In the last minutes of this week’s interview, today’s guest, Ellie, wanted to share one last thing with listeners as she looked back on her 25-year journey of grief after losing her two young children. She compared grief to the ocean. She said that sometimes, the ocean is clear and calm and beautiful while at other times storms come and it feels tumultuous. I find this an incredibly fitting comparison as I sit here writing this while a catastrophic hurricane, Hurricane Milton, is landing in Florida.

At this time yesterday, the ocean likely looked beautiful and inviting along Florida’s beaches while today it is destroying property and lives. That is the same feeling that we get in our grief. Sometimes, life seems relatively calm, but at other times, our grief feels like it has shredded us completely. We think we will never be able to recover. We feel like the devastation is complete and that there is no hope.

Twenty-five years ago, Ellie lost her two young children, Alex and Adri, in an explosion and fire. Ellie says that in some ways, this 25th year has been the worst, not because life is harder for her now than it was all those years ago, but because she had expectations that she would feel ‘better’ by now. When Ellie and her husband lost their only two children, I imagine that the grief felt like Hurricane Milton. It was huge and overpowering, and it felt like their entire world had been destroyed and no good could ever enter their lives again.

We know, however, that hurricanes don’t last forever. In mere days, Hurricane Milton will leave Florida, but as the ocean calms, damage will still be evident. If you look closely, scars will be evident for years, possibly even decades. This, too is the case for Ellie. From the outside, her family looks complete with her husband and four children. Many people do not know that there should be six and that the two oldest are forever missing. Ellie still notices the scars and feels the daily pain of her missing children. Some days, the grief feels like soft lapping waves on the beach, but at other times, she can still feel the hurricane-force winds.