You are not defined
by what you've
lost.

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. There are no words that fit that kind of loss. There is only the silence that follows, and the long, slow process of learning to breathe inside it.

I thought I understood grief then. I didn't know yet that grief had more to teach me.

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 til the end, at home in her 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, and with her went something I hadn't known how to name until it was missing. She used to say, "The best is yet to come." I held onto that. Some days, it was all I had.

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. Two women. One year. The weight of it was staggering.

And then Trudi — my high school friend — lost to pancreatic cancer in 2021.

I have stood at more gravesides than I can count. I have sat in the particular kind of darkness that descends after loss — the kind that doesn't just grieve a person, but begins to grieve yourself. Who am I now? What is my life for?

I fought emotionally, every single day, for years. Anxiety became a companion I hadn't invited. My sense of self quietly unraveled. I looked in the mirror and didn't always recognize the woman looking back.

But here is what I know now, on the other side of all of it: Purpose doesn't abandon you in grief. It waits.

I am Elizabeth Nelson. I am a woman who has loved deeply and lost deeply. A daughter, a friend, a woman of faith who believes that the Lord walks with us through every valley. I created Elizabeth Nelson Co because I know what it is to be in the middle of the grief — desperate for someone who gets it.

You are not defined by what you've lost. You are being shaped by it. And the best — the real best — is still yet to come.