NEWS RELEASE
CREATIVE AGING BOOKS AND IDEAS
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Creative Aging Books and Ideas is hosting a free virtual Book Club event on April 28, 2 p.m. with guest Erin Davis.
Cece Scott Photo and Writing Services and Jen Tindall of Art Your Service will be hosting and chatting with Erin Davis, CHFI morning’s long-time morning host and author of Mourning Has Broken: Love, Loss and Reclaiming Joy, (HarperCollins), a story of Erin and her husband Rob’s journey of recovery after losing their only and beloved child, 24-year-old daughter Lauren, who died in her sleep of unknown causes in May of 2015, one day after celebrating her first Mother’s Day.
Erin Davis is a name that is well known to the legions of fans who listened to her for decades on the CHFI 98.1 morning show. These listeners served their families breakfast, got their kids ready for school, and rushed off to work, all the while tuned into 98.1 in order to be lifted up and entertained by Erin’s wry wit and her intriguing good-humoured take on the world.
Davis had many co-hosts along the way including Don Daynard, Bob Magee, Darren B. Lamb, Erin and Darren in the Morning, and Mike Cooper. Viewers also got to see Erin on W Network TV, as well as on her nightly talk show on Rogers Television.
Ever popular and always the most upbeat person in the room, in the spring of 2015, Davis was in Jamaica hosting a listeners' contest trip when she got a phone call that would forever reshape her and her husband Rob Whitehead’s world.
The couple’s only child, Lauren, then 24 and the mother of 7-month-old Colin, had gone to bed on the night of her very first Mother’s Day, but had not woken up the next morning.
It is every parent's worst nightmare, an unimaginable tragedy. In fact, it is just as unimaginable to process what the four-hour flight back to Toronto would have felt like, a tumultuous 240 minutes of turbulence in the soul that no amount of empathy or solace could assuage.
And so, after two funerals, one in Toronto and one in Ottawa, where Lauren lived and worked as a news reader at Ottawa’s CFRA radio station, Erin and Rob began the long journey through their loss, a team unified in their determination to both survive and reclaim joy in their lives.
It was a journey that not only required them to claw their own way through their grief, but also one that demanded their strength in helping and supporting Lauren’s husband Phil, and their infant grandson, Colin.
Inspiring and unflinching, in Mourning Has Broken, Erin and Rob sift through intimate memories and family stories, ones which they tell themselves in order to survive. Along the way, they become fluent in the language of loss, hope, grief and vulnerability.
Canadian singer and songwriter, Jann Arden, wrote the forward to Mourning Has Broken, and in it she states: “What Erin Davis has managed to articulate with her gut-wrenching and brilliantly inspiring memoir dumbfounds me. Page after page is filled with such grace and insight and openness that quite often I was wiping a tear off my cheek or a laugh from the corner of my mouth.”
Register for the free Zoom link for this event here.
Davis will read from her book and then chat with both the hosts and you, the audience.
“The best connection you can make with someone is to share and have them realize that they are not alone, that there are others going through the same thing,” says Davis.
The duo will be hosting another stellar book event next month.
At the next virtual event, on Thursday, May 26 at 2 p.m., Cecil Foster will be the featured speaker.
Cecil Foster is a leading author, academic, journalist, and public intellectual. His work speaks about the challenges that Black people have encountered historically in Canada in their efforts to achieve respect and recognition for their contribution to what is now a multicultural Canada.
He highlights their fight for social justice and human dignity. In particular, Foster addresses the issues of immigration in his critical discussions on who is a Canadian in the ever-evolving social narrative toward a genuine multicultural Canada.
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