Loss found me
again and again.

My Story

Loss found me

again and again.

I didn't plan to become someone who helps women walk through grief. Grief found me first.

It came on a Father's Day weekend in 2003, on the coast of Oregon — the kind of place that should feel like peace. A boat accident. My father, gone. For three days my body was in shock — I cried, and cried, and yearned for his return. I hadn't lived in the same town for years, but I could always rely on his phone calls. His voice of comfort. Nothing will replace that feeling — of the one who knows you completely being torn from your life. I lost myself that day.

There was no social media back then. I had no one to reach out to. No best friend. Just friends I'd met along the way. I had no one to share my deepest pain — no one to sit with me. I still feel it in my body to this day. I'm still afraid of water. I'm healing, just like you.

That season taught me something I wasn't ready to learn: no one was coming to save me. But it also taught me something else — God would meet me exactly where I was. I would hike and talk to Him. Drive and talk. Lay in bed and talk. When you have no one, you reach for the only One you know will listen. And when you finally feel like you can breathe again, you begin to heal.

In 2005, I lost my father-in-law to colon cancer. Then in 2008, my mother had a massive stroke. I watched her fight for five years — five years of loving her from a different side of who she used to be — before she passed in 2013. And then in 2022, I lost my mother-in-law — a remarkable woman who had survived breast cancer twenty-five years earlier, only to be taken by dementia. She lived strong to the end, at home in the small cabin my husband built. Two mothers. Two different kinds of goodbye.

In 2012, I lost Starr — my best friend. The kind of friend who knows your whole heart. She was taken by autoimmune disease. Then Nicole, my college friend — she fought breast cancer once and won. The second time, she didn't. She left in 2016. That same year, I lost Linda, a longtime family friend, also to breast cancer. And then Trudi — an old high school friend I had reconnected with because of her cancer. Again someone I wasn't ready to say goodbye to, in 2021.

Loss after loss after loss. And every single time, I knew what "no more phone calls" sounded like, felt like. And I still wasn't ready.

But here's what I know about walking alone through hard things: it creates you. It defines you. It changes you. The strength I've gained from walking through grief without anyone to sit with me — no one knows it fully. Not even the people closest to me. But I carry it. And I've turned it into something.

Today, when I close my eyes and ask myself who I see — I see who I have become. Strength. Passion. Forgiveness. Truth. Peace. Becoming. The Lord does not waste a single moment of pain. He redeems it all.

I created Elizabeth Nelson CO because I needed someone to sit with me — and no one was there. I don't want that to be your story. There is a life worth living on the other side of loss. It takes getting up and showing up for yourself. And I will walk every step of it with you.

I'm still healing, just like you. And that's exactly why I'm here.