Love Stories and Voices from Beyond the Grave
In an era where our memories now sit on servers, not in boxes in the wardrobe
How does one market the certainty of death to people? It’s tricky if not impossible given we all prefer (need?) to believe we’re invincible. And yet the Death Industry is the most market-robust of all, patiently residing in the shadows of the internet awaiting a google-prompt at our hour of greatest, heart-breaking need: undertakers, coffin-makers, florists, wake-providers and head-stone carvers. It serves a never-ending stream of customers via calm, soothing websites suffused with love-affirming quotes and calla lily images.
As you’ll know by now, I love a good snorkel around a new industry and this one intrigues me.
Specifically, the history-graduate-turned-tech-entrepreneur in me was troubled as to what the massive expansion of our digital footprint was doing to the historical record, both for society and for our own, personal memories. What will be left of our lives and the lives of those we love and will lose, with the days of discovering troves of handwritten love letters and sepia photos in a box in a cupboard now long gone?
Yes, there is a lot more content that has been captured in this modern, digital age, but how accurate - and accessible - is it to those we leave behind? How considered and thoughtful? The art of letter-writing has all but died, so which parts of our scrappy digital archive would we want people to know is actually ‘us’ amidst all the guff and digital detritus of grown-out-of opinions, out-of-context throw-away comments, ugly photos and old passions long-since discarded. On whose servers, and how safely does it reside for posterity?
Death is the only certainty in life. Remembering that can be a source of panic… or reassurance, depending on how we perceive it. None of us are immune and it is a passage that every human in history has taken before us. It’s the final, great equaliser.
Like many others, it is the deaths of those I love that occupy my fears more than my own. My experience of it - of a parent, a sister-in-law, a close friend - all of whom passed well before their time, are a constant source of pain, but one I’ve learnt to channel into gratitude for the life, health and love I have. Little glimpses and memories of their vivid lives surround me: old articles and a hand-written diary from my father; my sister-in-law’s powerful, poignant art covering the walls of my mother-in-law’s house; squirly, hand-written notes on the Christmas decoration gift boxes from my friend that I unwrap lovingly each year on decorating the tree.
To know about your impending death, or not to know? That is the question. Objectively, now that the shock has long subsided, in many ways I’m thankful for my father’s sudden death on a Winter’s morning on a mountain side- his favourite place in the world, with his family around him. No fear or the cruelty and pain of a drawn out terminal illness. But perhaps there are ‘advantages’ to the latter (if you can call them that): an opportunity to prepare and think deeply about legacy and your loved ones. A university friend wrote the most beautiful memoir of her life’s learnings for her twin six year olds during her terminal months. Kate Gross’s ‘Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) is an achingly poignant reminder of the beauty and fragility of life which I have now re-read 4x (and gifted many times). It is the most precious gift she could have left for her young sons in the absence of her own loving arms throughout their childhood.
Perhaps this blog is a less profound version of mine to at least enable those I love to know a fraction of the myriad of thoughts that run through my head. But will Substack still exist by the time my kids are of an age that they might be curious? (Ironically, maybe i’ll produce a printed-out version for them in time). And of course, not everyone is blessed with being able to weave words as beautifully and evocatively as Kate.
There are 10s of 1000s of photos now to prompt both tears and memories of happier times with passed loved ones, but it is the words, voices and handwriting we really cherish. And I long for more audio and video of my father, more of his stories and life-lessons to share with the son-in-law and grand-children he never met. One of my biggest regrets is for all the encyclopaedic knowledge that he had at his fingertips about nature, history and politics that he and his photographic, thirsty-for-knowledge brain had acquired across 60 years. The myriad of birds he could identify by song in the garden; his deep knowledge about the movement of people over centuries which go towards explaining how national identities have evolved; how glaciation many centuries ago carved out the valleys and fells of the Lake District we love… deep wisdom, insight and interpretations extinguished in an instant. What would Dad have done or advised in this situation? I’ll never know.
Arguably we are all living ‘terminally’ to some degree but for most of us ‘legacy’ amounts to little more than the love we evoke in those closest to us. And to be clear, this is no small or insignificant thing. Perhaps it is the most important thing. But this longing for more from my father (plus listening to far too many episodes of ‘Desert Island Discs’) led me to ponder on the opportunity of curating audio stories from every-day people before they pass. Archives we can draw on for comfort and reassurance in our grief, on bad or good days. Down another entrepreneurial rabbit hole I fell.
And of course, I found countless businesses meeting this need. Companies that offer ghost-writers to research and write beautiful, custom printed book memoirs (here and here), online remembrance websites for grieving people to visit on anniversaries (here) or accessible via QR codes on headstones (here) and audio ideas similar to my own e.g. here and here, but the more I explored the industry, the more I appreciated its challenges.
If providing a digital archive, how can any lightly-funded start-up guarantee that they can hold these, most precious of memories in perpetuity and that they won’t fall within the 80% odds of failed start-ups? (Ultimately, it struck me that this was a content-creation/ data-storage business which would struggle to monetise in an attention economy world of free big-tech storage). How does one yield the best content without expensive Kirsty-Young style competence in interviewing skill (which is not to be sniffed at)? And perhaps most importantly, how does the instigator kindly and carefully broach ‘you’re either in the process of, or might soon die so would you mind please doing x’ to the desired subject of the archive?
It’s a morbid business. Literally. But one I continue to believe there’s huge scope for. Conversations about special memories, experiences, failures and learnings are to be encouraged between family and good friends. They’re reminders of what’s important. Why not make a recording of them a reason to have them?
But is this a business or simply a practice that could be more widely adopted - perhaps aided by prompt cards or format advice? Nostalgic conversations recorded and transcribed; a DIY ‘Desert Island Discs’ with Grandad perhaps; or a weekly exchange of voice notes with Grandma in response to prompts - ‘tell me about your favourite holiday’, ‘your biggest regret’, ‘your best friends at school’; After all, we already have the tech to record and store these precious audio or video nuggets in our pockets.
Perhaps these could be projects initiated between young and old, helping to stem the rapid growth of loneliness in society and bridge the growing age-divide in society. (They could maybe serve to repair a little of our rapidly waning ‘respect for elders’). Student journalists could ‘side hustle’ it. (Are they any student journalists these days, or are they all YouTubing?); schools could move to integrate them as homework deliverables. StoryCorps in the US is a fantastic non-profit initiative that harnesses many of these and has yielded over 700K individual audio studios for the US Library of Congress Archive - partly via audio booths placed in public places around the country. Everyday people sharing beautiful everyday stories - of love, loss, adventure and daily life through the decades.
Death - the prospect of both our own and those we love - is perhaps the greatest antidote of all. Life’s constant reminder to live well in the present, make memories, give more and love hard.