The Death Goes Digital Podcast: Recent Episodes
Peter Billingham
You have a digital legacy. What are you doing about it? This podcast talks with people and businesses connected to securing, protecting and preserving that digital legacy now and the generations of our family to follow.
Rachel entered The EXIT EARTH Short Story Competition, of which she was a finalist, with her work, ‘How To Curate a Life.’ It explores and opens up a fascinating discussion about what happens to our online lives after we die in a short story format.
If you could send a letter to your great-grandchildren, what would you say?
The idea of leaving messages for our loved ones is not new; it's probably as old as writing. Today using digital platforms we can create, store and send messages to the future simply and quickly.
If you could post an "I Love You" to the future who would you write to, what would you say and when would you want it delivered?
You can do that with GabrielsVault, a generational message platform.
What is the soundtrack to your life? Using this new life story curation website, you can now list and share the song and memories that make your life memorable using www.mylastsoundtrack.com
It's the coolest place on the web to craft your legacy and it's driven by music!
The Celebrant Directory is a new website designed to be the ultimate search and review site dedicated to Celebrants. Having an online profile is quickly becoming more critical as families search for celebrants as the need and the awareness of the services they offer grow. This website allows celebrants the opportunity to develop a show-stopping profile and then give clients the opportunities to leave reviews. Could joining this service help your celebrant business? I chat to Jennifer Constantthe founder to find out.
Jane Duncan Rogers is an award-winning Life and Death coach who helps people prepare well for the best ending of life possible. Having been in the field of psychotherapy and personal growth for more than 25 years, she is also the author of Gifted By Grief: A True Story of Cancer, Loss and Rebirth and Before I Go: Practical Questions to Ask and Answer Before You Die. She founded Before I Go Solutions in 2016. We chat about the role of digital technology in the world of grief and the upcoming training course for Before I Go, practitioners.
Paula Kiel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. She is thinking and researching how contemporary media blur boundaries and challenges established categories such as local and global or presence and absence - and even life and death. Her curiosity with these issues brought her to consider how digital media is involved in death-related practices (such as public mourning and memorialisation) today.
Toby Angel and I chat about how to bring together the ancient rituals of life and death, and the digital age of communication online can work together incredibly well-helping families find new ways of expressing and remembering the loss of someone they love.
Psychologist & author, Dr. Elaine Kasket is currently hard at work on All the Ghosts in the Machine. Researching the issues of death and digital legacy for 12 years, this book brings together questions about what it means to be human in a digital age.
Will your family know where to find all your vital estate planning information? In this episode, I chat with Ric Parks the founder of AfterVault. You can centralise and organise all your vital documents with AfterVault and when you die they will pass them on to the people you’ve designated. We chat about lost valuables, digital legacy and the rise of digital estate planning.
Justine Wykerd is a civil celebrant based in Warwickshire. In September 2017 she was awarded "Celebrant of the Year" at the Good Funeral Awards. In this episode, we chat about what it takes to be a successful celebrant and how having an online presence is becoming critical to run your business. We also get a guest interruption from you deaf dog! Makes for a fun episode.
Louise Winter - Funeral Director & Founder of Poetic Endings. She was a funeral celebrant before she decided to become a funeral director and launch the funeral service she believes needs to exist.
Before becoming a funeral director, Louise was the editor of the Good Funeral Guide. She's also the director of Life. Death. Whatever. An award festival and community that exists to change the dialogue around death and dying. In 2017, Louise won a Death Oscar at the Good Funeral Awards. She loves food, fashion, poetry and just about everything else.
Poetic Endings is founded on the belief that a good funeral can be profound and transformational in helping to accept and acknowledge that someone has died. Facing death can be an overwhelming, traumatic and confusing time.
Harbour Funerals
When a loved one dies, your world can fall apart. And the complexity and strain of funeral arrangements, as well as the financial burden, can add to your distress.
Harbour is offering a different choice. They are not traditional funeral directors. They offer simple, direct cremation and memorial services. Is direct cremation for you?
Qeepr - Ensuring A Loved One's Legacy Lives On(line) Forever.
The Qeepr Team has created an interactive story-telling platform that allows you to fill in the “dash” of your life or a loved one with memories, messages, photos, smiles and laughter. You now have the ability to become a Qeepr to preserve and share the legacy of your predecessors. Qeepr is a social media site dedicated to memorialising the lives of the departed with the aid of modern technology.
Bounce Works have created an interactive game to help families cope with life limiting illness, death and grief. Apart of Me is a safe virtual space that helps families find their way through grief. Apart of Me is based on the research that shows talking with children openly and honestly but in an age-sensitive way about death and dying can prevent them from developing entrenched, complex feelings around their loss. Apart of Me helps families by developing emotional literacy and wisdom around death. It helps by curating a secure digital memory box of your loved one. Also, it helps by finding and connecting with other people in similar situations, a way to not feel alone in a difficult situation. In its prototype form, Apart of Me is launching its next phase through an IndieGoGo launch.
LivesArchived - Securing Your Life Story Online
You present the materials—personal papers, letters, clippings, art work, compositions, drawings, plans, photos and videos. LivesArchived provides a safe, permanent, public archive for them. They ensure transparency about where the information is stored and who stores it. Whether you want to create a work portfolio, family archive, ancestral history, personal library or loved one’s memorial, LivesArchived will meet your needs.
Huunuu believes in inspiring choices to create the life story you want to leave behind. The huunuu pipe dream had been around for many years and in July 2014 Co-Founders Clare and Steve Turner finally incorporated huunuu.
Using huunuu helps create those crucial conversations and lets you enjoy some of the most amazing and inspiring businesses from around the world that they have brought into one place.
The Musing of a Crematorium Worker
Written in an honest, funny, poignant and revealing way, The Musings of a Crematorium Worker is a new blog by Kim Morris. What happens behind the scenes day by day in a busy crematorium? Kim writes in the first person and with incredible insight on the events, process and thoughts as she works each day in a busy London Crematorium. Her blog is certainly worth a read for anyone who is interested in how working in this aspect of the bereavement industry is truly like.
In this episode, I chat with Alex Devine who has launched Devine Funeral Stationary - An easy to use template design service that allows families the freedom to create a unique and uplifting funeral order of service online.
Swansongs is a global service established for archiving and dispatching legacy letters for at least the next one hundred years.
Imagine getting a birthday card from a lost parent, a letter from a friend who died too young, or a Christmas card from a Grandparent who passed fifty years ago. Think how it would make you feel, seeing their handwriting and soaking in their words, a message written for that moment, from a very long time ago. This is what Swansongs wants to bring to the legacy and EOL planning marketplace.
WHO SAYS A GOOD OBITUARY HAS TO BE DULL? The traditional obituary is a gloomy collection of dry facts and chilly clichés. The internet has swept away space restrictions and made newspaper deadlines irrelevant. Social media has encouraged us to swap stories and celebrate our loved ones’ lives. Why should today’s tributes rely on the same dull script we followed 30 years ago? It’s time for the old-school obituary to slip into something more contemporary.
How To Write An Online Obituary is a new book just published by Melissa Jayne Kinsey. In the book she shows step by step how to write a fresh, original tribute and create a memorable virtual memorial featuring photos, videos, and music.
In this interview, I chat with Marnie Summerfield Smith, a full-time memoir writer. We talk about how there is no such thing as an inconsequential life and no reason why everyone should leave some kind of record of their life story as a legacy for the future.
Marnie explains a 3 step process to writing your memories and also options of what to do with the memoir when it is finished. If you have ever thought about penning a few lines of your life this episode will give you the tools and hopefully the inspiration to start.
An Interview with David Sawyer Founder & CEO of TSOLIFE
TSOLife focuses on creating innovative ways to preserve a legacy and pass down life stories for future generations. Our mission is that no grandchild should have to wonder what their grandparent was like. Our unique solutions create the most personalised way to pass down personal stories that families will share and cherish for generations.
A PICTURE PAINTS A THOUSAND DAYS Look at an old photograph.
A frozen moment in time.
A time that lives again.
They live again.
They say a picture paints a thousand words. I say they paint a thousand days. The people in the photograph, though they may no longer be alive, live as you look into their faces. You see their smiles; you can hear in your mind the way they laughed one more time. You can relive that day, that moment, that minute as though they were still here and time had stood still. A thousand days in one image.
“Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?
— Daniele Varè, The Maker of Heavenly Trousers
"Talking about sex will not get you pregnant, neither will talking about a funeral kill you."
Said Gail Rubin, founder of A Good Goodbye.
She is right. From my experience, people rarely speak of death. In 106 funerals conducted in the last six months, only a handful of families knew the wishes of their loved one. When they did, it made such a difference. It does not matter how old you are, plan your funeral.
Lesson Two - Life Is Short
We cannot judge a song by its duration
Nor by the number of its notes;
We must judge it by the way
it touches and lifts our souls.
Sometimes those unfinished
are among the most beautiful.
In the last six months, I have written 106 funeral services. Wrapped up in the mystery of those unwelcome days, are four valuable lessons I have learned. Lessons about life and how you can leave a digital legacy for your family. This is lesson two.
This Is What 106 Funerals Taught Me About Life & Digital Legacy
Helping 106 families face death teaches you about life. Death comes to us all. It comes mostly at times when you least expect it. It comes to the old, the sick, the young and the healthy. It comes. It will come to you.
In the last six months, I have written 106 funeral services. Wrapped up in the mystery of those unwelcome days, are four valuable lessons I have learned. Lessons about life and how you can leave a digital legacy for your family.
The Legacy Recorder was created to give people the opportunity to write down their stories. Using simple storytelling methods, families can work together to capture their stories. Regardless of age, everyone has something to contribute. I believe that by working together, families will change the conversations within their own lives and go on to impact how other families interact.
Securing Your Digital Legacy-Vivala.me is an easy to use platform that allows you to control exactly what happens to all of your documents, images, videos and more after you have died. You are able to pass on control to the right person at the right time. When it comes to the thousands of digital assets you own, your photos, documents, passwords, accounts, videos and other items, you are now able to control exactly what happens to each and every one of these precious memories and make sure they end up in the right hands at the right time.
Stephanie Longmuir is a Funeral Celebrant and founder of my endnotes.com, Australia's first digital funeral planning service. Over the last seven years, she has led over 900 funeral and memorial services. myendnotes is developed in response to the hundreds of families that she met who wished they had asked all those important questions of their loved one while there was still time.
In this interview, we chat about all things being a funeral celebrant in Australia, live streaming funerals and how the funeral industry is inevitably heading online.
Tina Shang and Jayson Davis are the founders of Jang Consulting. They specialise in social media solutions for organizations based on each firm's unique business goals.
In this episode we talk about how innovative funeral businesses are using a weekly live Facebook program to reach new customers and how to grow the digital impact of your funeral business using social media.
Jang Consulting have significant experience in working with the funeral industry. Whether you want your funeral business to reach to out to your community, increase followers, or drive targeted leads to your website, they can help, advise and create packages to suit all business levels.
Dov Sugarman is the Strategic Partnerships Manager at SafeBeyond.
Safe Beyond is an advanced legacy management service. The platform provides an innovative online and mobile app solution for the easy and secure management of your life story and your meaningful digital content, with enhanced distribution capabilities for the future delivery of personalised messages, and digital assets. You decide when, where and with whom your messages and other digital assets will be shared.
In this episode, I chat with Dov about building strategic partnerships with other industries to educate, engage and create opportunities for people to know about and use the Safe Beyond platform.
Memontage is a digital memorial platform where you can upload any kind of memory of a loved one who passed away, a photo that always makes you laugh, a link to a song they sang off key or a recipe of a cake that smells like home.
This site invites you to invoke the senses and create a Memontage that tells a story using smells, tastes, sights, sounds and flavours. You do not need to have old memorabilia in hand but just think back and find representations of each memory. It's a new way to store your digital legacy.
Ep17 - Digital Legacy Estate Planning with Tim Snaith - Private Client Lawyer Digital Legacy Tim Snaith is a Partner in Winckworth Sherwood’s Private Client team, regularly advising on trusts, estates and succession planning (including the many tax issues that arise with the same, along with the problems presented by the loss of mental capacity). Tim was recently named as one of the UK's top 35 private client lawyers under the age of 35.
With a diverse client base including individuals, trustees, beneficiaries and executors, his clients are both UK-based and those with connections abroad. Tim often works alongside other professionals of other disciplines such as accountants, investment managers and independent financial advisers. His most recent Huffington post article was The Death Taboo - What’s Your Digital Legacy?
It all started in 2010 when Andrew Smith ended up in the hospital for 6 days. There is nothing like sitting in a hospital bed to get you thinking about life and death! Andrew decided he needed to write his final wishes down. He got to thinking about the celebration he would like, the photos he’d want shared, and the music he’d like played. But where can I write this all down? In that moment the Final Wish website and platform was born. Final Wish is a place to collect and share the stories of a life and more importantly how you would want to be remembered.
Kathy Kortes-Miller thinks about dying and death a lot! She knows it helps her to embrace life full on. She is an unconventional death educator with a passion for palliative care and improving the end of life care for all. Kathy has been teaching and researching at Lakehead University for over a decade inspiring and challenging the future healthcare providers of tomorrow to be prepared to care for individuals who are dying and their families in all healthcare settings. In this episode, we chat palliative care and social media, digital legacy and the odd good drinking song!
In this episode, I chat with Max Shelly of Echoleft.
Echoleft brings together every part of a life story in one place. Photo albums in drawers and cupboards, family overseas, stories told in a forgotten email. Bring them all together for everyone to look back on through this online memorial site builder. Now, you can show children and grandchildren the impact of a loved one's life through a beautiful website. Unlike social networks, Echoleft keeps your memories private, in your control and free of advertising. Echoleft also helps others by selecting a charity and accepting memorial donations with one click.
Dr. Mark Taubert is Consultant physician and Clinical Director for palliative care at a Welsh cancer centre. In this episode, we talk about the use of digital media in palliative care and the letter to David Bowie that Mark wrote published in the Huffington post.
We chat with Darren Richmond founder of The Soldiers Box
The Soldier's Box - the secure cloud based service for storing, organising and managing your treasured photos, home videos, online accounts, household information or any other important digital file.
Organise your digital world while you're alive and leave your files to loved ones when you're gone.
"Expressions of grief on Facebook: Navigating discomfort, persistent identity, and public memorialization" was a qualitative study that explored concepts of online identity and memorialization in relation to Facebook users' mourning practices. In-depth interviews were conducted and analyzed for emergent themes as part of Molly Kalan's master's thesis. In this interview, we chat about how Facebook helps and sometimes hinders the mourning process for people today.
Debra Bassett a PhD research student from Warwick University, England chats about the development of social networks and websites that provide digital opportunities to remember loved ones. She is studying how these may or may not help with the process of grieving.
"The fact that we are all going to die is an indisputable reality of the human condition. Whilst the beginning of our lives are celebrated, discussed and chronicled, death and dying have become medicalized, sanitized and whispered about in many Western cultures."
MyNews is a family sharing website creating a space where people can share the sad news of a bereavement and in time create a loving memorial to share fond memories, photos, thoughts, and remembrances.
Born and raised in the West Midlands, Caroline grew up in the beautiful county of Shropshire and trained as a celebrant in 2012, several years after she experienced her first real grief due to the death of her Mother.
She has journeyed and grown within her vocational profession and has gained experience of working with people from all walks of life, backgrounds and cultures. She is truly passionate about what she does and always takes something meaningful away with me from each family that she works work with.
We chat funerals, the use of social media to connect with families and how the future is shaping for working as a funeral celebrant.
WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE FUNERAL CELEBRANT? Stories have captivated mankind since the beginning of time. The art of the story is a skill and ability needed if you are a funeral celebrant. Being able to listen well, find the story and tell it with sensitivity and relevance is what makes an effective celebrant.
In this podcast, I chat with Linda Stuart a Life Cycle Celebrant from Ontario, Canada. We talk about how Linda's creative website has driven new business, the use of social media and red wine and chocolate! A great mix!
Loggacy is founded upon the notion that there is a perennial human quest for ‘immortality’ – to create a personal narrative, leave something behind, pass something on and make a mark on the world. Loggacy connects generations; enabling users the opportunity to share their experiences and memories with their loved ones on both a safe and secure digital platform.
Digital technology is transforming the funeral industry in ways never imagined a couple of years ago. One technology that is disrupting industry in all areas is 3D printing. In this episode, I chat with Mike Hepburn from EturnalMemories. Using the creativity and originality that 3D printing offers, they are creating one of kind urns that are gaining lots of interest. We also chat social media for funeral homes and the way that the industry is headning.
My name is Peter Billingham and through speaking at conferences, writing books and consulting I help the funeral industry change and adapt to an online world. Perhaps I can help you?
Once I've Gone allows you to record your final wishes and important information so that it can be shared with your nearest and dearest when it's your time to go to the great gig in the sky. You can use the site to capture special memories and messages, record your life story for future generations and even start your bucket list.