Almost every memorial in this country is assembled by exhausted people in the fortnight after a death, from whatever they can find, about someone who can no longer be asked anything.
There is an obvious alternative, and a growing number of people are taking it: do it yourself, in advance, while you still know the answers.
This is not morbid. It is the same instinct that produces a will, and people who do it generally report finding it far more enjoyable than they expected.
Why people do it
You are the only person who knows most of it. Your family knows their version of you. They do not know what your grandmother's kitchen smelled like, why you left that job, what you were thinking on a particular day in 1979. Once you go, that is simply gone, and nobody can reconstruct it.
It spares them an impossible task. Writing about someone you have just lost, while arranging a funeral, is more than most people can manage. It is the single commonest reason memorial pages sit half empty.
You get to record your own voice. This is the one that matters most and the one almost nobody thinks of. Families lose voices faster than faces, and it is one of the sharpest secondary griefs there is. You can fix that in twenty minutes with a phone, and no relative afterwards can.
You control the story. Not to sanitise it, but so the record is yours rather than an obituary written by whoever felt able to.
It settles arguments before they start. Families disagree about what may be said, which photographs are acceptable, what is nobody's business. If you have decided, there is nothing to fall out over.
What to record, in order of value
1. Your voice
Do this first and do it today. Ten minutes on a phone voice recorder, in a quiet room. Do not script it and do not try to be profound.
Useful prompts: describe the house you grew up in, room by room. Tell the story people always ask you to tell. Say what your parents were like. Explain how you met your partner. Say something to a grandchild who has not been born yet.
Ordinary is better than polished. In twenty years the value is in hearing you, not in what you said.
2. The photographs, named
The great problem with inherited photographs is that nobody knows who anybody is. You are, right now, the last person who can name the people in half of those pictures.
Go through them and write on the back or in the caption: who, where, roughly when. That single act does more for a family archive than anything else on this page.
3. The ordinary details
Not achievements. Nobody misses achievements. What gets missed is the specific: the sayings, the habits, the food, the tuneless whistle. Write down the things that feel too trivial to record, because those are precisely the ones that disappear.
4. The practical answers
Where things are. What you want done. Who should be told. This overlaps with a will and does not replace one, but a plain document answering the obvious questions saves your family weeks.
5. What you do not want included
Worth writing down explicitly. It gives whoever is left permission to leave things out, and stops a well-meaning relative publishing something you would have hated.
Where to put it
The options are the same as for any memorial, and they are compared in what is a digital memorial. Three practical routes:
A folder you control. Free, entirely private, and the most likely of the three to be lost, because it depends on somebody knowing it exists and being able to get into it.
An online memorial page set up now. Some services allow a page to be created in advance and kept private until it is needed.
A page with a physical marker. The advantage is that it does not rely on anybody remembering a link or a password. A plaque on a keepsake box, the back of a framed photograph, or an urn bought in advance means the material is findable by whoever comes across the object, without instructions.
The four things that decide whether it survives you
This is the part people get wrong, and it is the whole ballgame. A memorial you build and nobody can reach is worse than nothing, because you will have stopped anybody else from doing it.
- Name a second person now, ideally a generation younger. Someone other than you must be able to get in, edit and download. If one login exists and it is yours, the memorial freezes on the day you die.
- Write it into your will or with your papers. Not the passwords in the will itself, since a will can become a public document, but a note saying what exists and where the details are kept. Solicitors call these digital assets and most are used to the question now.
- Tell somebody out loud. A document nobody knows about is not a plan. Have one conversation with the person who will be dealing with things.
- Avoid anything on a subscription. A memorial funded by a recurring payment stops when your card does, which is to say shortly after you die. That is the single most common way these are lost, and it is covered in how memorial QR codes work.
Two cautions
Be careful what you publish about yourself. A page giving your full date of birth, mother's maiden name, place of birth, first school and address is a completed set of security questions. While you are alive that is a fraud risk to you; afterwards it is a risk to your estate. Use years rather than full dates and leave the address off. More in memorial page privacy.
Do not settle scores. It is tempting to use the last word to say the unsaid thing. People who do it generally cause lasting damage to people who cannot reply, and the family removes it anyway.
Doing it with someone else
If this is for a parent or grandparent rather than yourself, the ask matters more than the technology.
"I want to record you for when you're gone" lands badly. "Nan, will you tell me about the shop again so I can keep it?" does not, and gets you the same recording.
Record the conversation rather than conducting an interview. Ask about places and objects rather than feelings. Go back a second time, because the best material almost always arrives once somebody has got used to the idea.
And do it sooner than feels necessary. Families who wait until somebody is ill usually find the window was earlier than they thought.
If you are arranging your funeral at the same time
Many people do both in one sitting. A funeral director can hold your wishes on file, and it is worth asking whether they can note that a memorial page exists and who holds access, since they are frequently the first professional the family speaks to. Some firms are set up for this and some are not, and the trade view is in memorial QR codes for funeral directors.
The rest of what your family will face in the first fortnight is set out in what to do when someone dies. Reading it now, on your own behalf, is a strange experience and a genuinely useful one.
Start with ten minutes
Do not plan a project. Open the voice recorder on your phone, sit somewhere quiet, and talk for ten minutes about the house you grew up in.
That single recording will be worth more to somebody in forty years than anything else you could do this afternoon, and unlike almost everything else on this page, nobody else can do it for you.
What to put in the rest of it is in building a digital memorial page. If you want something physical that makes it findable without a password or a link, that is what a plaque with a memory page does. It is £70 once, with no subscription and no renewal for anyone to remember after you have gone, and the page is included for as long as The Life Behind is trading. Nobody can promise to trade forever, so our terms of service set out what happens if we stopped: at least 90 days' notice by email to every family, and a full download of everything on the page before it goes offline. Whoever holds access can also download the lot at any time, as ordinary photograph and video files, which is the version of this we would tell you to rely on.