Welcome to The Art of Memorialising - an audio newsletter by Peter Billingham from Death Goes Digital and Memorable Words Eulogy Writing services bringing you the latest news on digital immortality, digital legacy, digital life curation and all things #Deathtech.
Sponsoring this edition is 4everstory
A lifetime comprises a thousand stories. 4everstory is a secure and private digital story platform. 4everstory specialises in capturing digital memories and preserving special moments in a single and secure location. 4everstory encourages sharing and connecting family memories, and life experiences, strengthening family bonds, family traditions, and is a simple way to continue telling life stories.
What Will You Find In This Issue?
Telling your life story using the digital heritage app After Cloud.
Bringing artistic design to obituaries is start up Murial
Memorial NFT’s? Remembering our loved ones in the Metaverse.
Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash
Your Life Is An Epic Story Waiting To Be Told. Will You Tell it?
Once upon a time …
‘He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.’ ( The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway)
‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.’ (The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)
How would you write the first line of your life story?
A good life story captivates heart and mind.
Stories inspire us. Encourage us. Make us laugh and cry.
Stories make sense of life when everything is senseless.
Gripping, captivating and memorable stories, says author Donald Miller, are about, ‘A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.’
Is that you? Is your life is an epic story waiting to be told? Now, more than ever, telling it is in the palm of your hand.
It’s challenging and demanding to write our life story.
I know. I just published a memoir.
Documenting lives for eternity - our digital heritage - is available with the click of a thumb. But will people write it?
What Is The Shape of Your Life Story?
Famous storyteller, Kurt Vonnegut, pens quirky, complex books. He believes stories have shapes. Especially life stories.
He suggests the basic structure of all stories come down to eight story shapes. This infographic explains them all.
As a eulogy writer, I often see and use the ‘Man In A Hole’ and ‘Redemptive’ epic story shape.
The ‘Man In A Hole’ story need not be about a man or a hole! It is a story of someone who gets into trouble and gets out of it again. The story has a happy-sad-happy trajectory.
Many identify with the ‘Redemptive Story.’ The story shape starts off bad then ends good.
Another life story shape coined by Joseph Campbell is ‘The Hero's Journey.’ This story involves a normal person who goes on an epic adventure, hits a pivotal crisis, wins a victory, and then comes home changed.
Which is your life story shape?
Digital legacy platforms enable the telling of life stories. But will they be told?
After seeing too many ‘Dear Dad’ or ‘Dear Mum’ life story journals empty, I’m not convinced writing your life story online will happen for many.
Unless …
Unless an army of story tellers could help write those stories? Now, maybe there’s an opportunity for the future?
And they all lived happily after after …
Startup Spotlights - AfterCloud.co.uk and Murial.Life
AfterCloud.co.uk
We profiled After Cloud in August 2021. What a difference a year can make committed to a vision of building tools for digital heritage.
After Cloud celebrates and shares individual life moments. Helps to tell our unique life story preserving our family history.
Approved by ORCHA (Organisation for the Review of Health and Care Apps) and part of the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) digital app library, After Cloud is being used and adapted in many care situations.
Moments enables you to record and store important daily thoughts and precious memories. Perhaps as a daily journal to share stories with your loved ones privately and securely, now or after you have died.
Timelines - is to record your life events, so future generations can see and hear all the really important moments in your words. Timelines is also an app to assist with life story work in aged care settings and people living with dementia.You can sign up for Moments or Timelines here.
Murial.Life
Chatting this month with Gary Kisela, the founder and CEO of Murial, it was intriguing to learn of his desire not only to create a platform for telling and preserving life stories, but to do it with excellent design and creativity.
When an entrepreneur experiences the loss of a loved one and finds the marketplace lacking, need and vision come together. This was the case with Gary. Disillusioned and unimpressed with the blandness of many obituary platforms, he is setting out to turn Murial into the best space to help people express tributes to remember their loved ones.
You can create a Murial for free or unlock its full features by choosing the premium tier. Premium Murial gives you music, unlimited photos, and space to remember your loved ones more meaningfully.
Heard of a startup in digital life curation or #Deathtech?
Please let me know. Email info@deathgoesdigital.com
Sponsored Product or Service - 4everstory
There is nothing worse than an untold family story lost forever.
We forget valuable old photographs and family movies stored away in boxes. Memories fade. Every year, thousands of digital images and videos stored on smart phones are accidentally deleted or misplaced. Increasingly, family history is lost because family stories are no longer shared. Parents or grandparents are no longer here to tell their stories.
So what is the solution?
John Withers, the Australian founder of 4everstory, has announced its secure and private web-based digital story platform is now available.
As life becomes increasingly complex and digital, so has the interest to build unique permanent online spaces. Now it is easy to create tribute experiences rich in mixed media content. These can be collectively shared with family and friends anywhere in the world to create a wider sense of connection.
4everstory creates lasting, meaningful, and dynamic digital stroies that connect lives today and will do tomorrow.
Interested in sharing your new product or service with readers of The Art of Memorialising?
We highlight your product, service, or idea sponsoring an edition. We give you the space; you get to tell the world about what you are doing or have created.
You and your business can become part of the adventure now. Secure your month in 2022/23.
MM’s (Memorialisation Morsels)
5 meaty bites of news for YOU to stay ahead of the conversation on Digital Legacy, Digital Life Curation & all things #Deathtech.
1 - Remember.Place - The World’s 1st Commemorative NFTs & Dedicated Memorial Metaverse
The Metaverse is coming! What it will look like and how we will spend time working, being entertained, even socialising there, is in a state of creative evolution. One thing is for sure, it will encompass all of life … and increasingly death.
Will remembering our loved ones in that virtual space do away with our need to have physical memorials for a loved one? Remember.Place is creating commemorative Memorial Stone NFT’s. There are 5,000 one-of-a-kind stones. Each Memorial Stone is an original, delicately crafted artwork that provides you with a unique way to celebrate the story of your loved one. Check out a YouTube video here.
2 - A Online Funeral For An Online Video Game - Really?
Red Dead is a series of Western-themed action-adventure games published by Rockstar Games. As a reaction to the creator of the game failing to update it, the fans gathered for #RedDeadFuneral. What makes this interesting to me is mourning online has become the culture for a natural way of expressing loss. Fascinating how the community of gamers came together for the funeral posting condolences. I believe the step to mourn a loved one online will become as normal in the future. (via ruetir.com) Looks like the fans of Assassin’s Creed are planing something similar.
3 - Can Digital Afterlife Practices Keep Us Connected To Our Dead?
Ginger Liu, the CEO/Founder Ginger Media & Entertainment, asks the poignant question in the article The Digital Afterlife of Grief. (via Medium/Illumination) She notes, ‘Kubler-Ross developed stages of grief as a linear process that has an endpoint but this view is gradually being replaced by the continuing bonds approach as our connection with the dead has been immortalised in the digital world.’ The ‘Ethics of prolonging bereavement’ is a subject being studied, but how it will play out for us all in the coming decades is unknown.
4 - My House of Memories App - From Liverpool Museums
The theme this month is storytelling online. So I’m grateful to Ginger Liu who mentioned, My House of Memories app in her piece above. She used it when caring or her mother dying Alzheimer’s disease. While not an after-death app, My House of Memories app has pictures of objects from across the decades, brought to life with sound, as an easy-to-use way to help people living with dementia explore things that resonate with them. What caught my eye about the app was the ‘My Memories’ feature. This enables users to upload their own photos to share precious personal memories with the people they care for living with dementia/Alzheimer’s. Stories stored in the last season of life.
5 - #Deathtech startup Willed raises $6 million (via smartcompany)
‘Death tech startups like Willed are disrupting a very traditional space by offering multiple services under one banner…’ says smartcompany. Following on June’s newsletter - Is Direct Cremation Disrupting The Legacy of Traditional Funerals in the UK Forever? - it seems it may also be the same in Australia. Online direct cremation - funeral planning the simple, affordable way on offer from Willed. Interesting both the $6m and adding funerals to a will company.
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Until next month, keep safe, and keep going.
Pete
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