Nat Lauzon in The Beat’s studio in … I don’t know, a while back whenever I took this photo.

It’s an unfortunate reality in the radio business that while your arrival is announced with great fanfare, your departure is often met with a silent scrubbing of any evidence of your existence.

Such was the fate of Nat Lauzon, who announced on Thursday that her time at the radio station had come to an end. “We’ve parted ways,” she wrote in a Facebook post. (She clarifies in a video that the decision to leave wasn’t hers.)

Lauzon first joined the station as the weekend afternoon announcer shortly after its launch in 2011, after a long career at competitor Mix 96/Virgin Radio. She said at the time the weekend-only schedule fit with her desire to spend more of her time working on other pursuits, mainly her voiceover business.

All together, she’s been on the air in Montreal for 27 years. Tack on another half-decade if you include her time in Toronto and her home town of Timmins, Ont.

“I’m honestly not sure what happens from here. I guess I’ll just take a beat (yeah, I heard it) and sort through some life stuff,” she writes.

It’s hard to understate how much of an institution Lauzon is on Montreal radio, becoming a veteran at Mix 96 and then The Beat. (Cat Spencer, Donna Saker and Claudia Marques are the only remaining announcers at The Beat who have been there since the beginning.)

It’s not because she was the biggest name, or had the most prestigious time slot (though she has very fond memories of hosting the morning show at Mix 96 with Andre Maisonneuve). Instead, she distinguished herself mainly through her personality, being friendly without sounding fake, laughing at poop jokes like the rest of them, and using her experience behind the microphone to feel comfortable enough that she sounds more like a friend chatting with you than she does an announcer performing a break between songs.

If you want to keep hearing her voice, she recently launched a podcast called Feedbag, talking about midlife relationships and other random stuff. She also chatted with Matt Cundill on his Sound Off podcast about her career. Or you can go back and read a story I wrote about her progressive hearing loss in 2019.

But if you look at The Beat’s website or social media, you won’t see any mention of her name. Not even a note to say thank you. The Beat’s schedule just has a hole at 6-9am on weekends, and the pages for Lauzon and her show now give 404 error messages.

That’s a shame. She deserves more. A lot of people in the industry do.