For about two years after our Joe died, I was doing grief work with an online zoom group. It was a group made of people of various losses and with grievers from around the world. I was in zoom groups up to four days a week for a majority of that time. It really helped me learn to deal with my grief in a healthier way and not to be ashamed of missing my Joe so much. Monday’s zoom meeting was a break out session where everyone was separated out into different grief groups. I was in the “room” that had parents who had lost children ages 26-35 years of age when they died. I saw a lot of the same people in that Monday group. A couple of the women started talking outside of the zoom group and wanted to get to know other moms better. I call the group the Nueve Amigas…the nine friends. We meet via zoom every other Tuesday for an hour or so and catch up with each other. I finally let my subscription to the big grief group expire when I was traveling so much over the summer. We are from all over the U.S. and one in Canada. Four of us were nurses at some point. Seven of the nine lost sons. Three of those sons were named Joseph. I am the only one with 3 kids…everyone else had 2. In September, Beth flew in from Massachusetts and Katy flew in from Arizona. They stayed here for four days and Rich and I showed them around Glacier National Park and the rest of the Flathead Valley. Beth and Katy discovered they really enjoyed huckleberry ice cream! They were two former nurses and helped me go through a lot of our medical supplies on our medical response vehicle at the fire department. The three of us drove to western Washington and took a ferry to Victoria, BC, where we met up with Barb at her house. Veronica flew up from Iowa to meet us. While staying the night in Washington, I went and visited one of my best friends from our time in Norway. It had been 14 years since we had seen each other but the time melted away easily as being with good friends does. In Canada, the five of us laughed, cried, talked into the night, toured around Victoria, and honored our kids by telling stories about them. It was nice because we didn’t ever have to really explain anything. We were all coming into the week with the same awful reality of losing a child. There is a photo towards the end with the five of us on a pier by the water. We released dried flowers into the water. We wanted a photo of the five of us and so we asked a gentleman who was reading. He seemed a little put out at first. I went over to him and explained that we were all strangers who had just met in person. We were all coping with the death of one of our children. He took our photo and then shared that he had just lost his wife last year and was new to the area. We all gave him hugs. It was such a sweet moment. We got to talking later that those hugs were probably something he didn’t get often now that his wife was gone. We are hoping to have all nine of us get together in 2025. The plans are being made. Here are some photos of that time with my gal pals.

Our kids….lit up by candlelight every night. Every single one of them were gone too soon.