choppy and uncharted waters of grief, and in puzzling through how we could possibly be of help to our son-in-law. He also helped me gain some perspective and clarity in endeavouring to make a decision about the immense career and address change that would come at the end of 2016. We will always owe Dr. Rosenblat a huge debt of gratitude.
Because of him and Dr. Knipping, Rob and I are big fans of talk therapy, whether through a doctor or therapist or with a group comprising people who are also bereaved. Maybe it’s an online group, and you’re all there anonymously. Perhaps it’s a parish priest or a favourite rabbi. But it is so important that you find someone—even if you have to pay them—who will listen to you pour out your heart. If you find yourself in a group setting, like our meditation classes were, where you go around the circle and talk about where you are in your lives or the challenges each of you faces—from the everyday to the overwhelming—you come to realize that you are never alone in your suffering. You witness that none of us has come through life unscathed. It may not be as monumental a trauma as losing a child, but almost every person you will encounter carries a weight that is often challenging enough to make you grateful for your own. Almost.
Whether it’s just further proof of the old saying that misery loves company or simply a connection around a virtual version of the campfire that once drew our ancestors, talk therapy is a chance to share and to hear of pain other than your own. It is a reminder that you are not alone. For fellow bereaved mother Ellen Hinkley, the idea of therapy, of paying to have someone listen, didn’t resonate. Instead, she turned to a friend who’d also lost a child, as well as a circle of bereaved moms who would knit and talk. I can think of no more tribal way for women to join hands and hearts symbolically—sharing and healing while creating something beautiful in so very many ways—can you?
Life is filled with dichotomies and ironies that seem to become clearer when the less important details melt away. Even though it leaves you so often enveloped in fog, being shaken to your raw core by the loss of someone you don’t want to live without tends to put things in perspective: you learn who your friends are and who is no longer worth whatever precious energy you have left. You start to prioritize things according to what has to be done and what you want to do, instead of what you feel you should do, or what someone else might want you to do.
You strip away the extraneous activities and former obligations because—guess what?—you have an excuse no one can question. You will never need more nurturing than you do when you’re in the depths of grief. And it is in that moment that you’ll find one of the most ironic truths of all: there is strength—true power—in vulnerability.
I truly believe that, if we’re lucky, people want to help us when we are suffering, and we should not miss out on a chance to be held or comforted when it is offered. After all, we need only look at survivors of natural disasters to see how fast the news wheel turns. Our pain becomes a part of recent—and then ancient—history in a very short period of time. The world moves on. But we don’t have to—not until we’re ready. And I say to hell with anyone who feels that our timeline doesn’t suit theirs. Sometimes, those little “get over it” nudges come from the most well-meaning people.
I remember about a month after Lauren’s passing, my father remarked to one of my sisters that he’d had a phone chat with me and that I “seemed to be over the worst of it.” My younger sister, who would soon go on to experience her own hobbling grief, lost it on him. “Dad,” she said, “she hasn’t even begun to get through this, never mind over it!”
My dad’s reasoning came from a lifetime of Armed Forces stoicism and ingrained prairie practicality and toughness. At one point, I had to ask him to please stop reminding me that both of my grandmothers had lost children in infancy. I pointed out that this was in the 1930s, when infant mortality was at a far higher rate than it is today, plus they all went on to have more children, which was not going to be an option for me. I love my dad and knew his heart was in the right place, but once again, the perils of comparing grief or loss were clearly on display. We’d all lost my mother three years earlier, and he dealt with the passing of his wife of fifty-five years with great grace and strength, but losing a parent (and, to some extent, the death of a spouse) is something we are all preparing for, in some way or another, from the moment we’re old enough to grasp the concept of mortality. As for the death of a child, how can there be guidelines on surviving something that is never, ever supposed to happen?
One of the most common reactions I heard from people who’d also suffered the loss of someone dear was their own surprise that the world kept turning so blissfully unaware in the aftermath of their own searing tragedy. In the early days of our darkness, I felt as if I wanted to dye my hair white or tear my clothes or wear a black armband; somehow, I reasoned, the world should see how everything inside me had been carved out and that nothing was ever going to be the same. I did none of those things. Instead, after stumbling and falling in a parking lot during our first trip home from Ottawa following Lauren’s death, I carelessly (rather than deliberately) wore a black dress that showed the raw, scabby wound on my knee at her Ottawa memorial. When I realized that my knee’s ugly red and brown patch would show beneath the risen hemline as I sat facing the group of mourners at the gathering in Lauren’s memory, I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to bother covering it up with pantyhose; I’d let everyone see how her death had taken me down.
In time, of course, the scab disappeared, and now there’s just the faintest of scars. It would take far longer for our hearts to begin to mend, as every day some new memory, some fresh pain would open the wound again.
That’s not to say that Rob was physically unscathed by the sudden loss of his dear daughter. In the days of May between her first memorial in Ottawa and the second in Toronto, it was as though I was watching a physical transformation in my handsome husband. Rob is a man who has always prided himself on staying fit—fit enough into his sixties to play in goal twice weekly against hockey players who were much younger (and stopping their shots with success more often than not). But as we walked through a grocery store parking lot, I noticed how this profound loss was weighing on him like a lead yoke. His shoulders had become rounded and slumped, his pace slowed, and the pronounced lines in his face—carved by a lifetime of laughter—were now mirroring the deep, fresh crevices in his heart. I remarked to him that I was seeing this change and urged him, urged us, not to let this age us. We promised ourselves and each other that death was not going to claim us the way it had our young, vibrant daughter; death was not going to leach the life out of us or make us give up on our attempts to defy the inevitability of time. Eventually we would find a way to smile that showed a return of the sparkle in our eyes; we’d find a way to reignite our souls’ pilot lights after they were so cruelly extinguished that May morning.
As time goes on and your own healing begins and continues, the immense pain of loss dissipates among those who knew your loved one. As much as it hurts to witness this, I suppose it truly is the way life is meant to go: the suffering shouldn’t be endless, and everyone must have the opportunity to embrace hope and joy once more. But as the one who experienced the greatest deprivation, you’ll probably find it increasingly hard to find anyone who will listen to you or who will be generous enough of spirit to bring up the name of the person whose absence has made your life so difficult. For some, this is because they don’t want to cause you upset when it appears you’re doing so well. For others, it could be a matter of wanting to move forward and thinking that by not bringing up the deceased, they’re helping you to heal.
Not
hing could be further from the truth. Yes, having our daughter’s sweet name brought up by strangers in airports, shopping malls and emails was sometimes a reminder of our loss (in that rare instance that it wasn’t already at the front of our minds). But that momentary jolt was always replaced by a sense of gratitude that people were thinking of her. As long as she remained in their thoughts, she hadn’t yet disappeared completely, right? I wonder about people like Marie Osmond—mothers whose loss played out for all the world to see, making headlines in newspapers and tabloids, and who will always be greeted by caring people with (at best) sad eyes, tilted heads and words of condolence, or (at worst) inappropriate questions or comments.
For those of us not in that white-hot spotlight, the passage of time means fewer mentions, and there comes a day when you don’t bring up your loved one’s name for fear of making others feel awkward. At least, that’s how it’s been for Rob and for me. Family who knew and loved her don’t talk about her much anymore (even though she’s all we want to talk about). We want to laugh; we want to celebrate her zaniness and the hugeness of her heart and her life! But to everyone else, I suppose, it is time to move on. As one numerologist put it to me, people around us are thinking: Why aren’t you over it yet? Change your thinking, change your life! As though a saying on a coffee mug or a poster depicting an imperilled kitten will somehow help everything to make sense. Please! When I am drowning and need a lifesaver, don’t throw me a candy with a hole in it. Throw me something to keep my head above water, just this one day. Say her name. Tell me your memory of her. Remind me of the time something she did touched your heart. Perhaps it was a thank-you card or a kind gesture. Or maybe she made you laugh. God, how she made people laugh.