Grieving Binbrook family finds solace in bat swing

There were plenty of tears and even more cheers when Nicole Murphy revealed the gender of her yet-tobe-born baby.

It’s the kind of event that wouldn’t always garner so much attention, but this was not your everyday gender reveal.

It was an emotional night for the Murphy family and the entire community of Binbrook as the baby’s gender was revealed Sunday. For two months the community has been grieving the loss of Murphy’s husband, Mark Murphy.

On May 18, Mark was involved in a head-on collision on Highway 6 near Glancaster Road that proved fatal. Mark was a longtime baseball fan and the couple had planned to reveal their baby’s gender using a smoke-filled baseball. The plan was for Mark to hit the ball, revealing either blue or pink smoke.

“My husband was a really big baseball fan and we had seen Kevin Pillar from the Toronto Blue Jays do something similar, so I said to him that it would be a really cool idea,” Murphy said. “He was totally on board to do it. When he had his accident, I wasn’t going to do it anymore but my daughter really wanted to do it.”

In his place was the couple’s eldest daughter, Charlee. She hit a ball filled with smoke off a tee. When she did, the colour was pink, symbolizing that the baby would be a girl. She will be their fourth daughter.

“She really loved how many people came out, but she was disappointed that the ball was pink,” Murphy said with a laugh. “She wanted a brother.”

Because Mark did not have life insurance, family friends and community members set up a GoFundMe page and online auction to help the family, which is why it was so important for the Murphy family to share the event with the community.

“It was really amazing,” Murphy said. “The community has been incredible throughout my whole situation here. They have been so supportive. When we did decide to go ahead and do this Charlee asked if we could have all of Binbrook come ... Who better to share this experience with than the community that took care of us?”