165 | It Is Well (Part One) with Donna Eller

My friend Donna Eller is my guest on the podcast today.  In the first half of this two-part episode, she shares the story of her independent, funny, and faith-filled daughter Julie, who went to Heaven following a fierce battle with cancer in 2015.  But there’s more to her story, as Donna has also experienced the loss of her 8-day-old grandbaby (Julie’s son Noah) as well as her husband Tim more recently.  Though I’d heard Donna’s story when she attended our While We're Waiting Weekend in 2018, it wasn’t until this conversation that I realized the profound impact baby Noah had on their entire family, and how God used his life to prepare them for what was to come.  I believe you’ll be inspired by Julie’s faith journey as read from her own journals by her mom.  Lean in today and be encouraged.

All views expressed by guests on this podcast are theirs alone, and may not represent the Statement of Faith and Statement of Beliefs of the While We're Waiting ministry.

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Transcript

00:00:00 - Jill Sullivan
Hi, Donna. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

00:00:04 - Donna Eller
Thank you so much for having me. I'm just excited to get to share some of this with you.

00:00:10 - Jill Sullivan
Yes. I always enjoy visiting with you, so I have been looking forward to today. So let's start by just giving you an opportunity to tell the listeners a little bit about yourself. Tell us where you're from and what life is like for you there.

00:00:25 - Donna Eller
All right. I live in Missouri City, Texas, which is a suburb of Houston. We have been here for 47 years. We moved here when Julie was six months old. We've lived in the same house, the same neighborhood that entire time.

00:00:43 - Jill Sullivan
Wow.

00:00:43 - Donna Eller
My husband Tim and I have three children. Brad, who is 53, and Steve is 49, and Julie, who went to heaven at the age of 39 years old. I have nine grandchildren. I have one grandson that is in heaven with his mom. Two of my grandchildren are now married. I have five who are in college and two who are in high school. So I've left behind all those little young years where they just were all over you all the time. They all have their own lives these days. I taught school, elementary school. I taught first and second grade for almost 30 years, both in public school and in private school. Right now, I really don't have any big hobbies. Kind of got out of all the things of a lot of sport activities and just don't have anything too specific. I did make a quilt, my very first quilt this last spring for my granddaughter that got married. I had made that out of Tim's shirts, and that was my very first attempt at sewing since many, many years ago. I just really like to spend time with family and do that as much as I can and with friends in my church activities. Tim and I were married for 56 years when he passed away a year and a half ago. And we had a lot of good years together, a lot of good times. So now I'm just learning how to live life again.

00:02:22 - Jill Sullivan
Yes, exactly … 56 years. That's a complete lifetime that you guys lived together! Yeah. That's a blessing. You just don't hear of that so much anymore. And, yeah, I'm thankful that you guys had that time together. So we're here today, really, to talk about your daughter Julie. And I would love for you to take a few minutes and just tell our listeners about her. What was Julie like?

00:02:50 - Donna Eller
Julie was our youngest, and she was our only girl, the one we really didn't plan for, but very thankful to God that he sent her to us.

00:03:02 - Jill Sullivan
Sure.

00:03:02 - Donna Eller
Julie was independent from a very young age. She took care of her own room when she went to school. She took care of her own homework. She didn't need anybody to show her what to do. She just did it. She was self motivated. If she didn't know how to do something, she usually taught herself. She wasn't a crowd follower. She was willing to stand up and speak her mind for things that she thought were right. She was confident in her decisions and the choices that she made. A few of the character traits that I would think about were number one, she was funny. She had a sense of humor, a lot like her dad in some ways, but she could keep you in laughter without even saying a word sometimes. She had a positive outlook on life, very seldom negative. Didn't look at the bad side or the sad side of things. She was loyal to her family and friends, and she loved her God. She spent a lot of time in prayer and study, and she loved being with church friends. She did love to talk, for sure. From an early age, she could sit and talk for hours about anything. Sometimes it was just stories made up, and our family trips could get a little hectic with her chatter that went on. We went on a trip to Colorado at one time when she was in middle school at that time, I guess, and we were in the car for several hours, going from the airport to our cabin. And she never stopped. I mean, she never stopped. Nobody else talked, and she loved to do that. And she connected with people very well. It was easy for her to talk to people. She was in gymnastics from about the age three all the way through high school. She competed in private club and in high school, she was talented, she was creative. Like I said, if she didn't know how to do something, she would learn it. She learned how to do plumbing from going to YouTube, and she would build things, and she'd go to Hobby Lobby and find something she liked, and she'd go home and make it herself. She left all of us something of hers that she created, and that's been a blessing to have around. She majored in graphic design at Abilene Christian University and worked for a couple of years in that field before her first child, Alyssa, was born. She began dating a boy named Ethan Whaley when they were in high school, and they were married after his graduation in 1999. At that point, they moved here to Houston, lived here for about eight years, where we got to see three of our grandchildren born, and then they moved to Tennessee in around 2006, and there the third granddaughter, their third child, was born, and then they moved to Austin in 2011, where they lived until she passed away.

00:06:38 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, you've shared of course, you and I are Facebook friends, and sometimes you'll share videos and pictures and things of Julie, and her personality really comes through in those. And now that I know that she was a gymnast, that explains some of those dancing videos that I've seen you post.

00:06:57 - Donna Eller
Yes. She was always doing something, yeah.

00:07:03 - Jill Sullivan
Just obviously somebody with a lot of personality and just a fun person to be around. So at what point did you realize that something was going on with Julie's health?

00:07:16 - Donna Eller
Well, probably not as early as it started. She tended not to share a lot of those things ... I'll just handle this myself and everything.

00:07:27 - Jill Sullivan
Well, she was a married woman and a mom.

00:07:30 - Donna Eller
She was independent, and she'd been on her own for 10-12 years. Sure. It was in 2010 when it began. They were living in Tennessee at that time, and she had just called me and told me she had been to the doctor, had some tests done, and they had found a lump. And that was kind of the beginning of that battle.

00:07:59 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. So she found a lump and was concerned. So what happened from there?

00:08:06 - Donna Eller
Well, at that point, she dug her heels in and was ready to take on whatever she needed to. They did the test, she ended up having a lump removed. They removed some lymph nodes. It was at that time just stage two cancer in the breast. And when they went into surgery, they did find that there were some areas of lymph nodes that were affected. So they had removed a few of those. She began a treatment of chemo and did that for eight months. And in eight months, she was declared cancer free. And that began her journey of knowing it could come back, but determined to live her life the way that she knew God wanted her to.

00:09:04 - Jill Sullivan
Sure. So how long did that cancer free period last?

00:09:11 - Donna Eller
That was almost four years.

00:09:13 - Jill Sullivan
Wow.

00:09:14 - Donna Eller
And that was in 2010. And then in 2014, just the beginning of her fourth year, that cancer returned. And that was kind of … she went through chemo again, had surgery, had radiation, the whole thing. And this time it became much more aggressive. The diagnosis was more aggressive. It had metastasized into her bone, into her lungs, into her liver, and she had times that she spent with each of those being a real problem. But there came the time that they had finished everything and were getting ready to start a clinical trial, when they found it in her skin. It had metastasized into her skin and her liver and lungs were both beginning to show the effects of it and everything. If I can kind of add a little bit now, a lot of the times I tend to think of no, I want to just go into all the detail about how hard it was and what a journey that she went through and we went through. But knowing Julie, it was kind of I can't do that as much because I really would like to in telling her story, kind of tell how she walked that journey and how the fact that the way she walked it was a real tribute to her faith and how it prepared us for many things coming in the future. So if I can just go back a little bit to the beginning. And really that beginning began even before her cancer diagnosis in 2005. They had a little boy, Noah. It was a perfect pregnancy, perfect birth, everything. Beautiful baby boy with nothing wrong. But within minutes of his delivery, he began having breathing problems and neurological problems and was immediately sent to a NIC unit and he was there for eight days where they did tests and tried everything and he had just lost too much. There had been an incident in the womb before he was born that hindered his breathing, took away the oxygen, and after eight days, Ethan and Julie just walked him into the hands of God and over into heaven. So that incident crushed everyone. Didn't know how we were going to do with that, to have a child, lose a child like that. Yeah. But that really began such a journey to watch what Julie came through during that time. And I want to, in just a minute or so, just read some of the things during her journey from 2005 all the way to 2015.

00:12:50 - Jill Sullivan
Please do.

00:12:51 - Donna Eller
When she went home at that time, we all went through the grief. Julie went through her grief, but she turned so much more to seeking God in how to do that. She wasn't real open with us about it, except she blogged. And that blog was started when Noah was born. It was to keep everybody kind of updated, but that blog became her heart and she shared things that she would never tell you in person. Yeah, but they were things partly in sharing that because so many people were there to help us. We have a book of her blog that has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments from people all over the world.

00:13:47 - Jill Sullivan
Wow.

00:13:47 - Donna Eller
And I think that encouraged her through her blog and through all of those comments that just brought her faith. That brought her faith out.

00:13:58 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah.

00:14:00 - Donna Eller
In March when she was diagnosed, she just immediately started into, as I said, a little bit now, she just went to fight. And her theme then was Fight For Julie. And again, she had people all around her and she only talked of the positive. The days that she had hard, she would kind of lay low a little bit, but never complaining, never turning. Aside from that faith, her sense of humor was always there. She took care of those three little girls. And really the youngest one, who was born just two years before she was diagnosed in 2010, really never got to know her mom without being sick. She knew hospital stays and visits and surgeries and wearing scarves and all those things. But what Julie did seemed to cover that up so much that they remember so much of the good. And through videos that Julie made all the time, which are a treasure to them now and everything. But in 2014, when that returned and struck really hard, she began her fight. She decided to take on a theme of “It Is Well”, based on the song. Bethel's version of it is. Well she got a tattoo that she wrote out in her own words for “It Is Well”. And she ended up making plaques for about 15 different people with those words written on it that she did in the last two days of her life in the hospital. She was determined to get those finished, and so we have those as a memory to her. But then, July the 13th, 2015, she had fought a really hard battle, had gone through many, many things, tried everything, but she left this world and all of that suffering behind, and she walked across into the presence of God. She left behind a legacy of faith and trusting in God for us to hold on to. And I want to just a minute, if it's okay just to share some of her own words through those (Jill: please do). We know and really feel and could see how God was growing Julie ... how he changed her, how he brought her to a place that she knew that he was the only answer for whatever circumstance she faced. When Noah was born and the blog was started, one of the first things that she said, we were all trying to struggle. Why? I know they were, too. But her words said, though we struggle, though we are sad, though we are confused, God is using Noah and our life for good. Just let us glorify him.

00:17:27 - Jill Sullivan
Wow.

00:17:29 - Donna Eller
So she took on that battle and she took on that journey and really never turned aside from that. In 2010, some of the things that she said was, I want his will to be done in my life. I am in his hands. What I can't understand, he can. What I can't do, he can. What I can't even see possible, he can. And when I can't, he will. And she took that from a reading she did in Lamentations about God's faithfulness, never ending, never going aside again. In 2014, she continued, even when it came back at such an aggressive state, and we knew that the end might be a lot sooner than we had hoped for, she said, God is good. I believe that. I may be face down to the throne every day, begging, boldly, asking for Him to take this away, but with all my heart, I will believe that he is good, he is love, he is in control. And she would face it with a smile. I will keep my smile to bless those around me. It is to show my hope and my faith, even when my confidence in the future here on Earth has gone. Moving into 2015, that next year. It began in December. Her lungs began to fill with fluid she had to have it drained regularly to be able to breathe. Lesions were showing up on her liver much more. Her liver began to swell, and knowing that time was getting short, she took each of the girls on a trip and spent a week with each one of them for those last days. And she begins to become a little bit more public, preparing for where she was going. And she would say, do not let hardship and pain drive you from your Maker. Do not doubt his love for me and my family. I don't understand his way, but I trust him. And I trust his way. I will press into Him to reveal this path to me, trusting Him every step of the way. And as summer got here, the days got harder. She could hardly breathe. Pain became unbearable. She even shared a little bit more, but never doubting what God was doing. Hope, she said. Nothing can take that away. I can, and I will, have it up until my last breath. A belief that God can do anything, accepting this life and this journey that has been laid out for me since the beginning of time, faithfully accepting the grace that God gives me to make it through the next curve and to let that be enough. And one of the last couple of things that she said just days before she joined Jesus in heaven. My heart is heavy. It aches for healing, but my soul is covered in the love of my Savior. I have never been more thankful for the gift of salvation than now looking into the eyes of death, believing that all I had to do was say yes and Jesus did the rest. And that when that day comes, despite the grieving, there will be rejoicing. I will be home with my Lord and Savior. Oh, I don't understand it at all, but my soul pushes me on to believe it every day. And her very last thoughts are called “A Peace”. She wrote this in her closet one day life is looking shorter, but my peace is greater. I want that same thing for you, because I want you to know. I want you to be thankful for the peace that surrounds me. I want that peace to penetrate you, to give you hope. And when the time comes that life looks different and it is definitely here, he will still be my presence, my peace. I will stand and praise Him and for you through the unthinkable, be filled with his love. Know that his love is good and he will always be enough. And on a Monday morning, July 13, 2015, at 07:13 a.m., she went home and Ethan posted:  “know that she lived life with noble character, a smile on her face, and a heart full of joy”. And her memorial service was filled with hundreds and hundreds of people, all wearing white T shirts that had the words “It Is Well” written across their shirts. And the song, It Is Well pouring into the hearts of all.

00:23:13 - Jill Sullivan
Wow. I'm just almost speechless. What a gift that you have. All of these writings of hers and you know, right where her heart was, you know where her faith was, that is so much confidence. She knew that even though she was not getting earthly healing, that she was looking right into heavenly healing. And that is such a gift. And the other thing that really strikes me about your story is the role that Noah played in it. We have these parents … I'm going to get choked up. And that never happens when I record these episodes. But it's happening. We have these moms and dads who come to our retreats that have lost infants, some of them stillborn, some of them live just a few days, maybe eight days like Noah did. And we always talk about how, to the world, that doesn't seem like a very complete life. That doesn't seem like very much. But look at what a profound impact Noah had on Julie in just those eight days and what a purpose that God had for him in her life and in your life. Because it sounds like from what you're saying, that Noah's life was really kind of what put her on that trajectory of trusting the Lord, really knowing what that trust.

00:24:44 - Donna Eller
Yes. She would say, I mean, we know, we raised her to know that, but I don't know that she ever realized what that was doing for her until she was diagnosed with cancer. And realizing I can walk this walk because I have God with me.

00:25:05 - Jill Sullivan
Right. And the suffering that she went through in the loss of Noah prepared her for what was to come. Wow.

00:25:13 - Donna Eller
I know it's always hard to try to answer, why would God take a child? We were blessed. We had Julie for 39 years.

00:25:23 - Jill Sullivan
Yes.

00:25:24 - Donna Eller
And I grieve for parents that lose them so young. And the question is, why would he do that? And it's real easy to turn the other way and say, sure, it's not fair, but he does show us, he does tell us to wait and we find out how those things are a part of your life. And I would have never believed that back then. You couldn't have convinced me that there would be a purpose for him being here. Yeah, but having been through Julie and Tim, there is a purpose.

00:26:01 - Jill Sullivan
There was a purpose, absolutely. And can you imagine that reunion that she had with Noah when she got to know that little boy that she never really got to know. Wow, what a sweet reunion. And to know that you will get to see them both again one day. And Tim, of course. And Tim. Wow. Lucky Tim. He's with both of them.

00:26:26 - Donna Eller
I'd already told him I was mad at him when he was diagnosed and everything. I said, that's not fair. You're going to get to be with them. But I'm so glad. I mean, that's a beautiful picture and it is a very comforting picture too.

00:26:46 - Jill Sullivan
I've just been enthralled by your story and the things that Julie wrote. I have not heard that in such detail. Before, I knew your story, I knew a little bit about what happened with Julie, but I didn't know that much detail and what a gift. So thank you for sharing all of that.

00:27:04 - Donna Eller
You're welcome.

00:27:05 - Jill Sullivan
So we know that Julie's faith was strong throughout her whole cancer journey. What about your own? How did you deal with all those ups and downs of that cancer journey? Because I've been there too as a mom.

00:27:19 - Donna Eller
Yeah, it's hard to answer because the part of me that goes back to the story I just told is really the source of what that faith was and became. I mean, for sure, there were times that I would just tell God, I can't do this. I don't want to do this. She needs to be here to watch her kids grow up. I want all the things we want for our children. But it never was a point of me trying to say, God's unfair or really, why did you do this to me? That didn't seem to be a big part of it. It was so much that watching how she and Ethan walked gave us, it just poured over into us what that faith should be and what it should look like. And the thought always was Tim and I both said this so many times. If Julie could do what she did through a loss of Noah and through her own battle up to the last days, practically of her life, how can we do anything else? How could we turn aside from that?

00:28:33 - Jill Sullivan
Sure.

00:28:34 - Donna Eller
And we definitely had friends and church praying for us and with us and never leaving us, and they're still there. There are so many people who remember Julie's walk and they sing the song. It is well at church. And I have numerous people that will stop and say, I thought of Julie when we sang that song. So we've had so much support in that. And, you know, God showed up. He gives you strength when you don't think you can have it.

00:29:07 - Jill Sullivan
Yes.

00:29:07 - Donna Eller
So I had faith, but I know that faith strengthened and grew and got deeper. And I know, too, that it got deeper for a reason of what I was going to have to face later.

00:29:24 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, absolutely. As a grandparent, you were grieving not just the loss of your daughter, but I'm sure there was some grief for your grandchildren, too. How did you deal with that? I know it's ongoing. How have you dealt with that?

00:29:42 - Donna Eller
We had at that time, there were five grandchildren. Alyssa was two. That was Julie's first daughter. And she never, and this was Julie, she was not going to let you forget Noah, even though that was hard on some members of the family to have him constantly being brought up. But Noah was going to, I mean, Alyssa was going to know who Noah was.

00:30:08 - Jill Sullivan
Sure.

00:30:08 - Donna Eller
And so with those grandchildren, they learned that it was just Noah had just moved to a different house. They were told Jesus had been sitting beside Noah those eight days in the hospital. Jesus decided to take him home to God. And they talked about heaven and rainbows, and it was just a part of them that they I guess being young, that was kind of a story that they could wrap their mind around somebody that loves you that much and that he wasn't gone, right? He had just moved to someplace that we're all going to get to. I mean, they all miss that. But being young, kids would act differently. And it became fairly common for them to talk about Noah and to remember him. Every year, they all sent balloons off on his birthday, had a cake for his birthday, and we had this year he would have been 18 and we had a graduation party for him.

00:31:27 - Jill Sullivan
Oh, wow.

00:31:28 - Donna Eller
Just made a cake for graduation and he would have graduated high school. So they've always been involved in his memory and everything. When Julie died, they kind of carried that over. They were older at that time, teenagers, most of them, and it was that she was with Noah and with God, and I think that helped a lot in their grief. The hardest part was probably watching the three girls. They were eleven and seven and five when Julie went to heaven. They kind of had their own way of dealing with it at that time. Alyssa was eleven. Emotions ranged from anger to just not wanting to deal with it, not wanting to talk about it. One of the other ones turned to the computer. It was in those first days with Ethan, dealing with what he had to deal with, that's all he could do. She turned to that became where she would sink her head. And she still does that a lot. She still does that a lot. The youngest one, you could see her sadness in how she just clung to other women, friends of Julie, or relatives or teachers at school. She just needed to be around someone that could kind of give a mother figure and everything. So watching all of that those first several years was very hard. I wanted to kind of step in and be Julie for them, and yet I knew that wasn't my place. I couldn't do that. Ethan was very open, as they had always been with the girls. He let them talk freely about her, ask questions, whatever they needed to. And as I said before, they had videos. So he put those videos on the computer so they could go to that anytime they wanted to, to see her, hear her talk, hear her. I mean, Alyssa is a junior at Texas Tech. The other two are in high school, a junior and a sophomore. Ethan remarried, which is a whole nother story about how God works. It's a beautiful family now that we are still a part of.

00:34:10 - Jill Sullivan
Wonderful.

00:34:11 - Donna Eller
Ethan is my son. I call him my son in law. I call Katie, his wife, my daughter in law. And they are very attentive to us. They have you know, I feel again, God's done what God does, and he takes care of things.

00:34:33 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah.

00:34:34 - Donna Eller
I have to say that part of the grieving, as far as the grandkids are concerned, is grieving what they won't have, especially at this age, graduations and marriage and children. But again, I can't go there. I can't go too far there. I can think of it and wish it was different, but I can't go there and stay.

00:34:56 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah. Yeah. Once again. It's interesting to me the role that little Noah played in preparing them for the grief that they were going to experience later in life and for, you know, not even realizing at the time that including him and talking about him and talking about heaven and all of that was preparing her girls for something that she couldn't have knew.

00:35:24 - Donna Eller
You know, I have a painting that a friend at church did. She's an artist, and she told me she wanted to paint a picture for me. This was after Noah died, and so we talked a lot about what might be included in that. And I just told her, I said, I want the girls in it. At that time, there was only Alyssa. I want the representation of the grandchildren in that. I want balloons in it. I want rainbows in it. And she painted a beautiful picture of two children standing on the shore across a lake, and over that water was a beautiful rainbow. And floating up to that rainbow were balloons, because one of my grandsons said that what he thought, because we always sent balloons, is that those balloons must have all gotten together with Noah and made a rainbow because of all of the colors of it.

00:36:28 - Jill Sullivan
Sweet.

00:36:28 - Donna Eller
And so she painted that picture. And as I've looked at it over the years, what I see even more in it, because in the background, she painted a landscaping that you could just barely see the mountains and things in the background. But to me, that's heaven. That's where it's all going. That's where we're all going. And we just look from this side and wait for that day.

00:36:53 - Jill Sullivan
Yeah, that's right. I love that.  What a special gift.