For many Torontonians, for almost three decades, the comforting reassurances of Erin Davis started the workday. A beacon of good humour and sound advice, she co-hosted CHFI-FM’s ratings-rich morning broadcast as a calming voice before the big city’s challenges ramped up in full.And, radio being as intimate as it is, that made her part of the family. Not only did listeners know Davis better than some of their own relatives, they often knew her relatives better than their own.There was her always supportive husband Rob Whitehead, a longtime local radio producer, and their effervescent daughter Lauren, who virtually grew up on the air. From the announcement of Davis’s pregnancy, through Lauren’s birth — listeners could sometimes hear the baby mewling when Davis broadcast from home — and annual Christmas Eve appearances, the broadcaster shared her daughter’s life. An ad in the Star heralded Lauren’s arrival in 1991 as CHFI’s “newest listener.”The Davis family was an open book; no personal anecdote seemed off limits. That candour made people care. So it reverberated well beyond Erin and Rob when, in May of 2015, they were blindsided by devastating news.While on set in Jamaica during an annual trip with listeners, Rob received a call from a relative at home. Lauren was dead. Just 24 and seemingly in perfect health, the new mom had arisen in the late evening hours to feed her infant son; drifting off to sleep at the end of Mother’s Day, she’d heard the 7-month-old’s hungry cries from the nursery.The next morning, her husband found Lauren’s body partly off their bed. She had died in her sleep. An autopsy did not definitively explain the cause of death.One possibility, Davis writes in a new book being released Tuesday, was an undiagnosed congenital heart disorder; another was that medication had reacted negatively with her heart rate or rhythm. A third theory was that chronic mening ...
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