Healing a BROKEN HEART
She lost the love of her life, Alex ‘Chumpy’ Pullin, in a freak accident two years ago. But a decision to undergo a post-mortem sperm retrieval and start a family without him has helped to heal Ellidy Pullin’s heart
Looking back on that dreadful day in July 2020, Ellidy Pullin believes she can pinpoint the exact eerie moment when her heart shattered. It was the moment before she even found out her partner, world champion and Olympic snowboarder Alex “Chumpy” Pullin, had died in a freak skin diving mishap near their southern Gold Coast home.
She was walking home from the park with their dog Rummi, as Chumpy was spearfishing on the artificial reef at Palm Beach, when she felt a sudden stabbing pain in her chest.
“The sharpness stopped me in my tracks, knocking the wind out of me and almost forcing me to my knees,” she recalls in her powerful and moving new memoir, Heartstrong, co-written with journalist Alley Pascoe.
“I clenched my heart and Rummi looked up at me as if to say, ‘What the hell, Mum! Are you okay?’
“After 30 seconds, I was. I brushed the pain off as anxiety – maybe I needed more sleep, or some vitamins or a massage – and kept walking.
“Looking back, I think that was the moment Chumpy left this earth – the moment my heart shattered.”
Was it a chilling premonition? Who knows. But there was no uncertainty about the moment when her heart soared again – bittersweet though it was.
It was the moment, 15 months after Chumpy’s death, that Ellidy first laid eyes on her newborn daughter.
Their miracle daughter.
Theirs was a Big Love, Ellidy and Chumpy’s; a love as vast as the sea that would cruelly snatch him from her. It was their mutual love of the ocean that brought them together.
They met on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where Ellidy grew up and where Chumpy, a keen surfer and diver when he wasn’t carving up the slopes, was based between travelling the world competing in snowboarding tournaments.
Her parents – Peter Vlug, a police sergeant turned actor and model, and Karen, also a cop who became a seamstress and fashion designer – split after a tumultuous relationship when Ellidy was one and her brother Dave was three.
Ellidy and Dave went to live with their mum at Narrabeen, spending every second weekend at their dad’s at nearby Warriewood.
“The separation was bound to happen,” Ellidy writes. “They were so different, it’s hard to see how they were together in the first place. Chump would often say to me, ‘Wow I just can’t believe those two ever dated’.”
Weekends spent with their father – “the Crocodile Dundee of the Northern Beaches” – were some of the happiest of Ellidy’s childhood.
“My dad taught me and all my friends how to surf when we were young – every Saturday was
surf safari day for us as Dad found the best waves to practise on,’’ she remembers.
While Pete’s parenting approach was laissezfaire, Ellidy says her mother was “the disciplinarian” and had to be, raising two kids while working full time as a police officer. “Mum is our rock,” she says.
“She is our consistent, calm centre. While Dad was always fun, and living in the moment, Mum was working hard keeping an eye on the bigger picture of caring for us day after day.”
While her own fractured family “weren’t a super close-knit bunch”, Chumpy’s was.
He and younger sister Emma grew up in Mansfield in the Victorian Alps, where their parents, childhood sweethearts Chris and Sally, ran a ski shop in winter. In summer, they’d sail their yacht. In 1987, they sailed to New Zealand with baby Chumpy in Sally’s belly.
Chumpy’s birth, writes Chris in one of three deeply poignant chapters in Heartstrong, was “the happiest moment of my life”.
“I couldn’t feel the ground. I wasn’t walking, I was floating towards them (Sally and Chumpy). The floor beneath me was air.”
Chris recalls an idyllic family life bringing up Chumpy and Emma, who became “inseparable” best friends and bandmates. Sally had taught Chumpy to play the guitar when he was eight, and he passed the music gift on to his sister.
“Emma never knew a world without Chumpy. He was her world,” Chris writes.
Chumpy became hooked on snowboarding in 1995 during a family holiday to Lake Tahoe in the US. Skiing went by the wayside as he took up the-then new sport with gusto, travelling alone to America at 14 to compete.
He joined the Race Club at Mt Buller, a training program for the next generation of winter Olympians, and was soon dominating junior and open competitions in Australia and overseas. In 2011, when Chumpy became Australia’s first world snowboarding champion, Chris sent him a message quoting their favourite line from the movie Babe: “That’ll do, Chump; that’ll do.”
“When people ask me what I’m most proud of about Chumpy, it’s not the world championship trophies, the sponsorship deals or industry awards that come to mind; it’s the way he made people feel,” Chris writes.
“Chumpy was an extremely talented individual, but he was also just a lovely human being. When he had a conversation with someone, he made them feel like they were the only person in the room.’’
It was a sliding doors moment, the night Ellidy and Chumpy met at the 21st birthday of her friend, pro surfer Laura Enever. Ellidy was heartbroken after the end of her first relationship and Chumpy was meant to be on a plane but had changed his flight.
Ellidy knew Chumpy from the edge of her friendship circle as “the mysterious snowboarder who travelled a lot and would randomly play music at our parties when he was in town”.
They’d passed each other on the stairs at Warriewood Beach a couple of days before the party, as she was running and he was checking the surf.
“Chumpy looked beautiful that day at the beach, I swear his skin glowed and his eyes sparkled,” Ellidy recalls in the book.
“Meanwhile, I was red and sweaty from running – and a bit giddy from seeing him.
I wanted to say more than hi to him, but in that moment, I couldn’t form complete sentences. Later, Chumpy would tell me he had wanted to talk to me too – and I would feel giddy all over again.”
Chumpy arrived at the party in a denim jumpsuit that Ellidy remembers made him look “like a full-on mechanic, but hot”.
“Chumpy had an electric energy about him. People were drawn to him, just like I had been on the beach and how I was at the party,” she writes.
“It’s not something that’s easy to pinpoint; it’s the way he walked, his effortlessness, his very presence. I wasn’t the only one who saw it, everyone who met him felt the same. Chumpy was larger than life; I always told him he was beyond this world, he radiated at a higher level like he was from a different dimension to the rest of us. When you looked into his eyes, there was a depth that was other-worldly.”
In typical rom-com fashion, she says, their eyes kept meeting across the room and it wasn’t long before their bodies met on the dance floor.
“Later, my friends would tell me they watched me on the dance floor and saw me fall in love right in front of them.
“From our first kiss on that dance floor, it was on. It felt like we were two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fitted together perfectly. We just clicked. Everything felt right, even the date of our first official meeting was perfect: 10/11/12. I have the date engraved on the gold pendant that my friends had made for me, which I wear around my neck every day. It has an imprint of Chumpy’s fingerprint on the other side.”
I pray and I pray, but I can’t go back in time and never let Chumpy out of my arms
A fan of the hit TV series Vikings, Chumpy would psyche up for races listening to the show’s theme song, and got a tattoo of an axe on his ribs with the motto “all in” written in Viking runes.
“That was the way Chumpy lived his life: he went all in,” Ellidy writes.
“He didn’t half-arse anything. That was certainly the case when it came to our relationship: from day one, he was all in.”
The couple moved in together, sharing an apartment he’d bought in Dee Why.
While she didn’t often get the chance to see him compete, she watched on proudly as he carried the flag for Australia at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia (he also represented Australia at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada, and the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea).
The following year, they enjoyed a memorable sailing trip with Chumpy’s family in New Caledonia – “a sunny blur of colourful coral, fresh fish on the barbecue, sunset rums and guitar strumming”.
“It gave me such an insight into what Chumpy’s childhood would have been like, and a lot of respect for the unconventional way his parents raised him.”
In 2017, the year Chumpy turned 30, they moved to the Gold Coast and bought their dream home at Palm Beach. Chumpy “filled the house with music, just like his parents had when he was a kid”. Two soon became three when they got their beloved kelpie, Rummi.
“I know now that Chumpy chose Rummi for me. She’s the most intuitive dog and she has so much of Chump in her: his caring nature, his obsession with the beach, his pure joy,” Ellidy writes.
“Getting Rummi marked a whole new era … Our life was getting better and better every single day. Sometimes we’d just look at each other and say, ‘How good is this?’ We had the house, the dog and we were trying for the baby. There was so much to live for, so much good stuff to come, so many things to get excited about.” Then, on July 8, 2020, Ellidy’s world caved in. It was a winter’s day, she writes in Heartstrong, “but nobody told the sun that”.
“It beat down on the perfectly still sea. The ocean was like glass, and it called to Chumpy. He excitedly got ready to go spearfishing while I soaked up the morning sunshine from our bed.”
Ellidy recalls that Chumpy almost went surfing that day but, speargun in hand, instead decided to head to Palm Beach reef to indulge his “latest obsession” while she walked the dog.
“Chumpy was meticulous, and he approached spearfishing with the same dedication he put into everything else he did,” she writes.
“He’d practise meditating in our lap pool and hold his breath with my brother at the kitchen table while I sat bored for three or so minutes. Every time Chumpy went for a dive, I’d say, ‘Love you, watch out for sharks.’ He wasn’t afraid of sharks.”
He’d mentioned this only a week earlier when his parents were visiting him and Ellidy on the Gold Coast.
Sharks weren’t the worry, he said – he saw them all the time at Palm Beach – the hidden danger was shallow water blackouts, when a diver blacks out at the end of a breath-hold dive.
“I was never afraid for Chumpy when he was in the water because I knew how long he could hold his breath for, I knew how careful he was, and I knew how fit he was,” Ellidy says.
“Chumpy was a professional athlete, for god’s sake; he knew the limits of his body like the freckles on the back of his hands.
“He grew up in the water and he loved nothing more than being in it. The ocean gave him life, and I didn’t think for a second that it would take that same life away.”
They were leaving home at the same time that fateful morning when, amid confusion over who was going to close the garage door after Chumpy reversed out his van, they shared what would be their final hug.
Melting into Chumpy one last time, Ellidy told him: “Alright, have fun. See you in a bit.”
Every time she replays that morning in her mind, Ellidy says, it never gets any clearer.
“I search and I search, but I never find new details hidden in the background,” she says.
“I pray and I pray, but I can’t go back in time and never let Chumpy out of my arms.”
There is, however, one bolt of clarity in the fogginess of her memories. That eerie moment when she was walking home from the park with Rummi, and the pain hit her in the chest like a lightning bolt.
She was home with her mum – Ellidy was cutting the tassels from a floor rug – when the neighbour came to the front door, her voice “dripping with worry”. She’d just seen a Facebook post about someone being pulled from the water at Palm Beach.
“Five minutes later, it hit me. Holy shit, it was Chump,” Ellidy recalls.
From then on, it was a blur of shock and numb grief. The frantic drive with her mum to the beach. The cop asking her if her partner had tattoos. The look in his eyes that confirmed the worst.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is bullshit. We’re busy today. Chump has a meeting this afternoon and I’ve got acupuncture. He knows that. We’ve got things to do. This is really inconvenient. Chumpy needs to stop whatever this nonsense is and get on with the day.”
Ellidy rang Chumpy’s parents but could only
He grew up in the water … the ocean gave him life, and I didn’t think for a second that it would take that same life away
bring herself to tell them that “something bad has happened … I think he’s hurt”.
Her brother Dave – who was like a brother to Chumpy – arrived at the surf club where the police were. Ellidy fell to the floor with Dave, shaking in his arms. She couldn’t bring herself to see Chumpy, and Dave and Karen went downstairs.
“Mum told me later – much later – that they’d both said goodbye to Chumpy in the back of the ambulance,” she says.
“Mum hugged him and kissed him and told him how much we all loved him.”
Chumpy’s death certificate listed the cause of death as drowning, but Ellidy says: “I like to think that he simply went to sleep under the water. He didn’t struggle or fight for air or choke with panic; he simply closed his eyes and didn’t open them again.”
Ellidy reminds herself that Chumpy died doing something that he loved in the place he loved most: the ocean. “It’s cold comfort, but it’s something.”
Ellidy says she always knew she’d be a mother. On their first holiday together, to Hawaii in 2013, she and Chumpy had discussed kids and even wrote out a list of baby names.
Before Chumpy died, they were trying for a child, only to be told Ellidy had a low egg count. The doctor suggested they try for a few more months and consider IVF. It was Dave, who Ellidy simply calls “Bro”, who first mentioned the words “sperm retrieval”.
He broached it gently with her on the night of Chumpy’s death, as she sat with her head between her knees in the backyard. Her friends, Laura Enever, and Chloe Fisher had floated the idea. Laura had another friend who had also lost her partner when she was 30, and wished she’d retrieved his sperm to give her son a sibling.
“I’d never heard of post-mortem sperm retrieval and had no idea of the process or legalities, but I just knew,” Ellidy writes.
“‘Yes,’ I said to Dave without any hesitation. ‘Do it. That’s what I want. Can you make it happen? Please?’”
In Queensland, sperm retrieval must happen within 36 hours so Dave, Lauren and Chloe hit the phones to find a lawyer and an IVF doctor. Because Ellidy and Chumpy weren’t married, Chris and Sally Pullin had to sign an affidavit supporting the procedure.
The clock was ticking, but the retrieval was successfully performed at the 11th hour by Coast doctor Andrew Davidson.
Ellidy says: “Had Chumpy died on a weekend, when courts and IVF clinics were closed, we
wouldn’t have been able to do it. I like to think Chumpy was helping us.”
Dr Davidson’s nurse later told Ellidy how she had held Chumpy’s hand and talked to him through the procedure.
“The sample was stored at the IVF clinic, and I put the thought of it on a shelf above my grief,” she says.
“It was always in the back of my head, but I didn’t have the space to really think about it in those early days. I was in survival mode, doing what needed to be done in the moment, to just get through the day.”
A month after Chumpy died, Ellidy’s father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
With Rummi beside her, she drove to Sydney to be with Pete, playing Chumpy’s music on repeat as she relived the surfing road trips they’d done together. It was, she says, the loneliest she’d ever felt.
“Dad stared down his fate: he understood that he wasn’t going to survive stage four brain cancer,” she writes.
Before leaving for Sydney, she threw a posthumous 33rd birthday for Chumpy, celebrating like he was still alive. She and her friends printed off photos of his face and wore them as masks. They sang Happy Birthday, screaming, “Happy birthday, Chumppppyyyyy! Where the bloody hell are ya?”
“He wasn’t there to blow out his candles, so we did it for him.”
In December 2020, with her father looking like he would see the New Year, Ellidy decided to return home to the Gold Coast. She also decided it was time to take Chumpy’s sperm off the shelf and try for a baby.
Driving home to the Coast, she passed through Arrawarra near Coffs Harbour – a spot she and Chumpy always stopped at on their trips – and saw the turn-off sign to Minnie Water.
“Everything became clear: I was going to have a baby and if she was a girl, I was going to call her Minnie Alex.”
Minnie Alex Pullin came into the world on October 25 last year. “As she took her first mouthfuls of air, I held her to my chest next to the necklace I wear that’s imprinted with Chumpy’s fingerprint,” Ellidy writes.
“My two loves, close to my heart. Chumpy had been gone for 15 months but there I was, holding our daughter. There’s a strange mix of sadness and strength knowing that I did it on my own. But I also know I wasn’t really alone – Chumpy was with me the whole way.”
Minnie was conceived in Ellidy’s second attempt at IVF after she suffered an agonising miscarriage on New Year’s Eve, 2020.
She wrote to Minnie, aka “Bubba Chump”, before she was born, in her baby book: “You are so lucky, you’ve got the best dad in the whole world. He’s the biggest legend. I will show you everything he is – and was – but he’s not here. And he won’t be here. But you’re so lucky that he’s your dad.”
Much has happened in Ellidy’s life since Chumpy’s death and Minnie’s birth.
She and great mate Chloe launched a hugely popular podcast, Darling, Shine!, where they discuss the agony and ecstasy of womanhood. (Chloe and her husband, Gold Coast-based international DJ Paul Fisher, lost twin sons in a third devastating miscarriage earlier this year).
Ellidy also teamed with another young widow she connected with on Instagram, Londonbased Lotte Bowser, to produce a grief handbook – Now What? A Guide to Navigating Life After Loss – to help other women cope with the loss of their partners.
She turned 30 and changed her name from Vlug to Pullin so Minnie could take it.
Last year, she launched the Chumpy Pullin Foundation to help aspiring snowboarders.
This year, on the second anniversary of Chumpy’s death, she flew to Europe with her mum and Minnie for a well-deserved holiday.
In January this year, Pete Vlug died, aged 68, but not before he got to meet his granddaughter.
“I know within my heart that Dad had been holding on because he wanted to meet Minnie,” Ellidy says.
Before he died, he told her: “I’m not really scared anymore. Chump’s already done it. I’ll just go and hang out with him.”
As her father was slipping away, Ellidy also introduced Minnie to her in-laws. As if the family had not endured enough suffering, Chumpy’s mum, Sally, was diagnosed with cancer, and Ellidy handed Minnie to her in a Sydney hospital bed.
“There were no words. Sally was holding her grandchild, Chumpy’s daughter, his ‘Minnieme’,” Ellidy says.
“When we eventually did speak, it was through tears. Chris and Sally gave me my life’s greatest gift in Chumpy. As if that wasn’t enough, they helped me to have Minnie by giving me their blessing, support and love. They are the salt of the earth.”
As Minnie gets older, Ellidy sees more and more of Chumpy in her.
“She’s so present and aware. Sometimes I’ll see her staring intensely into space, and I’ll think, ‘What are you looking at? Is your dad there?’
“I still catch myself going to call out to Chumpy when Minnie’s doing something cute. I still have entire conversations with him in my mind. He’s still the first person I want to tell when something good or bad happens. Does that feeling ever go away? I hope not.
“Even though he’s not here, Chumpy is still so much a part of Minnie’s life.
“I play his music when I’m feeding her, and in the car, and when she’s having a bath. I take her down to Chumpy’s Reef and we watch the sunset together. I tell her every day how much her dad loves her.
“I know Chumpy would be cut up that his child doesn’t have him in their life, but he would just love that a piece of him is still here, carrying on his name and his legacy,” Ellidy says.
“I know that, because I know Chumpy.”
Heartstrong, by Ellidy Pullin with Alley Pascoe; Hachette Australia; $35. Out on Wednesday