This woman's grandma lived in an apartment building across the way. Now the balcony view comforts her in grief

Six years ago, Jennifer Douma of Woodstock, Ont., moved into the apartment building next to her grandmother. As luck would have it, the women's balconies faced each other and they would regularly greet each other with enthusiastic waves from across the parking lot.

But now that Douma's grandmother has died, it's her viral Facebook post on the group, 'View from YOUR window,' that is helping her grieve.

"The response was tremendous. It was outrageous," said Douma, 51, a single mom and high school teacher. "I actually had to put a little edit on there just thanking everybody for their comments and their condolences and their touching tributes."

"I miss her a lot. I still think about her a lot every day," she said.

Six years ago, Douma decided to downsize her home and moved her family into an apartment building directly across from the building where her grandmother, Audrey Douma, lived.

Douma, who immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands in 1948, had seven children, 17 grandchildren and 37 great grandchildren. She was 96 years old when she died on February 26.

"My apartment is on the third floor and her apartment was on the fourth floor, and we were directly across from each other so we could see each other every day," said Douma.

"She watched my children walk to school," she said. "She'd watched them from her breakfast table."

Read Jennifer Douma's social media post:

"I think the picture of the balcony made it real to people who read the FB post," said Darcy Harris, Thanatology professor at Western University's King's University College in London, Ont. Thanatology is the study of death and dying.

"They could imagine her grandmother waving back to Jennifer, and now the image without her is just of a generic apartment building," she said. "It is a poignant reminder of grief as the absence of presence."

Reading people's responses about their own journeys with grief has been healing, said Douma.

"This is a community. This is a global thing. It's not just me," she said. "There was a real sense of connection with people."

Some of Douma's best memories of her grandmother are from when she was a child, eating lunch with her grandparents.