'I Feel Pretty Lucky:' Downers Grove Mom Reflects On 2021 Tornado

Downers Grove IL

18 June, 2022

8:44 AM

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DOWNERS GROVE, IL — It's been one year since a tornado destroyed Trish Axelson's Downers Grove home, but she still can't bring herself to fully watch the 15-second video her sons recorded as the trio huddled in their dark bathroom and listened as the storm tore apart their home. "You hear me pull them to me," Axelson, said of the moment in the video where she clung to her sons, Evan, 15, and Sam, 12, bracing for the worst. "They're almost as big as me, but I want to be able to protect them." The next sound Axelson hears in the video is the "clangs and bangs" that came as the June 20, 2021, tornado tore the roof off her home, uprooted trees and demolished Evan's bedroom. That's the point where Axelson has to stop watching. via Trish Axelson Related: Downers Grove Storm Victim 'Felt The Whole House Shake' At one point, Axelson and her sons opened the bathroom door to find rainwater pouring from the sky directly into the basement, two levels down. via Trish Axelson The EF-3 tornado spanned three blocks and ripped through three miles of DuPage County, hospitalizing 11 people, damaging hundreds of homes and claiming the life of an unborn baby. "It was like I was floating" In the immediate aftermath of the tornado, the family "lived out of garbage bags" that had been hastily stuffed with the belongings they could salvage, Axelson told Patch last June. Eventually, they found a rental house in Western Springs that became their home until mid-March of 2022. In total, Axelson and her sons were displaced from their home for nine months. "It was like I was floating for a few weeks because I don't really remember a lot of it," Axelson said of the remainder of the summer of 2021. "As the weeks and the months went past, there was a lot of crying. I felt sad for my kids mostly." Far from their Downers Grove neighborhood, Evan and Sam were unable to ride their bikes with their friends as they had done in the summer months. Axelson said, "A summer was taken from them, which sounds ridiculous, but people had it so much worse." When school started again, she initially had to juggle driving both her sons to their old school bus stop in Downers Grove and getting to her job by 7:30 a.m. "I wanted them to have as close of a normal experience as they could," she told Patch. Eventually, the vice principal of Downers Grove South coordinated with administrators at Lakeview Junior High to arrange bus service to take Evan and Sam to and from school and extracurricular activities. "The support from staff and neighbors and the mom friends in the neighborhood has been amazing," Axelson said. Coming Back Home Axelson and her family drove to Downers Grove "every day or every other day" to watch as construction workers, plumbers, electricians and eventually, painters, worked to rebuild the gutted home. Finally, in March 2022, Trish and her sons were able to return to their house. Coming back "wasn't like a normal move," she said. The family had to buy new furniture and coordinate with movers and insurance companies to get their old belongings back into their home. Some things arrived piecemeal and other items were still covered with insulation, wood chips and dust that the tornado had blown throughout the home. "It made me appreciate things more" Axelson told Patch she feels for other victims of the June 20, 2021 tornado and is grateful things weren't worse for her and her sons. She still has nightmares about the storm and said she's unsure when —or if— that feeling of fear will ever go away. Evan and Sam track every approaching storm on their phones. "It's crazy how something we never even worried about in the past can affect us so much right now," Axelson said. Still, there have been unexpected glimmers of silver lining in the wake of the tornado. At work, Axelson helps relocate people who have been displaced due to emergency situations. She said her tornado experience helps her connect with clients who are going through the same sort of trauma. In the year that has passed since Axelson's world got turned upside down, much of her perspective on life has altered. "It's slowed me down, and it's made me not care about things I spent too much time caring about before," Axelson said. "It makes me appreciate things more." Also on Patch: Skeleton Key Still 'Humbled' By Acts Of Kindness 1 Year After Tornado