Mourning Dove
Counseling

In many ways, the marriage of Gary and Elvira Delaplane is a testimony to life's inherent humor. Their childhoods and the families in which they grew up were poles apart.  As a result, their world views and the expectations they had for their relationship, and eventually their family, were fundamentally different.  As with many married couples, this only became apparent in a negative sense after years of marriage.  But, as they have learned and come to appreciate over the past three decades, the differences in their backgrounds and personalities have challenged them, helped to complement their strengths and weaknesses, and brought healing into both of their lives.  

 

Gary was the first-born son in a family that would eventually include two brothers and a sister. His childhood was spent in the small town of Logansport, Indiana on the family farm.  He grew up in the house that his grandfather, Harvey Delaplane, had been raised and his father had been born.  His father, George, provided for the family by working in the local railroad industry while his mother, Phyllis, took care of the children at home.  The rural upbringing played a significant role in setting Gary’s values and life perspective.

 

At the age of 14, Gary decided to pursue a career in chemical engineering.  After completing high school, Gary attended Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1973.  College, for Gary, was seen as a way out of the small town in which he had been raised and into the broader world.  A week after graduating, he relocated to a northern suburb of Nashville, TN where he began working for the DuPont Company.

 

In late 1976, an unexpected change in assignments resulted in Gary’s transfer to Kansas City, MO. Moving from a manufacturing environment into a sales and marketing position challenged Gary while also encouraging and requiring a great deal of personal growth.  Gary's feelings were defined largely by the sense of possibility and excitement that resulted from his daily exposure to new people, places, and things.  His meeting Elvira Viggiano on a blind date set up by a friend fell easily in line with the overall progress and growth that defined his life at this time.   

 

Elvira, on the other hand, was born in New York City's bustling Mid-town section of Manhattan in a hospital that her grandfather, Donato Viggiano, had co-founded.  She was the second daughter - and part of the second generation - of a large Italian family that also included a younger brother and sister and a very large and closely-knit extended family.  Initially living in the large home of her grandparents in Brooklyn, her family soon moved into subsidized housing.  During this time, her father, Ugo Viggiano, founded a manufacturing business with the money her mother, Anne, had saved over the course of 20 years while working at the telephone company of New York; a position she started at the age of 12, much to her disappointment in having to leave school and enter the work force. 

 

Eventually, the family moved into a three-story home in Great Neck, NY, where Elvira attended parochial schools.  When she was 11 years old, the family moved to Middletown, NJ to shorten her father’s commute to his factory in Elizabeth, NJ.  In 1966, she graduated from Middletown High School and shortly thereafter joined her older sister, Julie, at Tusculum College in Greeneville, TN.  After college, Elvira spent a year in southern California before joining Trans World Airlines as a flight attendant.  After working out of JFK airport in New York for two years, Elvira transferred to Kansas City, where she bought a small home.

 

Gary and Elvira met in the summer of 1977.  The chemistry they felt together was immediate, which contributed to their decision to elope and get married after dating one another for five months.  The wedding took place on New Year’s Eve.  Now living together in the condominium that Gary had purchased, they continued in their jobs with DuPont and TWA.  On May 19th, 1979, their first son, Aaron, was born.  A few months later the family was transferred to Buffalo, NY where their second son, Nathan, was born on May 14th, 1981. 

 

The next fifteen years were defined by near-constant relocations due to the changing nature of Gary's career and DuPont's ever-evolving corporate structure.  The Delaplane's were transferred to and from Wilmington, DE, North Little Rock, AR, Seaford, DE, Dalton, GA and Atlanta, GA.  Elvira had continued working with TWA airlines until 1986, when the airline was bought and sold off.  After a period of readjustment, she began teaching and mentoring in the public school districts.  By the time the family arrived in Atlanta in the summer of 1996 they had survived three moves in four years and all were physically and emotionally exhausted.  The Delaplane's home life was punctuated with frequent arguments and permeated with an increasing sense of estrangement from one another.     

 

Gary and Elvira's marriage and their relationship with their two boys seemed to be a constant roller coaster of conflict and struggles.  Their finances were shaky due to a lawsuit with their home builder and years of “playing religion” had taken its toll.  Both boys were dealing as best they could with the many losses of friends and having to continually adapt to new environments and cultures.  The differences that Gary and Elvira had found so attractive in each other while dating they now saw as character defects.  The traits and behaviors of each acted as a live wire to the emotional insecurities of the other.  In many ways, the family had reached a breaking point. 

 

By the end of 1997, the situation had brought both Gary and Elvira to their knees. Individually, each decided that their lives, as they were, were not working and that there had to be a better way to do things and relate to one another.  After years of self-sufficiency and a sense of spiritual disconnection, both Gary and Elvira asked God to take control of their lives, their finances, their marriage, and their family. That submission represented the beginning of what would become a new and often times challenging journey towards greater intimacy, trust, and understanding.      

 

Over the next three years, Gary and Elvira changed churches, became involved in a group study on marriage intimacy, and began to truly rely on God.  Despite the ongoing issues with the lawsuit, they once again tithed and made a constant effort to turn over their finances to God.  Gary and Elvira knew that a significant change had occurred in their lives when they found themselves praying for the builder and the attorneys involved in the lawsuit, which, at this point, had dragged on for years.  In 1997, Gary and Nathan took a vacation together in Paris while Elvira spent time with Aaron at the Grand Canyon.

 

Nathan and Aaron also reconnected during this time with one another.  Though they had always been close, they had also dealt with the many changes by isolating, both within the family and from one another.  In 1998, Nathan moved in with Aaron for a period of time in Colorado, where Aaron was then attending college.  Prior to this, Gary and Elvira, along with Nathan, had visited Aaron and together the family had spent a week together in which they enjoyed one another's company and reconnected.  Later, Aaron and Nathan travelled cross-country with one another to Northern California, where Aaron had secured a summer internship in-between semesters at school.  It was clear, in retrospect, that the family had turned a corner.  

 

In the midst of this transformation, everything was tragically upended.  This may seem a strange departure from what was just stated about the family doing well.  The truth is that things had improved, but the struggle that both boys felt in terms of making their way in life remained as did Nathan's struggle with occasional, yet intense, bouts of depression.  While vacationing in Delaware to attend the wedding of a dear friend, the Delaplanes received a call on Gary’s cell phone from one of Nathan’s best friends. 

 

The friend, in shock, simply said “Mr. Delaplane, this is Paul. Nathan hung himself and he’s dead.” With those few words uttered by Nathan's best friend - words that Paul had said nearly verbatim earlier to Aaron, who was then a student at UGA and received the call in his apartment where he had been studying.  Gary, Elvira, and Aaron suddenly found themselves in a state of denial, dread, and disassociation from the present moment, the pain of which their minds were hopelessly unequipped to handle.

 

The road to recovery from this event was slow and, in many respects, continues to this day.  In coping with this fundamental break from their previous lives, the Delaplane's were comforted by the attention and concern of friends and family.  Over time, as acceptance has set in and new memories have been made, the residual pain of Nathan's death has lessened and given way to an increasingly less transient sense of peace. 

 

In 2001, Gary began to see his job at DuPont as a way of simply obtaining a paycheck and less in line with the capacity for healing that God had made possible for both him and Elvira through the tragedy of Nathan's death.  By the next summer, Gary applied for early retirement from DuPont and, with Elvira’s encouragement and support, ended his 28-year career, which, though chosen, nonetheless created a palpable loss of structure in both their lives.  At the same time, Elvira found working in the school system increasingly tiring and less meaningful than it had been for her previously.    

 

The road to recovery from this event was slow and, in many respects, continues to this day.  In coping with this fundamental break from their previous lives, the Delaplane's were comforted by the attention and concern of friends and family.  Over time, as acceptance has set in and new memories have been made, the residual pain of Nathan's death has lessened and given way to an increasingly less transient sense of peace. 

 

In 2001, Gary began to see his job at DuPont as a way of simply obtaining a paycheck and less in line with the capacity for healing that God had made possible for both him and Elvira through the tragedy of Nathan's death.  By the next summer, Gary applied for early retirement from DuPont and, with Elvira’s encouragement and support, ended his 28-year career, which, though chosen, nonetheless created a palpable loss of structure in both their lives.  At the same time, Elvira found working in the school system increasingly tiring and less meaningful than it had been for her previously.    

 

After simplifying their lifestyle and down-sizing their home, Gary and Elvira started Mourning Dove Ministries in the fall of 2001. By the following spring, the couple discussed the possibility of Gary returning to school to obtain a Master’s Degree in counseling. After deciding together that Gary would return to school, the couple also decided that, for the time being, Elvira would continue to provide income and insurance for the family by working as a teaching assistant until Gary completed the degree in May 2005.

 

The next step of faith came in 2006 when the Delaplanes walked away from all of their other activities to put full-time effort into the coaching and counseling ministry. At around the same time, Aaron moved to New York City, where he has over the course of seven years managed to carve out a comfortable, yet exciting, life for himself.  Gary and Elvira feel that God has honored their decision to commit their lives to helping others who are going through experiences similar to their own in so many unexpected ways. Without knowing God’s entire plan, Gary and Elvira are passionate about doing all that God has in mind to heal marriages and to create new legacies for the children of those marriages. The story will continue…