Mourning Has Broken

by Erin Davis

  For us, it’s telling the story of Lauren’s death, and the anguish of not knowing if it could have been prevented. It’s living out loud after losing Lauren; seeking and finding happiness wherever we can and not denying ourselves the pleasures that may lie within each new day. We love to travel and are now finding the time to do more of it, even hosting cruises. And my ties with radio were not quite cut: that fill-in gig on the midday shift at our new local radio station lasted for nine months. As I’ve already mentioned, the opportunity was serendipitous, coming when I was beginning to feel untethered and unsure about our move away from Ontario, where Rob and I had lived for more than thirty years. Once again, it seemed that radio was a lifesaver after this latest big loss, the one we’d imposed on ourselves when we left our friends, our grandson and his family, and our lives behind to try to start anew, knowing few people and precious little about the area we were now calling “home.” But gradually, with time and the patience and kindness of friends and family here on Vancouver Island, we have begun to feel grounded as our roots start to take hold: Rob is playing hockey a few times a week, and I am looking forward to more emceeing and public speaking across the country. After all that we have endured, Rob and I are intent on proving that there is, indeed, life after death.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dreaming a Little Dream

  Lauren in Mexico on our first family March Break vacation, 2004

  THERE ARE THOSE SWEET MOMENTS OF MERCY, the ones where I’m immersed in the frothed-milk softness just before waking from gentle dreams of Lauren, when we’re together and happy and all is right with our gauzy, sepia-toned world. She’s still with us and we’re still with her; those are the fleeting seconds that keep me wrapped in the fleecy warmth of how things used to be.

  Of course, the alarm clock or daylight and the reality of where we find ourselves now come back in a whoosh that lands squarely on my chest and sits there with heaviness until I sit up, rub my face and shake it off. Sometimes, I let the tears start to leak from my sleepy eyes as I lie on my pillow, willing myself back to that place of contentment. But the years since Lauren left us have shown me that there are little ways to cope with the waking hours. Joy can be ours again, and although it will never feel as complete as it once did, it is our right to feel happiness. That’s what Rob and I have kept telling each other, even through the changes that have brought us to a new life, pushing ourselves forward through the thick, dark curtain of loss.

  I want to begin this final chapter by saying thank you. If there is a word more weighty than mourning—even if it has broken—I’m not sure what it is, but I do know that it took a certain strength and sympathy (even empathy) for you to decide to spend this time with me, with my husband and our family, and I am grateful to you for coming along. Also, sorry for using the word grateful so often. But I am. We are. So, thank you again.

  Since we’re here and you know who I am, let me tell you who I think you are. You are one or more of three kinds of people: you have lost someone close to you (like us); there is someone dear in your life who has suffered a catastrophic loss; or you have never gone through the loss of someone and felt the extreme pain that accompanies that experience. If you fall into that last, fortunate group, it is with not even a hint of bitterness that I say, “Lucky you.”

  I believe you can belong to that group and still know how it feels to lose someone or something that meant a great deal to you: someone with whom you shared a special closeness. Until we lost Lauren, I would have counted myself among that group. When my mother died in 2012, I mourned her loss. I still miss her and know that I always will. But I have become certain that the brain aneurysm she suffered—and which basically killed her on the spot, even though she was kept on life support until three of her four daughters could come to her side—was the way Mom would have wanted to leave this life. She suffered very briefly, but was pretty much brain dead before the ambulance arrived at the small bungalow my parents rented in California to escape the Canadian winter. One moment, she was sitting with Dad, eating off a TV tray and watching a rerun of M*A*S*H, and the next, she was complaining of an awful headache and how hot it suddenly was. Then she was gone.

  Throughout her life, Mom always made it clear that when the time came, she didn’t want to linger or be a bother to anyone. She would rather have gone as quickly as she did—even possibly without being aware of the goodbyes and kisses we gave her before the tubes were taken out at the hospital—than to stay alive living anything less than the happy life she had come to enjoy in her senior years. Antidepressants had been a friend to my mom during the last third of her life, and she was painting gorgeous landscapes and watercolour florals, golfing, playing pickle ball and joining neighbours—fellow Canadian snowbirds and American residents alike—in embracing every day. The aneurysm ended a life that had been as happy in its final chapter as it was at any time. And for that, we were all grateful. (That word again!)

  The day before what would have been my mother’s seventy-ninth birthday, and after a lunch in a crowded California café where we dealt with the shock of what was happening by teasing my father about the older ladies possibly eyeing him (there’s that humour, saving the day again), my sisters, my dad and I headed off to the hospital where we would be faced with the heavy task of saying our final farewells to our mother. As big band music and a few Josh Groban selections my eldest sister had chosen played through a small speaker, we said soft words and laid six red roses—one for each of her four daughters, her husband and herself—in her still but warm hands. After an hour, the time came for us to leave the room as the nurses removed the tubes that were keeping her alive. We returned to her room from a quiet family lounge a few minutes later.

  The mechanical clicking that had accompanied her aided breathing had stopped, and all we heard above our sniffles and quiet words to our mother were the slowing beeps as the numbers on a machine registering her heartbeat continued to drop. Aware that the staff was waiting to come in and prepare the private room for another patient, we steeled ourselves for the final goodbyes. Down, down, down the numbers dropped: 98 . . . 82 . . . 60 . . .

  When the numbers had gotten down near the teens, my sisters began to gather up their jackets, the speakers, their purses. I sat at the bedside and rubbed Mom’s arm, speaking softly to her all the while. As the beeping pattern changed, I looked up.

  52 . . . 60 . . . 72 . . . 88 . . . the numbers began to climb! What was this—some kind of miracle? “She’s not quite ready to go yet,” I said hopefully. But when I stopped rubbing her arm, the numbers and her heart rate slowly began to drop again. Was Mom sending a signal that she knew we were there—that she wasn’t going to be leaving us all?

  As lovely as that would have been to believe, I suspect the truth is that she really did go on her way when she fell to the floor in her bathrobe at home. What we were witnessing was some kind of static-electric reaction to me rubbing her skin. Of course that was it . . . wasn’t it?

  After another fifteen minutes, we knew the end was near, and I said to my mother what I am sure would have made her laugh (she laughed so easily in the last decade or so of her life): “Well, Mom, you know how much they charge for hospital parking, so we’d better get going . . .,” and with that, we stroked her hair, kissed her forehead one more time—my sisters, my dad and I—and we left that quiet hospital room. When I turned and went back for one last moment, the nurses were already there. It was over.

  As we walked out of the hospital, I seemed to leave my body and look down at our sad, broken family. I could see myself falling to my knees, and indeed, it did cross my mind briefly to crumple to the sidewalk and just stay there. But instead, we all calmly walked to the car, and I never let on to anyone we passed on the way that the woman who had meant more to me than any other human for the first half of my life was gone.

  We would hold a memorial the following year, the evening before Lauren’s wedding, when family from across the country had gathered for a happy celebration the ne
xt day. We sent Mom off with a beautiful service filled with music interwoven with visual presentations and shared memories by her husband, children and grandchildren at what we called a “Momorial.” Later that evening, we all joined in a big party at a local pub in celebration of her life and Lauren’s upcoming nuptials. Mom would have just loved it all, especially when her daughters and granddaughter took the stage to make music with the band (all friends of the family). I’ve always thought how generous of spirit it was for Lauren and Phil to share part of their wedding weekend with Lauren’s grandmother, even though it meant tears of sadness were intermingled with tears of joy in the span of just a few hours. But oh how we partied that evening!

  As time passed, there was a peace in knowing that Mom’s death was how things were meant to be, and all of us—Dad and my three sisters and our families—came to accept my mother’s absence, no matter how big a void was left when we could no longer hear her voice, share in laughter and listen to her advice (whether it was appreciated at the time or not). Of course, in a few short years, we would come to be grateful for my mother’s passing for another reason: she would not have to endure the pain of losing not only her dear granddaughter Lauren but also, just two years later, her first grandson, Michael.

  Through the passage of time and a gentle easing of pain that the changing of every calendar is meant to bring, my sisters and I were able, thankfully, to bear witness to the fact that there is always hope for happiness: in 2016, my father found companionship and joy with the “girl next door,” a woman three years his senior who literally lives in an adjacent suite in the retirement home he entered two years after Mom’s passing. In his way, as he always has, Dad showed us that life does indeed go on. And all of his daughters are quite honestly thrilled for him. After all, who doesn’t deserve happiness, especially after the enormous loss of his lifelong partner, the girl he’d known since she was a child accused of stealing his xylophone? (A charge she always denied, by the way.)

  So you see what I mean when I said earlier that I was fortunate for so long to be in that group of those who had never gone through a loss and pain that forever scars you. My grandparents and my own dear mother had gone before, and we had cried over the loss of special pets, of course, as nearly everyone who enters adulthood has. But again, these were the kinds of losses that one can come to terms with, the kind that are expected and prepared for and endured.

  Let me make myself very clear here: I am not for a moment saying that there’s something wrong with you if you lost a parent and didn’t recover from it in a year or two or even ten. We all deal with loss and grief so very differently, and no two people handle it the same. Frequently in the time since Lauren’s passing, Rob and I have wondered how we are doing and whether we might even be living with something that’s been named “complicated grief.” Fortunately, there’s a scale that exists—a test, if you will—that allows people to get a sense of whether what they’re going through is to be expected at this point in their recovery from the loss of a loved one. Having answered the Weill Cornell questionnaire (easily found online by searching “grief intensity scale”) about longing for the loved one, inability to function in daily chores and so on, Rob and I were both somewhat relieved to see affirmation of what we both believed: we were—and are—coming through our grieving at a healthy pace. I took some comfort in feeling that we’re moving along, Rob and I, in the right direction. So far.

  There was a scene in a TV show we saw last year that summed up how we feel about our lives now. There had been an awful car wreck in which a long piece of metal rebar came loose from the load of a truck when it rear-ended the car ahead of it. That rebar became a potentially deadly projectile, shooting forward and piercing the headrest, as well as the driver’s skull, from back to front. As a paramedic, a friend of the hapless victim, calmed him before transporting him to the hospital, he exclaimed that the man—having survived what should have been a deadly crash but with this horrific injury of having a bar through his head—was the “luckiest unlucky son of a bitch” he’d ever met. That’s kind of how Rob and I feel every day: we’re blessed in so very many ways and are trying to live happy and fulfilled lives. But there’s no escaping that, every day, we’re just lucky to have survived our wounds.

  Because of the outpouring of kindness and support from radio station listeners, and the same compassion that still shows up on Facebook or in emails in reaction to my daily journal, I have always felt the arms of a virtual community around our little family as we move forward. But those same social media outlets that helped save Rob and me are having a surprising effect on others who walk in our shoes.

  It’s a dichotomy, really: today, we openly mourn people we’ve never met, a phenomenon that truly became part of the modern grieving conversation with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when people cried openly for days and left fields of flowers and a sea of plush toys at the gates of Buckingham Palace. But at the same time, our social media platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram, are expected to reflect a sunny and optimistic outlook. It’s why so many experts claim that the cheery veneer of posts—so many of which seem only to show life at its happiest—just serve to make those who aren’t sharing that same warmth feel as though they’re missing out, that their real lives simply don’t measure up to those of the people they follow, regardless of whether they are celebrity strangers or the girl next door. It would seem that in an age where everything is on display, few things—especially feelings—are what they would appear. And yet, that’s what is expected of us. The tune from Bye Bye Birdie, “Put on a Happy Face,” could not be more fitting for the twenty-first century, and those of us grieving do not escape the unrealistic expectation that we should grit our teeth and say that everything is just fine, no matter how not fine things really are.

  We are expected to pick up and move on—because, face it, our social media friends certainly have. Nowhere have I seen this situation more poignantly articulated than in a post emailed to me by the website What’s Your Grief. This post cracked my heart wide open.

  Laura Abbruzzese lost her partner of four years in 2016. In a blog entitled “Trust Me As I Grieve,” she writes with piercing honesty about the admonitions and unsolicited advice she’s received from well-meaning friends about openly sharing her grief on social media. Boy, you sure feel her pain here, and I admire her for such a stunning piece of honesty (and thank her for letting me share this with you):

  I recently passed the 14-month mark of losing the man that I love. I feel very strongly that I have done well and have made the best choices that I could during this time. I am proud of my resiliency. I have made a strong effort to live my life and stay positive. This essay is about the misunderstanding of grief by people who have not experienced this kind of significant loss, yet offer advice about moving on with life after death.

  I know it is done with love and the desire to see me live out the rest of my life without this heavy burden of loss and tragedy. I already know that this burden will always be with me—nothing will ever change that. But I have to tell you something else. Something important. Here it is: you cannot create a road map to a place you have never traveled. There is no road map for my journey and I am figuring it out as I go. All I ask is that the people in my life trust that I am doing everything I can to live my life and go forward without my favorite person.

  If you have never experienced the sudden and tragic loss of someone you love, I am afraid it is not your place to tell me when it’s time to move on. A little more than a year after his death, being told by some of my dearest friends that it is time to stop grieving nearly destroyed me with anger and sadness. They asked, “When are you going to take his belongings out of the apartment?” They said, “Stop posting memories about him on social media!” They said other things like, “don’t let it define you,” “you are not getting any younger,” and “maybe it’s time to stop being sad.” Okay, point taken. However, one thing I have learned through trial and error is that it is n
ot possible to just stop the grieving process. Still, as a favor to my friends, I can continue to travel this road alone inside my head where you cannot see it or feel the discomfort it may bring. I understand how you may not be ready to appreciate the window of experience I am offering you.

  I guess you are right, not everyone needs to know how much it sucked last weekend to go through the closet and put his most worn clothing into a plastic bag for donation. And I still have more closets and storage spaces to go though. I cried for every shirt and every pair of jeans I folded and placed into a bag. I smelled each shirt to see if it still had his scent. I found one that had a faint scent of his cologne. I kept that shirt along with all my favorites and put them in a storage bag to keep. I labored over which ones to keep and which ones to donate. But point taken, I will no longer share this kind of experience publicly so as not to make anyone else uncomfortable.

  In my own social media life, I’ve pulled way back from blogging or posting on Twitter or Facebook about the immensity of pain that some days bring. I will generally only open up about what’s tugging at my heart on the days that have significant weight in our lives; days where people might forgive me for, as one (later apologetic) journal reader called it, “wallowing” in the memories. Imagine using my own blog on my own website to express my raw emotions at any given time! It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, really, despite the fear it strikes in my heart that someone like that reader would rap my knuckles for being so honest.