Mourning Has Broken

by Erin Davis

  I’d let my partner down.

  I went back to sleep, having assured myself that my excuse was valid: it’s true that I had no voice, but I was also still drunk. There’s no way I could have faked my way through a four-hour live radio show. Apparently, though, I did think I could fake my way through ninety minutes; ashamed, I walked across the street and went in to the station at 7:30 a.m. and finished the show. (To be truthful, I don’t remember that either, but Rob does.)

  I can’t recall how the meeting was set up, or who called whom, but Mike, Rob and I met up later that same day at a local wing joint. Mike was not happy with me—justifiably so—and told me I’d let down the show. I wish I remembered more about the conversation, but I think that my shame over what had happened—how I’d seemingly deliberately sabotaged what should have been a high point in my life—managed to submerge a lot about the aftermath of that night of bingeing. A night that probably should have ended in a hospital, not on an elevator floor with my husband struggling to drag me to our apartment door. Pretty “grand,” huh? I couldn’t figure out why my arms hurt so badly and why I was limping in the days immediately following the parade debacle; reluctantly, Rob told me what he’d had to do to get me home. I was mortified.

  I wish I could tell you that the pain and shame with which I remember the fog of those two days in my life were enough to scare me sober. They weren’t. But one morning a few months later, I awoke and said I’d finally had enough. I was tired of waking up feeling like “death warmed over,” as my mother would say, and I decided then and there to quit. Once again, with the help of Antabuse and Bert Pluymen’s book, I quit drinking. It was July 4, 2006: my own “Independence Day.”

  Having tried unsuccessfully to stop drinking a few times in the past—my record was several months—I knew how to go about doing it. I didn’t do anything as drastic as pour the contents of all of the bottles in our condo and cottage down the drain; we’d need them for visitors. I also didn’t forbid Rob to drink, and when he felt sheepish over wanting a Manhattan when I was sipping a diet Dr Pepper, I reminded him that it wasn’t his fault I didn’t have an off switch. Besides, I’d also tell him, living with me would be enough to make you want to drink, right? He’d laugh. We did have an arrangement we both adhered to: if he was going to drink, there would be no hanky and definitely no panky. We both agreed that it wouldn’t be fair if he had alcohol on his breath and we were, um, embracing. That’s part of how it worked for us. I didn’t try to make him quit, and we had just a few ground rules.

  There were challenges on listener trips when everyone was getting pretty well-lubricated with all of the free libations around the pool, at the welcome parties and so on. But I remembered previous trips during my drinking days, when we’d done a clothed conga line right into the swimming pool, or I’d spent countless hours in the hot tub while the Errol Flynns flowed. For someone who was so protective of her image and so careful not to be the topic of gossip, at times I’d been careless enough to let down my guard. In fairness, a good number of those folks partying with me wouldn’t have noticed any particular loosening up on my part, but still . . . I was being needlessly reckless. So it came as somewhat of a relief to be sober on those trips, if only to make the 4 or 5 a.m. show starts (depending on the time zones) a little easier to take. But come on—did they have to put whole bottles of booze in the rooms? Talk about waving it under my nose! We would tuck those bottles into the closet as soon as we checked in. Out of sight and all of that.

  You may wonder why I sought the wisdom of a book rather than Alcoholics Anonymous and its Big Book. I’ll tell you straight out: pride. That oh-so-dangerous deadly sin. Very early on, when I was online exploring the possibility of sobriety, I told a chat room that I had a high-profile position and was very worried about being outed for my dependence on alcohol. A few less-than-kind posters called me out on my ego (probably justifiably) and were anything but understanding and supportive. Now, of course, the cold and often cowardly anonymity of a chat room or website does not at all compare with the heart-to-heart compassion that can come out of a real-life support group, and I should not have let that experience sour me or scare me away from an AA meeting. I have not yet closed the door on the possibility of attending a meeting, as I know how very successful the program has been for so many. And in this life, I think we need all the help we can get.

  During the time immediately following Lauren’s death, I thanked my higher powers more times than I can count for the strength it took to persevere and achieve sobriety, starting that day. Lauren’s death, which occurred just a couple of months short of my ninth anniversary of putting away the martini shaker, tested my resolve in a way that made losing a job seem as trivial as breaking a fingernail. Still, somehow, my sobriety held through the ordeal of losing and saying goodbye to our daughter.

  * * *

  THIS is where I should stop writing and let you move on to the next chapter, but that would be taking the easy way out. This book is about being honest and sharing the travels and travails that have brought Rob and me to where we are today. So I have to tell you the truth: the week I announced I was leaving Toronto radio in late 2016, I began drinking again.

  It happened innocently enough, and it wasn’t the first time this challenge had been put in my path: Rob and I were flying off to spend a few weeks together in the sun, and I asked our flight attendant for a virgin Caesar (no vodka). I got one. When I requested another, he forgot the “virgin” part. I tasted the vodka immediately, said to myself, Why not? and down it went. My blessed life as I knew it was over in so many ways, a man I detested with every fibre of my being had been elected to the highest office in the land just south of us, and I was, to tone down the vernacular, all out of damns to give.

  I leaned across to where Rob was seated and told him right away that there was vodka in my Caesar. He didn’t protest or try to talk me out of it: he hoped that after over ten years of sobriety, I’d find my off switch and, in return, give him a wife who could have cocktails with him and just roll with the idea of feeling no pain after being tortured by so much of it. Caesars were followed by wine with dinner and a nice port to top things off. This was going to be a great vacation!

  When we got home from that booze-soaked trip (so much for the off switch), I managed to control my intake—one glass of wine after dinner, and never in front of anyone but Rob—right up until the day, one month later, that we said goodbye to Ontario and boarded a flight to our new life. Then I could imbibe all of the martinis and white wine I wanted! I felt I could freely numb the pain of the litany of horrendous losses we had suffered in the previous months: our child, proximity to our grandchild (because of our choice to move), my entire radio life and the identity I’d spent my career building up. Who was I now? Where was I? We knew a total of six people in the area to which we were moving, after thirty years of being in a city where I was surrounded by friendly and welcoming faces at almost every turn. Suddenly, every insecurity I’d had since childhood came back with a vengeance: I was that new kid in school again, the misfit stranger. The kid who would decide with every meeting: introvert or extrovert? I hadn’t realized until I arrived in our new province just how weird it would be to know barely a soul and not to worry about putting on makeup (which I still did for months, even for a neighbourhood dog walk) in case I was recognized or someone wanted to share a selfie.

  Rob and I both experienced the extreme loneliness that comes with uprooting and having to find everything from a doctor and dentist to a hairdresser and dry cleaner. We came to see our new home, with its breathtaking ocean and mountain views, as a nice, new place in which to be sad.

  For the first three or four months, as we settled in, I found myself sinking into a hole of remorse and regret. How much of that came from the aftermath of imbibing again, I’m not sure; I only know that enveloping myself in the days surrounding Lauren’s death, as I did (and Rob did, too) for this book, pulled me down further than I’d been since the actual event. Do not
think that I regret for a second agreeing to write and share these experiences with you! But the process of doing so definitely did have a toll, and it was a cost that until now I have disclosed to only those who shared a bottle of wine with me during those months of 2017.

  As I watched the numbers on my bathroom scale rise, the darkness under my eyes deepen and my ambition to stay active dwindle to nothing, I continued to indulge in unhealthy doses of both self-medication and self-loathing. Rob and I both were in a deep state of mourning for the lives we’d left behind, and this was how we dealt with it, together.

  You might be asking the same question we asked ourselves: How is it that I survived the loss of our daughter but began drinking a year and a half later? I have a few theories: after decades of answering to others (including three pre-dawn alarms), I had no one for whom I needed to behave responsibly in this new post-radio life. No early mornings, no show to carry or to which to contribute; there was no one to disappoint or disgust with my weakness, or to turn to for help, for that matter.

  We were rudderless with no horizon in sight, floundering aimlessly with only the mission of writing this book to tether us to any kind of duty or feeling of purpose.

  But suddenly (and not for the first time), radio came to my rescue: in May 2017, I was approached to fill in on the midday show at our local Rogers radio station, Ocean 98.5, in Victoria. Without hesitation, I said yes, and with that, I had a reason to get up each day and find things to talk about in a concise (and hopefully interesting) manner. And I had to answer to someone besides my bosses: listeners. Of course, my daily online blog had continued, but in this case, radio was much more of an immediate demand. And I wasn’t going to let anyone down.

  So I started to find some purpose, once again. And eventually I decided that, since I did not have the ability to say “no thanks” after one or two drinks like most “normal” drinkers, it was time to stop poisoning my body (especially the brain I had always relied on to serve up just the right words at the right time) and to take this problem by the reins. I sought help from our family doctor, who agreed that an antidepressant might be what I needed, embraced physical activity again and have now been sober since the beginning of the second year of our new life here.

  Although it was easy to use Lauren’s death and the upheaval in our lives as the best excuses possible to indulge in a habit I knew was doing me physical harm (and who was it hurting but me, this time around?), I recognized how angry she would be with me—and with her daddy—for letting this happen again. I had marked ten years’ sobriety in July 2016, for God’s sake. How could I have let all of that go?

  It was easy. No one could really blame me. But it wasn’t the right thing to do. If Rob and I were to live the lives that Lauren would want us to, until we can be with our daughter again, then changes had to be made. And they were. This time, the date I chose was Groundhog Day, February 2. I had seen my shadow and it foretold a world of hurt. So before I fell back into that hole, it was time to stop.

  I take nothing for granted about each day without drinking as it comes. I am grateful for each one. Yes, although they do get easier, the evenings can be hard, but the mornings—and their clarity—are so much better. I hope that, soon, embracing sobriety will feel as natural a part of me as it did for those ten years. I know that I can do this, and I will. One day at a time.

  CHAPTER 10

  Purposeful Mourning

  Colin, summer 2016

  STRENGTH COMES IN SO MANY DIFFERENT INCARNATIONS. Much of the time—perhaps most of the time—we come by it because there’s simply no alternative. Someone wise once said that you don’t know what you’re capable of until it’s the only thing left to do, and it’s so true. I have lost count of the number of people who have said they don’t know how they would survive in my shoes, or that they can’t imagine how they’d keep going, or just how strong I must be. But to them, all I say is that I’m not doing anything different from what they would probably do. I just happen to be doing it on a stage, of sorts. Whether on the radio or through my blog, I’ve just lived out loud. But I’ve kept living, and that’s the key—just as it has been for countless parents before us who have also faced devastation and gotten up to fight another day.

  The strength of women like Ellen Hinkley—who manage to dig their way out of the darkness to happiness after having been immersed in so many levels of pain that every day must have felt like a new circle of hell—is something that my own family and siblings are going to have to draw upon. You see, almost exactly two years after we lost our daughter, my youngest sister’s son died—the victim of a suspected murder. Almost unbelievably, this is the second child that she has had to bury. Twenty-five years earlier, when Leslie told our mother that her baby would be stillborn, Mom responded in sadness and incredulity, “This kind of thing doesn’t happen to our family.” She was right.

  Until baby Katrina’s death, we’d enjoyed what most people would probably casually observe as an enviable life: happily married parents, four ambitious and achieving daughters and a comfortable and sometimes adventurous middle-class existence. There were challenges, to be sure, as there are in every family: divorce, disease and dissent. But nothing like the heartbreak Leslie suffered when she endured the stillbirth of her first child.

  It could be argued—my self-imposed ban on comparisons aside—that nowhere is the loss of a child so amplified by the pain of broken and still limitless dreams as when a baby is lost before or during birth. No matter how much time a mother has had to bond with that baby before its arrival in the world, whether two months or full term, there comes with losing that child an inevitable, piercing pain—a realization of the unfairness of such a helpless human being not even having had a chance to take a breath.

  Whether we know it or not, someone close to us has probably suffered a miscarriage. It’s estimated that, although statistics are incomplete, some 15 to 20 percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. In my own family, it happened to two of my three sisters, as well as my dear niece and my own mother (during the pregnancy before my arrival). The feelings of sadness that accompany this kind of loss are coupled with the hormonal changes the body experiences during pregnancy, only adding to the expected feelings of depression and other immense emotional distress.

  In addition to shock, anger and depression, a grieving mother-to-be often experiences sensations of guilt. A woman whose pregnancy has ended with the death of a baby (called a “stillbirth” after twenty weeks of gestation) may wonder if she should have known there was something wrong, or what she did to have brought about her unborn child’s death. Certainly this was the case when my younger sister lost her daughter in 1993.

  Leslie was pregnant with her first child and had seemingly sailed through seven months. A busy phone book advertising sales executive, she looked like she was managing it all. But late one evening as she was helping to meet a huge deadline at work, a fellow ad rep pointed to Leslie’s belly and said, “What are you doing here? You should be at home taking care of that baby!”

  Those words would haunt Leslie for months—even years—as she asked herself repeatedly, “What did I do wrong? Did I bring this on?” Because the very next day, she was on her back, sick with a cold for which, in good conscience, she could take no medication. On day two of cold-induced bed rest, she noticed a lack of movement in her belly.

  At first, she wondered if her sickness had laid the baby low, and whether it was just taking it easy, like Mommy. But worry set in, and she and her husband bundled up against the January cold and made their way to the hospital, where a barrage of tests was done during a long and anxious day. To make matters worse, nurse after nurse refused to give them any information. One, however, tried to assuage their concerns by lightheartedly saying that there must have been something wrong with one of the ultrasound machines. If only.

  After waiting nine hours for word—any word at all—Leslie and Peter were now really fearing the worst and wondering why no one would give them any in
formation, good or bad. They left that hospital, which was the one nearest their home, and made a silent drive to another one half an hour away, the hospital she had visited regularly during her prenatal doctor’s appointments. It was there that their fears were confirmed. In the small and lonely hours of the next morning, her doctor showed up and, tears in his dark brown eyes, asked softly, “Leslie, what happened?”

  Of course, no one knew. That would be a question that several tests on a little girl who would soon be named Katrina would fail to answer. But first came what I, as an outsider, perceived to be the next hardest part: waiting for the baby to arrive naturally.

  When Leslie called me in a hotel room many miles away to tell me her tragic news, I asked when she would be giving birth. She relayed the doctor’s recommendations that nature be allowed to take its course: the baby would wait in utero until Leslie went into labour. Next to the news of her unsuccessful pregnancy, I thought this was the saddest, sickest thing I had ever heard. But her doctor was firm in his belief that this pregnancy should be as physically non-disruptive as possible for Leslie so that she would be in good shape for her next one.

  I could not imagine having to keep a dead baby inside me, my “baby bump” a constant reminder of the dreams that were never to come true. It’s no wonder some women choose to be induced immediately upon hearing of a baby’s prenatal death. But Leslie decided to listen to her doctor’s advice and wait until her baby emerged in her own time and, in so doing, proved completely wrong my assumption that it would be a torturous period.