Noelle Fontes took a break from social media for about a month this summer. When she started posting again, in late July, it was with a reel that showed her entering her home in a black dress, clutching a large urn and lip syncing along to a viral (and famously awkward) soundbite pulled from an episode of Little Women: Atlanta: “Hey, how y’all doing?” She was returning, she told her more than 22,000 Instagram followers, as a widow.

“First of all, we ‘JOKE TO COPE’ around here,” Fontes, known online as @UptownMom_Dallas, shared in her caption, preemptively addressing anyone who might be taken aback by her gallows humor. “Second of all, Daniel wasn’t getting out of my Instagrams that easy, and third of all laughing is genuinely what gets me through so if it ain’t for you. … It ain’t for you.”

“Daniel” is Daniel Fontes, her husband, whose death from stage 4 colon cancer she’d announced a week earlier in a statement reflecting on his loss and the more lighthearted tone she planned to adopt going forward. Fontes filmed her “widow” reel straight from his memorial service, hence the black dress, green fascinator hat and butterfly heels (a nod to some of his favorite things). And the urn — with Daniel's remains inside — of course.

Joking is “just what I’ve always done. It’s how I’ve always coped,” the mom of two boys tells Yahoo. “People who have been following me for a long time get it.” Even so, they might still feel guilty chuckling along at her widow content; some even apologize for enjoying it. “But I'm like, ‘Girl, it's funny.’ I put it up for people to laugh.”

‘You don’t have to get it’

Long before cancer and its aftermath came calling, humor was simply how Noelle survived loneliness. She started her blog as an outlet for creativity and community when she became a stay-at-home mom to her firstborn son, Dexter, 10 years ago.

“For some people, that is maybe a dream job. For me, it felt very lonely and isolating,” she says. Instead of allowing that feeling to swallow her, Fontes turned her stay-at-home parenting experiences into comedy material. “I would start recording the tantrums and things, just to make it more funny. It becomes a skit then, like your own TV show, vs. this horrible life.”

Then came the pandemic, her pregnancy with her second child (Dillon, now 5) and the sharpening of her online voice. “There were no activities, and we were all miserable. My vicious personality really came out,” she says. “This does not age well because my husband has died. But the joke through the whole COVID pregnancy was, ‘Is Daniel gonna make it? ’Cause I'm gonna kill him.’”

Thus, an era of dark humor was born. “Daniel and I used to always laugh, and we would say, ‘You're lucky you think dead spouse jokes are funny because a lot of people wouldn't,’” Fontes recalls. She says that attitude helped her survive the difficult times to come.

Daniel was diagnosed with colon cancer in January 2024. Fontes says that’s when she started “mentally preparing” for life without him, but she still sought opportunities for joy. “Once my husband got cancer, it wasn't all bad,” Fontes says. “The whole purpose was still having fun and still enjoying life because we now knew life is short. We didn't know how much time there was, and wanted to truly just make the best of it, still laugh through it. So I got good at doing that — at being sad and being happy at the same time.”

When the family dog died shortly after Daniel's diagnosis, Fontes made a parody video that had commenters agreeing that “laughter is the best medicine.” Fontes would also bring her jokes into doctors' offices for her husband’s scans and chemotherapy treatments. Her goal at the time was to make sure he still had reason to smile. Now that he’s gone, “my audience is an audience of one — that's me,” she says. “My No. 1 objective is to help myself, [to post] what is cathartic for me. But I think, in turn, it helps others too.”

And if anyone doesn’t like it, too bad. “I'm sure some people don't get it when I post certain things,” she says. “You don't have to get it. I don't need to convince you. People will say, ‘I don't understand.’ I'm like, ‘I hope you never do. I hope you never have to understand this, but it makes sense for me.’”

‘We’re still including him’

Fontes may be on her own now, but Daniel is still very much a part of every video and every joke. She recalls talking to his urn while filming her first reel as a widow. “I was like, ‘Daniel, we have to redo it. We didn't get it right.’ It made me laugh,” she says. “Including Daniel or including anything about Daniel in a lot of my content makes me feel like he's still there. It makes me feel like we're still including him. He's still part of our life.”

She’s playfully scolded photos of Daniel for leaving her to take on the responsibilities of single parenting, used his urn to complete a “couples costume” for Halloween inspired by their favorite movie, Beetlejuice and complained about having to watch Stranger Things by herself.

“I can’t believe he died before the final season,” she captioned that reel. Some commenters could relate. “I feel this! My husband passed in July and ‘we’ are binging it together today,” one wrote. “We started it together, we will finish it together.”

It’s not the usual show of grief that people might be used to. It’s also not aligned with how other family members are grieving Daniel's death. “[My sister-in-law] respects my perspective, and she lets me be me, but her [social media content] is just much more sensitive and thoughtful,” says Fontes. “I have all those thoughts, but I have to laugh. I'm already crying. I'm gonna cry all day. The laughing is good for your soul.”

Those laughs are needed more than ever as she faces special milestones and her first holiday season without her husband. This week marked the couple’s 13th wedding anniversary. Next up is Fontes's 40th birthday on Dec. 23, and then Christmas. “December is going to be a weird one,” she says. “It's uncharted territory.”

Focusing on what’s best for her family is helping her get through it. “We went to get all new Christmas ornaments, and we picked out every single one of them with [Daniel] in mind. We did an outdoorsy theme, so it's foresty and it's green and has butterflies. All of that is in Daniel's memory,” says Fontes. She, Dexter and Dillon will still be spending the holiday with both sides of their family, as they do every year. The one change is that they’ll head to a hotel instead of being in their home.

“It was the same for Thanksgiving. I knew I wasn't going to want to be home because we had some traditions. So I took them to a hotel,” she says. “Rather than feeling sad about all of the old things that we're not doing with [Daniel], we're doing new things. But he's still a part of it in a different way.”

She adds, “I was nervous about Thanksgiving, and it went really well. So, I’m hopeful for Christmas. It might not be perfect, but it's all OK.”

After all, she’s still getting presents from her longtime love. “I bought myself a new car for my 40th. And genuinely, I cannot explain it, but I know in my soul, Daniel drove me there, gave me that car, made it happen. … That's my gift from Daniel and I know it is,” she says. The hotel room for Christmas is also on him, or rather, his estate. “I call it a ‘widow consolation prize.’ It's not great, but you've got to find some silver lining.”