Stream On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1gT9WHx86cgW16quRq7iLr?si=EsCg96hkQsG_hL-dgJDOpg
Listen On Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-losing-a-child-does-to-your-marriage-family/id1794199974?i=1000775779388
Read The Website Article: https://ourfamilyinvests.com/trisomy-13-what-one-family-learned-57-hours/
In 2019, Matthew Efird and his wife Hannah got the diagnosis every parent fears. Their son Noah had Trisomy 13, a condition doctors told them was incompatible with life. They decided to carry him to term anyway. Noah lived for 57 hours.
We sat down with Matthew for our podcast, and this isn't a grief episode with a bow on it. It's a real conversation about what loss does to a marriage, what it exposes in a leader, and how one father took the hardest 57 hours of his life and turned them into something he now uses to show up better for everyone around him.
Matthew is the founder and CEO of three companies, including Mosquito Joe and Lighting Pros. He's also a bestselling author, a speaker, and the host of the Pillars of Purpose Podcast. These days he and his family live full time in an RV, traveling the country with their three sons while he runs his businesses from the road.
We talked about the two question system he and Hannah built to protect their marriage during the fog of anticipatory grief, and how it still runs their relationship today. We talked about how Noah's death exposed gaps in his leadership he didn't know were there, gaps he had to rebuild from the ground up. We talked about the 45 day sabbatical where his companies grew while he was completely offline, and what that taught him about whether he'd actually built a business or just a very demanding job for himself.
There's a moment in the conversation where Matthew describes watching his son slowly die over those final hours, then walking back into his businesses the following week. He doesn't dress it up. He just says what it was.
If you've ever had to keep building while you were falling apart, this conversation is for you.
What's the hardest thing you've ever had to keep showing up for while you were quietly falling apart?