On the internet late one night, months after she learned her sister, Kristin Johnston, had been stabbed to death in Halifax, Kim Johnston found the voice she'd been looking for.
She'd been devouring books about grief, but a blog she stumbled upon was the first to capture what she was feeling —the trauma of losing a sister and best friend to violence.
"You lose relatibility to society at large and to close friends. It's really isolating," Johnston said.
"No one is coming to help you. You have this pile of pain sitting in your lap and you think, oh yeah someone is going to help me… someone is going to reach out… you're just in a panic mode. It's too big. It's too overwhelming."
Johnston, who lives in British Columbia, reached out to the blog's author and forged an unexpected friendship with someone on the opposite coast: Delilah Saunders, the Labrador woman who wrote about losing her sister Loretta.
Not only had Johnston found someone who could so intimately connect with her pain, Saunders knew firsthand what it was to feel overlooked by the justice system.
Both women say losing their sisters showed them how taxing the court process can be, how challenging it is to find specialized counselling in rural areas and how few supports there are for people who've lost loved ones to violence.
Johnston spoke to CBC from her home in Tofino, B.C., about a month prior to the second-degree murder trial of Nicholas Butcher. He was convicted Saturday and got an automatic life sentence.
Johnston said it was only after reading Saunders's blog that she realized she'd heard Loretta's story before, from Kristin.
Loretta Saunders was murdered in 2014 over $430 in rent owed by Blake Leggette and Victoria Henneberry, who were subletting her Halifax apartment. They put the Inuk woman's body in a hockey bag and dumped her along the Trans-Canada Highway near Salisbury, N.B., where she was found two weeks later.
In the spring of 2015, Kristin Johnston helped organize Halifax screenings of the documentary Highway of Tears —directed by her childhood friend Matt Smiley — about missing and murdered Indigenous women. It was a subject Loretta had been studying.
Through the film screenings, she connected with Loretta's sister, Delilah Saunders.
Saunders said she remembers Kristin Johnston as "kind and generous and loving," someone who helped her on her healing journey at the time when the trial was starting.
"I will always remember and respect and love her for that," Delilah Saunders said.
Saunders started blogging because it helped her process the raw, frightening and sometimes overwhelming emotions related to losing her older sister.
And it wasn't entirely surprising when Kim Johnston reached out.
"I do feel that families are often left in the dark," she said from Happy Valley-Goose Bay, N.L.
"There are these holes where there are people in a very vulnerable situation, at the most vulnerable, traumatic time in their lives and that support isn't adequate."
Johnston, who stressed she couldn't speak for other members of her family, said she found it "really frustrating" to try to get information from her sister's case. There were repeated phone calls across four time zones for information from Victims Services and the Crown.
It was also challenging to try to move on with daily life when the trial's timeline depended on the accused's decisions, Johnston said.
In March 2016, her husband, called as a witness in the case, was packing to travel to Halifax to testify at pre-trial hearings when Butcher fired his lawyer. It would be another year before the trial started.
"In some ways, it seemed like torture to wait that long to move forward," said Johnston.
Saunders said her communications with Nova Scotia's Department of Justice weren't always easy either.
She would like to see more victim services workers trained to support Indigenous families in culturally appropriate ways, she said.
John Joyce-Robinson, director of victim services, said the department has partnered with the Mi'kmaq Legal Support Network in order to provide culturally sensitive support for Indigenous families.
Saunders also said people in rural areas likely have a particularly challenging time finding counsellors that can offer help with dealing with trauma. Last fall, she spoke to the Inquiry for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Cape Breton about what she alleges was inappropriate behaviour by the trauma counsellor she saw after her sister's death.
Johnston has also been receiving trauma counselling paid for, in part, by the Nova Scotia Department of Justice. She said it has helped her confront her grief and post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from imagining and replaying the horror of her sister's final hours.
"When friends stopped listening and stopped asking, she [the counsellor] was still there. Absolutely a lifeline for me," she said.
The type of funding provided to Johnston and Saunders after their sisters were murdered isn't available in all parts of Canada.
Justice programs vary by province and there's a wide range of compensation and Victims Services programs — from covered funeral expenses to supports for people who witness a crime.
Prince Edward Island offers up to $15,000 through its criminal injuries compensation program, all of which may be spent on counselling, by far the most extensive of any jurisdiction. Alberta doesn't offer any counselling coverage for siblings of homicide victims.
The Nova Scotia government covers up to $4,000 in counselling for immediately family members of homicide victims. In Johnston's case, they allotted her $2,000 for the first year and then granted another $2,000 in 2017 after the trial was postponed.
Johnston said it's unrealistic for government to pick up the bill for all the counselling that might be needed for every victim of crime. But she said it's helped guide her through the most difficult period of her life.
"Is $4,000 enough to get me back on my feet, spiritually and emotionally after my sister was killed? Probably not. But it's better than nothing and I'm really grateful for it," she said.
Others things can help too. She's tried meditation, mindfulness and practices yoga, her sister's passion.
Johnston also focused on her two very young children. She wasn't in Halifax for the trial, though in the months leading up to it, she said she often struggled with how she could advocate for her sister and still be the mother that her kids need.
Delilah Saunders said she was happy to share her insights into what she remembers as a "grueling" court process.
"It's very oppressive in many ways because you can't react the way you want to. You have to sit there and be civil, go through the whole … court process without showing your emotions."
She said it's important for communities not to forget the families at the centre of trials.
"It's important to show the judge and the jury and the accused, or the convicted, that this person mattered and still matters ... It definitely lends strength to families," she said.
This month, Saunders turned 26, the same age Loretta was when she was murdered.
The pain hasn't gone away. She expects to grieve her sister for the rest of her life.
Johnston and Saunders have never met in person. But they hope to and in the meantime, the virtual door is always open. They write to each other and often share memories of their sisters.
"To be able to remember our sisters together and to be able to talk about what we're going through, to have someone really understand it and get it, it's big. It's a really beautiful thing … I'm very happy that she came into my life," said Saunders.
Johnston said seeing Saunders journey through grief has helped her envision her own future.
"It feels like my life stopped. And I see her as moving and then surviving and especially because she's working with MMIW … she's right in the eye of the storm. She's doing extremely well. I look to her as a hopeful future for myself. That this will one day be something that is not so traumatizing and debilitating," Johnston said.