We recently passed a number I did not let myself imagine when I started. People have now shared hundreds of memories through OurMemoryBook.com.
I want to sit with that for a second before I do anything else with it because the number is not really the point. The people are. Hundreds of memories means hundreds of moments that someone decided were worth keeping, worth handing to another person, worth saving from the slow erasure that otherwise comes for all of it.
Here is what makes that humbling rather than simply gratifying. I do not see any of it. I do not read your stories, and I never have. I do not know the inside jokes, the quiet confessions, the things said about a person that they never got to hear while they were alive. That was a deliberate decision about how this should work. The memories belong to the people who share them and to the people they are meant for. So when I tell you that hundreds of memories have been shared, I am giving you a count, not a glimpse. I know the shape of the thing without ever seeing inside it, and somehow that makes the trust feel larger rather than smaller.
I do know the shape, though, and the shape is what moves me. (We have categories for suggested templates.)
People have used this to mark retirements after a working lifetime that deserved more than a card passed around the office on someone’s last Friday. Birthdays. Celebrations of life, for people who are gone and whom the people left behind flatly refuse to forget. Graduations, including, as it happens, my own daughter’s. We used our own product on one of the proudest weekends our family has had in years, which I suppose makes Avery both a graduate and a case study. She has forgiven me. Mostly.
Our family misson statement start with the line: we have a debt to those before us and an obligation to those after us. Every single one of those hundreds of memories is somebody paying that exact debt and meeting that exact obligation usually without ever framing it that way in their own head. It is the oldest thing our species does. We survive something, we grow from it, and then we turn around and hand what we learned both backward and forward at once. You did that. Hundreds of times now.
I built this for reasons that were deeply personal. Today I only want to say one thing.
Thank you. You did not have to trust something made by someone you have never met with something as irreplaceable as a memory. You did it anyway, hundreds of times over. I am grateful beyond what I can put cleanly into words, and I intend to keep earning it.