The TV Fan Club That Became an Intimate Grief Group
On August 7, Sharyn Friedman, 57, packed her bags and drove 350 miles west, from her home in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, to Clarion, Iowa, a town so small—“itty-bitty,” she remarked to me later—that it had only one grocery store. She was heading there to visit Christine Farrell-Espe, one of her closest friends and someone whom Friedman had never met in person.
The two women had been speaking to each other almost daily until then, moving from direct messages to texts to calls to videochats. Farrell-Espe, 54, lives 2,000 miles away, in Southern California, but a visit to her mother-in-law in Iowa brought her into a manageable visiting radius for the plane-shy Friedman.
And so, that day—a warm Wednesday, with highs in the upper 80s—Friedman drove for five hours, eager to make it to Farrell-Espe before the eighth.
Because the eighth, for both of them, was a bad date: It’s the date of their husbands’ deaths.
Farrell-Espe lost hers on March 8, 2017. Mitch had texted her that morning to wish her a happy International Women’s Day, promising to bring dinner home, but collapsed at work of a heart attack—the “widowmaker,” as it’s known. Friedman’s husband, Steve, died exactly one month later: He’d called to check on her the afternoon of April 8, and had a fatal heart attack sometime afterward, at home.
Friedman and Farrell-Espe, two women in their 50s, widowed a month apart for the same reason, became each other’s confidante in their worst times. Their friendship blossomed in a remarkable way: through, of all things, a TV show that aired on, of all places, Facebook Watch.
The women initially met online in a popular grief group on Facebook called Option B. But when S, a drama starring Elizabeth Olsen as a young widow, debuted
