“I’m just gonna rip the band aid off and have the boyfriend chat with everyone and how this happened,” Ellidy Pullin declared in a tell-all episode of her LiSTNR podcast Darling, Shine!
“I’m actually really so f***ing happy in my life right now, loving the chapter that I’m in, I’m really enjoying it.”
It’s been five and a half years since Ellidy lost her partner Alex “Chumpy” Pullin – a world champion Australian snowboarder who died aged 32 after suffering a shallow-water blackout while spearfishing at Palm Beach, Qld.
In July 2020 Ellidy found herself thrust into the spotlight as she raced against time to have the baby she and Chumpy had longed for before he passed away.
Her courageous fight to retrieve his sperm after he died made global headlines, and when she finally welcomed a baby girl, Minnie Alex, 15 months after the tragedy it seemed like life had come full circle.
Now, in her emotional podcast episode, Ellidy revealed she has finally found love again – with all the complicated feelings of guilt that brings.
“Chumpy passed away five years ago. Grief’s absolutely f***ed,” Ellidy candidly explained on the podcast.
“Of course I love Chumpy, I still love him so much. I’ll never not love him. I realised your heart can grow because I had a baby. Your heart grows and it grows and grows. I just never really imagined what my next relationship would look like [or] who that person would be. But I just didn’t really think it was going to be like this, and it just really took me by surprise.”
Ellidy, 33, explained that her new partner is called Brock – and she and the 31-year-old have known each other for a few years after meeting at a golf day. She is friends with his sisters.
“What I started noticing in my life, he [Brock] just slots in so easily and he already basically knows everyone,” she explained.
“He’s grown up on the Gold Coast…I’ve known him and his family forever [and he] just slots in really easily. I don’t ever have to babysit him…He’s very mature, very emotionally aware. Nothing’s hard with him.
“The whole Minnie and him thing had already happened,” the mum went on.
“They already knew each other. That was really natural and organic the way that she literally begs me every day, where’s Broccoli [Brock’s nickname]? Is he coming over tonight? She’s obsessed with him.”
Talking more about finding love again after Chumpy’s loss, Ellidy explained, “You just cannot compare the way that I am falling in love with Brock right now, and I’m so happy I’m in a whole different stage of my life to when I was that person that was falling in love with Chump….
“What I’m saying is you can’t compare,” she said. “And I feel like everything’s just different and beautiful and always going to be different because I’m a different person.
“I’m like, 15 years older now [compared to when Ellidy met Chumpy]. I feel guilty saying it, but I’m just so happy right now, and I’m really enjoying the feelings and the emotions and like, fully falling in love with Brock and having this new love.”
Reflecting more on feelings of guilt, Ellidy continued, “I feel guilty saying that because, obviously, there was so many times where I just thought it would just be Chump and I forever.
“It would have been, but he passed away…,” she explained. “I’m young, I’m never going to be alone forever. I didn’t make a rash decision. I sat on this for pretty much a whole year, and I’m really stoked with where I am with him right now. It’s f***ing epic.”
