One volunteer digging through piles of flood debris covering Kerr County, Texas, knows exactly how the families who lost their loved ones feel … because he experienced the same thing.

On Memorial Day weekend in 2015, historic flooding swept across much of Texas. It claimed the lives of Jonathan McComb’s wife and two young children.

“In an instant it was on us, and there was nothing you could do and no way out,” McComb told NBC Dallas-Forth Worth a year after the tragedy.

Now, ten years after McComb lost his family, he is trying to help others find theirs.

“I think it’s good for people to see that there’s hope, through tragedy,” he told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth this week. “That life can go on, and I’m here to help do whatever I can for those people. Because they’re going through the worst part of their lives right now, and I did that. I know exactly how they feel.”

McComb has been volunteering with Texas Search and Rescue, or TEXAR, a nonprofit first responder organization headquartered in Austin, Texas. He encourages families who have been touched by this tragedy to lean on their memories and their faith.

“Hold onto that because they can’t take that away from you,” he said.

McComb held onto his own family’s memories. When NBC Dallas-Fort Worth spoke with him a year after the flood changed his life, his children’s drawings and play table were still set up; the kids’ book bags still hung from hooks in the mudroom of the family’s home in Corpus Christi.

“They were all incredibly unique and beautiful and I miss them,” McComb said of his wife and kids in 2016.

The McComb family spent their last day together barbecuing with friends. That night, the Blanco River, which is just east of Kerr County, swelled 28 feet in 90 minutes. The McComb’s vacation home was pulled from its foundation and floated down the river.

“When we hit the bridge, it took the whole second layer off. It was an awful, awful sound,” McComb said.

After being separated from his wife and children in the water, McComb almost gave up completely, he told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.

“I’d been under long enough and I said, ‘I’m going home, I know what happened to everybody else and I just, you know, I’m too tired. I have nothing left in me,’ so I just went limp underwater,” he shared with the broadcast outlet.

After hitting a hard object underwater, McComb felt a surge of energy and swam to shore, where a bystander called an ambulance. His wife and son weren’t as lucky, and the body of his daughter Leighton has never been found.

“There was always hope, but I knew the second that I wasn’t with them, they were gone,” he told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.

McComb found some degree of peace when Leighton appeared to him in a dream.

“I said, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘We’re OK. We got picked up by a man on the river and it was Jesus,’” McComb recalled to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. “That was huge for me, hearing that.”