The Solace: online platform creates new way to grieve loved ones
How do you begin to memorialise the life of a loved one after they pass?
The methods we've cultivated over millennia are good ones, passed down through generations, designed to guide us through difficulty and connect us with others.
But the reality, of course, is that grieving goes on for far longer than the week or so it takes to hold a funeral. A mass, some flowers, and well wishes often don't come close to expressing the deep love we have for our loved ones, and the gap they leave in our lives when they pass on.
For Mark Legge, he says it wasn't until his dad died six years ago that he was exposed to "grief and the processes around it and the fact that I felt that it was lacking in a lot of care and empathy and consideration for the actual person".
"It felt a bit transactional and a bit cold, I would say."
His Dad, he says, was something of an explorer. An architect and founder of PLA Architects, Peter Legge's career spanned from rural Ireland to Nigeria. Mark recalls the stories he would tell as they were growing up, of "travelling around Germany in 1946 and '47, just after the war", taking off in his Morris Minor across Europe.
So it was unsurprising when, around his funeral, Mark and his family were being served up even more tales of his dad's exploits.
"Some I would have heard before, obviously, but there was a lot that I had never heard before, and they would have been from friends that maybe I hadn't come across or stories from his childhood or just people that maybe he hadn't been in touch with for a while that were at the funeral and would be reminiscing about these."
Losing these stories would be its own kind of loss. "They're all incredible stories, and I really wanted to be able to capture them in a way that, I suppose, memorialised them."
As many will know, often the most difficult part of grieving comes in the weeks and months after the loss, when fewer people call by and there are scant natural opportunities to talk about the person you've lost. Those stories dry up.
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The experience planted an idea in Mark: "I wanted to be able to create a digital legacy for someone that you could reflect back on in a week's time, a year's time, 10 year's time, whatever it might be." And so The Solace, a new online memorial platform, was born.
The platform, which launched only a few weeks ago, is designed for the "modern customer". As well as serving as a site where you can post a death notice, with information about funeral arrangements, it's a place where you can build a memorial for your loved one where others can chime in with stories, photos, videos and more.
There are currently two price points on the site: a free tier, which includes an online memorial, and the €75 tier, which includes making the memorial private or uploading photos and videos.
After the funeral itself, Mark says, "that's when [the platform] evolves into a digital memorial. It's a much more engaging and richer place rather than just having condolences. There's a lot more ways where you can upload photos and videos, you can donate to charity, you can plant a tree in someone's name, you can light a digital candle, you can obviously send flowers and candles and a sympathy card".
Mark wants to get people talking about grief, as well as celebrating our loved ones. "I feel like the traditions and the process around death, we do it well. What I don't think we do particularly well, [is] talking about it", he says. "We bury that a little bit."
We grieve slightly differently now, too. In the way that past generations would visit a grave, more of us have a sort of 'third space' for grief in our phones, where voice notes, text messages, photos and videos from our loved ones are preserved.
It can be deeply comforting but also somewhat insular - it's harder to share with others when it's 2 am and you've stumbled across the meme you shared with your best friend since college.
Social media has become its own bittersweet graveyard. There are millions of deceased social media accounts, reminders of the people we loved, shared memories, photographs, inside jokes passed between status updates and photo dump captions.
Analysis from the University of Oxford in 2019 theorised that the number of dead accounts on Facebook, now called Meta, could outnumber the living by 2069.
Finding ways to bridge the gap between ancient grieving traditions and our new, technology-based lives is needed. Part of the vision is creating a space for people to support one another, particularly if it's their first experience with grief.
"A lot of people struggle with how to show the care for someone who's gone through a loss. So what to say, what to do, how to help. And on the other side of that, the person who is grieving finds it hard to articulate or communicate what they're looking for", Mark says.
"I think if you haven't gone through it yourself, it's even harder. You don't have a clue how to manage it."
He hopes The Solace will become an online meeting point for people who are grieving: "Maybe there's someone in my area or nearby who also lost their dad or their mum or and they'd like to meet up and have a coffee because it's so hard to have those conversations with a friend who's maybe not gone through something like that."
Grief doesn't go away; it simply shifts and changes with you. It can come knocking in the most unusual, unexpected ways. Because of this, it's necessary that we become comfortable with talking about - and to - our grief.
Six months after his dad's death, Mark found out he had the bicuspid valve, a heart condition that his father also had. He had to undergo surgery to correct it, which led to another unexpected bout with grief: "I faced mortality, I suppose, in a certain way in terms of he died from something similar to what I have. I found that quite hard."
That brush with his own mortality only solidified how he'd been thinking about grief, and showed him why the more we engage with it, the better.
"It depends on how often you want to talk about it. But the more you're thinking about death, the more that you live. But I think that in a certain way, definitely helped me, I think, change, not immediately, but over a period of time.
"It did make me look at my life and what I really wanted to do."
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