Their story, in the voices that loved them

Asking without intruding

The worry families raise first is that asking people to record will feel like a demand at the worst possible moment. In practice the opposite tends to happen. Mourners often arrive wanting to say something to the family and finding no natural opening, and a card on a table gives them one they can take or leave.

What matters is that it is offered rather than announced. A small sign near the guest book or on the welcome table lets people come to it in their own time. Being handed a phone by a relative and asked to speak is a different experience entirely, and not a kind one.

What to ask people to say

Left with no prompt, most people say they are sorry for your loss, which the family has already heard forty times that afternoon. It is the honest instinct of someone who does not know what else to offer.

A single written question changes what you get. “Tell us about a time he made you laugh.” “What did she teach you without meaning to?” “How did you meet?” These invite a story rather than a condolence, and stories are what the family cannot reconstruct on their own.

One family we saw asked only this: “What did you know about her that we might not?” The film that came back contained a decade of her working life that her children had never heard described.

When to set it up

Most families open the space a day or two before the service, which leaves time to print cards and send the link to relatives who cannot travel. There is no requirement to have everything decided; the name and a piece of music are enough to begin.

People can share a memory as soon as you send the link, before, during and after the service. If your family needs more time, because relatives are travelling or because people simply are not ready that week, set the closing date a few days later. You can move it from your dashboard.

For the people who cannot be there

Funerals are arranged in days, not months. Someone is always mid-flight, in hospital, or on the far side of a border, and their absence is often felt more sharply than at any other kind of gathering.

Sharing the link privately, through a family group or a message, lets them record from wherever they are. Nothing in the finished film marks out who attended and who did not, which matters more to the people who could not come than they usually say.

What families do with the film

Very few watch it in the first week. It arrives, it is downloaded, and it sits until someone is ready. That is normal, and it is worth telling relatives so nobody feels they are grieving incorrectly.

What we hear afterwards is that it gets opened on anniversaries and birthdays, and that grandchildren watch it years later to hear a voice they were too young to remember. Download the films, the photos and the individual clips to your own storage within the 3 months your files are kept, as you would with any online service. We email a reminder before anything is deleted, so nobody has to watch a calendar while grieving.