When Joe lost his wife, Debbie, to breast cancer in July 2012, he was devastated. “The earth moved under my feet. As a family, we didn’t recognise the full extent of the devastation until years later,” he says. “It’s not something you can comprehend when you’re going through it.” At the time, he was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his two children, aged nine and 12. To cope with the pain and difficulties of his new life, he turned to blogging. “I would sit at my computer and words would just come out. I have no idea why I started, I just needed an outlet and it felt cathartic.”
Not long after he began writing, his blog was recommended to Kim, whose husband, Jack, had recently died from a brain tumour. “I was experiencing exactly the same, bringing up two children and juggling the demands at work,” she says. Grief was a big topic on the blog, but Joe also touched on other issues, like coping with milestones, such as the children’s first day back at school. “That was the post that really struck me. When the kids returned to school, I’d see these forms where my husband was listed alongside me. It was really hard.”
