How #widow/ers Chat
Channel Evolved
By Anne
It was Christmas Day of 1992 and my husband was on the couch in the living room. That's where his bed was because he was too weak to walk up steps. I had made a Christmas dinner, mainly for my Tony, but he was so lethargic and so weak that he couldn't eat anything. I was just so beside myself that Christmas Day and that evening after a Christmas dinner which wasn't eaten, I went out on my back porch and cried my eyes out. I never let Tony see how depressed I was so I usually did my crying outside where he couldn't see me.

I came back inside and cleaned up the kitchen and came into my computer room and logged onto Prodigy. I perused the bulletin boards and came upon a topic marked other and I logged onto it mainly to see what topics were there. I saw a topic called Widow/ers and I logged on and read the notes that were posted there. I didn't write anything because I wasn't a widow at that time, and I logged onto a few other topics and then logged off for the night.

Tony passed away six weeks later on February 1st of 1993 and my first note to other widows and widowers on the Prodigy network was posted around 11pm. I only wrote about six lines explaining that my husband had died that evening and when I logged back onto Prodigy the next morning was amazed to see the welcomes I got from so many of the people on widow/ers. They made me feel welcome so I stayed. About a month later a lady named Elaine (later to be called Magnolia) joined us. I loved the way she wrote so I sent her an email and she wrote me the nicest reply the very same day.

Over the months, we continued our emails to each other and then Prodigy made an announcement saying that the bulletin boards would be timed and they would no longer be free. That's when most of us who were there decided to join a network called GEnie and it was great in the beginning because the price was right and there was no charge for emails. We set up an email 'loop' for all the prodigy refugees and since I was only into widowhood for about 3 months at the time, the looped letters were my salvation. I couldn't sleep and I would read all the letters during the wee hours of the night.

Eventually, most of the people either dropped off the loop or they wrote privately, and Magnolia bought a motor home and decided to do a little traveling. We lost touch for awhile, but then I got an email from Michael Goshorn telling me that a new loop had been set up. I wrote back to him the same night asking him if he had seen Magnolia during her travels and he wrote back saying that she was on the new loop. Well, I was just so thrilled and so I joined the new GEnie widow/er loop and once again I was able to write to Magnolia. She was traveling all over the country in her motorhome and would somehow manage to log on to the GEnie chat line using a payphone.

Sometime in the winter of 1995 the GEnie network was sold to a corporation named Novelle and I had a letter in my mailbox stating that the GEnie rates would now be $18.95 a month effective immediately. I wrote a short note to all the people who were on my email list and told them I was unsubscribing from GEnie and would write to them from the internet. I had just subscribed to an ISP called Cybergate and had just found the irc. I still kept in touch with Magnolia via email and I told her how wonderful the internet was and proceeded to tell her about the internet relay chat and how I could 'talk' to people anywhere in the world.

Well, wouldn't you know that a few months later while I was on the IRC I had a private message waiting and it was from Magnolia. I was logged onto the IRC but I was away nuking some coffee because it was very early in the morning ... around 6am. I can't tell you the elation that I felt when I saw that private message and she told me that she wanted to surprise me. It certainly was a surprise cause I just about fell off my computer chair (I didn't tell her that though :) ).

A few weeks later, Michael joined me on the IRC and asked a lot of questions and wanted to know what the "slap" was. I had never used it so I told him I didn't know what that command did, and the next thing y'know I was getting slapped with a wet trout. Maggie and I continued our email writing and we decided we would set up a channel on the IRC called #Widow/ers. Nary a soul joined us so we decided to change it to #Bereavement but we changed it back to #Widow/ers when so many people joined us that had lost a parent, a son etc. Michael had just gotten Widownet started on the internet and he put our channel on his webpage and that's when other widows and widowers started to join us.

Recently, we have just moved from Efnet to Beyondirc and I think most are happy there...I know I am. I'm trying to remember when we set up the channel #widow/ers on the IRC but I just can't remember the date. I joined the internet in the spring of 1995 and found the IRC around August of the same year and Magnolia joined me a few months later so I imagine our channel #widow/ers has been in existance for about a year and a half. One of our first members was a lady named Jo and shortly after that a gentleman named Jon joined us. I don't hear from them anymore but I do hope they are doing well. I also remember Troy ... and I hope he's ok too. After that, BlueKap joined us, and then Dan, Stephanie, Stacie, Alan, Terramom and so many others. We joke around a lot but we can get serious when a newbie joins us.

In the beginning, we met on Tuesday and Thursday and then we extended it to Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Now we meet almost every night and hope I've given everybody a little insight on just how the #Widow/ers channel started on the IRC.

I love you all...

Anne