Mourning Dove Counseling

Gary and Elvira Delaplane entered marriage with profoundly different backgrounds, personalities, and expectations. Over time, those differences became sources of conflict as well as opportunities for growth. Their journey through marital crisis, renewed faith, and devastating loss taught them that healing is possible—even when a marriage, a family, or an individual cannot yet see a way forward.

​

Gary grew up on a family farm in Logansport, Indiana. After earning a degree in chemical engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, he began a career with DuPont that eventually brought him to Kansas City.

 

Elvira was raised in a large, close-knit Italian family in New York. After attending Tusculum College and spending a year in Southern California, she became a flight attendant with Trans World Airlines. Her work eventually brought her to Kansas City as well.

 

Gary and Elvira met on a blind date in the summer of 1977. Their connection was immediate, and five months later they married on New Year’s Eve. Their first son, Aaron, was born in 1979, followed by their second son, Nathan, in 1981.

 

Over the next fifteen years, the demands of Gary’s career required the family to relocate frequently. Each move meant leaving behind friends, schools, communities, and familiar routines. By the time the family arrived in Atlanta in 1996, they had endured three moves in four years and were physically and emotionally exhausted.

 

The qualities Gary and Elvira had once found attractive in each other gradually became sources of tension. Their marriage and family life were increasingly marked by conflict, financial strain, and disconnection. Aaron and Nathan were also struggling with repeated moves and the loss of friendships and stability. By the end of 1997, the family had reached a breaking point.

 

Gary and Elvira each recognized that the way they were living and relating to one another was no longer working. After years of self-reliance and spiritual disconnection, they asked God to take control of their lives, their marriage, and their family. That act of surrender became the beginning of a difficult but transformative journey toward greater intimacy, trust, and understanding.

 

Over the next several years, they became involved in a group study of marital intimacy and learned to rely more fully on God and one another. Their relationships with Aaron and Nathan also began to heal. The family spent meaningful time together, and the brothers renewed the closeness they had shared earlier in life. In retrospect, it seemed that the family had turned a corner.

 

Then everything was tragically upended.

 

Nathan had continued to experience occasional but intense periods of depression. In 2000, while Gary and Elvira were away attending the wedding of a close friend, they received the devastating news that Nathan had died by suicide.

 

His death created a fundamental break between the life the family had known and the life that followed. Recovery was slow and, in many respects, continues to this day. Gary, Elvira, and Aaron were sustained by their faith and by the care of friends and family. With time, they began to build a new life in which grief and love could exist together.

 

This experience gave Gary and Elvira a deeply personal understanding of bereavement, including the distinct and often isolating grief that follows the loss of a child to suicide. They understand that healing does not mean forgetting, “moving on,” or returning to the person one was before a loss. It means gradually learning to carry both the memory of the person who died and the life that remains.

 

Nathan’s death also changed the way Gary and Elvira understood their purpose. Gary increasingly felt that his career at DuPont no longer reflected the work to which he was being called. With Elvira’s encouragement, he retired after 28 years with the company. Elvira, too, began to feel drawn away from her work in the school system and toward a different form of service.

 

After simplifying their lives and downsizing their home, Gary and Elvira founded Mourning Dove Ministries in 2001. Gary returned to school and earned a master’s degree in counseling in 2005, while Elvira supported the family through her work as a teaching assistant.

 

In 2006, they stepped away from their other professional commitments to devote themselves fully to coaching and counseling. Their experiences with marital conflict, spiritual renewal, parenting, grief, and reconciliation continue to shape the care they offer today.

Gary and Elvira do not claim to have escaped pain or to possess easy answers. They know what it is like to feel alone, overwhelmed, disconnected from a spouse, or uncertain whether healing is possible. They also understand that a person can need support whether trying to restore a marriage, navigate a divorce, grieve a death, or face a difficult season individually.

 

Their experiences allow them to meet people not only with professional knowledge but also with humility, compassion, and the understanding that comes from having endured suffering themselves. They believe that people do not have to face their deepest struggles alone—and that conflict, grief, and loss do not have to be the final chapters of anyone’s story.