Not long after Claytie died, maybe within a month or so, I joined the first of several Widow support groups online. It was really late one night, when sleep was absolutely not happening for me, and I was desperately sad and lonely. I found myself typing all kinds of things into the search bar, and along with a whole host of pages from America, there were a couple over here.

I joined this one to start with, and felt almost embarrassed that I did. I didn’t want to be someone who would need something like this, but I also felt incredibly alone in what I was going through and thought ‘well, why not?!’ It was one of the very best things that I could have done.

This first group was an anchor. There were people that I could talk to day and night, who absolutely got where I was coming from. They supported me in all kinds of ways and I was there for them too. I have made some incredible friendships through that group. People who have become super important in my world and who I would not have found and got to know otherwise.

Over the weekend, it was announced by the page moderator, that it was being closed down completely. The announcement came out of the blue and has been a bit of a shock to a whole lot of people. There is no option for anyone else to take over the running of the page, it will just disappear. I understand why the owner of the page wants to step out of it. Her loss happened more than 10years ago and her life has moved forward, it is a lot of work to run the page and to hold other people’s grief, but there are more than 2000 members who will lose the connection that they have with that group. It feels like a pretty significant blow in a whole lot of ways.

I’m incredibly grateful to have had access to this group for four years and I wish the moderators all kinds of luck with whatever comes next for them. I hope that the other members find alternative groups to join and that everyone keeps getting the support that they need. There are a whole lot of other groups for people to join – and probably ones that are a whole lot better in so many ways (First Light is one I talk about often) but it still feels weird to me that I will no longer have that connection with the first group I joined, the group that helped to drag me out of some very dark days. The group that my boys jokingly called ‘the echo chamber of misery’.