On memory and the things worth keeping
The Dog Is Gone and You Are Not Allowed to Be This Sad
What to keep, what disappears faster than you expect, and why missing an animal this much is not sentimental — it's biological.
Read →Your Grandmother Is the Last Person Alive Who Knows Who These People Are
The things only a grandparent knows disappear quietly and all at once. Here's what to capture first, and the one afternoon that saves the most.
Read →How to Make a Memorial Page for Someone, Without Getting It Wrong
A practical guide to making a memorial page for someone who died — what belongs on it, what doesn't, and the one question most families forget to ask.
Read →The First Anniversary Is the One No One Prepares You For
The first anniversary of a death catches you off guard — the body remembers before the mind does. What one year taught me, and why marking the day matters.
Read →When a Parent with Dementia Forgets Your Name
The day a parent with dementia doesn't know your name is one of the hardest in the long goodbye. What one daughter learned — and how to hold on to who they are.
Read →How to Record Your Parent's Stories Before Dementia Takes Them
Dementia takes the stories and the voice while your parent is still here. Gentle ways to record them together — from a daughter doing it, badly and in time, with her own mother.
Read →The Questions That Actually Get You a Story, Not a Sentence
The right questions turn a stiff recording into a real story. Here's how to ask, when to stay quiet, and what actually gets someone talking.
Read →How to Ask Your Parent About Their Life (Before It Becomes a Question You Wish You'd Asked)
A gentle, practical guide to sitting down with a parent and actually hearing their story — where to start, what to ask, and what to do with it afterward.
Read →Last Words You Didn't Choose
Nobody gets to pick their final conversation. Most of us don't even get to remember it correctly.
Read →The Places That Don't Know Someone Is Gone: What Really Happens to a Facebook Account After Someone Dies
More people will be dead on Facebook than alive on it by the 2060s. Here's what really happens to a Facebook account after someone dies — memorialization, birthday reminders, and the access problem nobody warns you about.
Read →The Box You Never Opened: How to Preserve and Digitize Old Family Photos
You keep meaning to open that box of old photos "later." Here's how to actually preserve and digitize old family photos before they fade, and why later never arrives on its own.
Read →The Story You Could Lose Without Knowing: How to Record and Preserve Family Stories Before It's Too Late
The best version of a family story is usually the one nobody wrote down. A guide to recording and preserving family stories before they're gone for good.
Read →The Coat I Almost Gave Away
A folded grocery list in a coat pocket, two years after he died. The objects we almost give away are often the last place their handwriting survives.
Read →The Phone That Wouldn't Unlock
Locked out of a parent's phone after death: what digital estate planning solves, what it doesn't, and why unlocking an account is not the same as remembering someone.
Read →Millions Watched Strangers Cry Over Found Family Photos. Here's Why.
A guy who returns thrift-store photos to strangers has millions of followers, and the comment sections are full of tears. It's not really about the photos.
Read →We Didn't Know the Password. We Never Got the Photos Back.
Thousands of family photos, trapped behind a passcode nobody wrote down. It happens more than you'd think — and there's no customer support line that fixes it.
Read →The Only Photo of Me and My Mother at Five Years Old Is Gone
A five-minute mistake, and one photograph, gone for good. Here's what it taught me about the difference between having a memory and actually keeping it.
Read →Your Parents Are the Only Copy of Half Your Childhood Left
There's a version of your own childhood only your parents remember. Here's why waiting to ask about it is riskier than it feels — and where to put the answers.
Read →The Shoebox Isn't a Backup. It's a Countdown.
That shoebox of photos in the closet feels permanent. It isn't. Here's what's actually happening to it every year you don't open it — and the thirty-second fix.
Read →Keeping the Memory of Someone You Lost to Alcohol
Writing about someone who died of alcoholism means writing around a word that tends to swallow everything else about them. Here's how to write the fuller version.
Read →How to Preserve the Memory of a Parent You Had a Complicated Relationship With
Most guides about grief assume you only loved the person you lost. This one is for the harder, more honest version of that story.
Read →What to Do When You Can't Remember Someone's Voice
You'll keep their face for decades. Their voice goes first, quietly, without warning. What still works years later, what to save today, and the one phrase only they said.
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Somewhere to keep it
Stella Memoria is a page in memory of someone you loved — their photographs, their story, and what other people remember about them, kept together in one place. You write it a little at a time, and it stays online.