The 'worst mum site ever' has constant traffic. Unfortunately.

No mother would ever want to go to this terrible site. But they do.

Two years ago a website called MomAlways.org launched. It was immediately accessed by hundreds of mums around the world but it didn’t generate huge amounts of traffic (many parenting websites attract hundreds of thousands of users daily).

MomAlways.org didn’t care about the numbers. It wasn’t offering witty anecdotes, handy recipes or funny photos. In that regard, it was all wrong. In the words of its creator, Jody Becker, writing for Huffington Post:

I’m fairly confident that website gurus would say MomAlways.org is basically all wrong. Yeah, it is all wrong. MomAlways.org is a website for moms who know they are going to die, leaving their children too soon. That’s a fate that’s pretty fundamentally wrong. But for people who need this website, like my friend Lisa did, before it existed, I hoped, and have accepted, that this website is serving a purpose, and constitutes a decent response to a situation where there is nothing good to do or say.

Jody came up with the idea for the site after her friend Lisa was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Together they thought of every question these women would ask and found the best people to answer them.

She writes:

The website features a handful of child life experts with advice and insights on how moms who are dying can to talk to children -- as young as 2-years-old, and as savvy as teenagers -- about what's going on in their family. There's also a priest, a rabbi, a Zen hospice worker, a Christian counselor and a California mother who lost her own mother when she was a teenager. There's a recommended book and DVD list compiled by two very experienced social workers, and a few suggestions on how to find help in local communities. A few moms have requested creating a password-protected community for them linked to the site; that may come next.

In creating the site, I imagined that any mom in the position my friend was in, knowing that a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer meant she had only a few months to live before leaving her 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter, wouldn't need a lot of amazing "content" to capture her attention. Most immediately, she needed an uncluttered place with ideas about how to talk to her children, and then help them process their feelings, as much as she could, before she died.

It wasn't until the New York Times website Motherlode published a story about her friend Lisa that MomAlways.org became overwhelmed with traffic. Dying parents around the world tried to access the site, desperate for answers to all their questions and for any kind of help they could get. It crashed, and has since come back on line. MomAlways,org continues to help dying mothers and their families, in it's own understated way.

Jody writes:

When I look at the traffic reports in the morning and imagine the moms or their loved ones or caretakers who visited over the past day and night, I think of my friend, her laugh, her dismay at being cast in real life as a tragic heroine. But it happened. It happens.

The MomAlways.org website is a gesture of friendship - the essence of our friendship, extended to anyone who comes looking for ideas, insights, comfort.

As websites go, it's pretty awful. With any luck at all, you'll never have any reason to visit it.

As parents and mothers, it's nice to know the site is there. We can't imagine a more horrific experience than knowing you were preparing to leave your children behind.

Please share this site with anyone you know who could benefit from its brilliant advice.

Want more? Try this:

What I did for my kids when I found out I was dying.

A husband writes to his dead wife on a blog.