Preserving the Memories of Those You Love- with Alexander Josephson | EP 507

Close your eyes and imagine. What if the things in life that caused us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, are challenges. Challenges designed to help us grow to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried, but what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth, and I am your host, Brian Smith. Hey there, I'm Brian Smith, and welcome to Grief to Growth. In case you're new here, I'm glad you found us. If you've been with me for a while, welcome back. This shows up making sense of life, especially when life doesn't make sense. We talk about grief, loss, and the questions that keep us up at night. Who are we? Where do we go when we die? And is it possible that the people we've lost are closer than we think? I bring on guests to help illuminate the path, no matter how dark it feels. My guest today is Alexander Josephson. He's an architect who found himself sitting in a hospital room, listening to his father dictate what he wanted, written on his tombstone. Alexander is the father of partisans, an award-winning design studio in Toronto. And he spent his career thinking about how buildings shape what we feel. But in that room with his father, watching his father fight COVID for nine months, he realized that that stone was too small for the story. What do we get? A name, two dates, a line of text carved into a rock. Is that really all we get? The question became cumulus, a digital memorial platform built the way an architect would build it. It's not a static page. It's not a photo album gathering dust. It's a living space that you can move through, add to, and return to over the years. Map to real places and real graves, holding photos and memories and voices and stories. In this episode, we're going to talk about grief as something spatial, something that you move through rather than something you get over. We'll get into why memory needs a place to live and what happens in a culture like ours that avoids loss completely, that we stop building rituals around it. Alexander designs for emotion in a world obsessed with efficiency. And I want to know what that actually looks like when the thing you're designing for is sorrow. We'll also sit with the harder questions. Can ritual be real online? What do we lose when remembrance goes digital and what might we gain? What might we gain? And what does it mean to make something that doesn't try to fix your grief, but simply holds it? Now, for those of you who aren't familiar, I lost my daughter, Shana, in 2015. Her picture sits on my desk. It's on my watch face. It's in the foyer of my home. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see it's in the background over my shoulder. I know what it is to want to put love in a place where there's nowhere obvious for it to go. So this conversation is personal for me. If you've been carrying someone with you and you've wondered where they're supposed to live now, then this one's for you also. And if you want to continue the conversation after the episode, head over to grief to growth.substack.com. You'll find an article there about today's discussion where you can comment and connect with me and other listeners. And with that, let's welcome Alex Josephson. Wow, Brian, you describe what I'm doing better than I do. So I think we should just switch. I'll interview you or you're hired. Yeah, well, I've been doing this group thing for a while now. It's been 11 years for me. And this is a question that comes up over and over. I work with clients and over and over, there's this fear that our loved ones are going to be forgotten. And I went to your website earlier and I saw the conversation you were having with your father and you described like the three times a person dies. So maybe we'll start with that. Yes, I think about this a lot, especially. Especially when it comes to our stories that we tell and the impact we make on everybody around us. And I did once hear that obviously this is cultural, but there's three deaths. The first is when our physical bodies give up. Well, I shouldn't say give up, but we have our physical bodies die. And the second is the last time someone visits your grave. And the third is the last time someone utters your name. And I just thought that was so profound. And that's more, I don't think that's like an ego, that story that the three does. I believe that it's not just about someone uttering your name or not visiting your grave. It's you, you, you, the three deaths. But I think what's more important is the implication of the three deaths. The first death is the death that everybody universally just sort of has to grapple with it. But the other two are kind of more philosophical, right? And it has to do with your community. And maybe the reason the world in general has so much strife in it is we don't have close enough community and we do stop talking about each other. And my guess is that there's a lot more people doing good in this world than there are bad. But this community is lost. And when the community is lost, we lose more. Yeah, I think that's a really, really good way of putting it. And when I first heard that thing about when we die, it was from the movie Coco. And I remember watching it many years ago, the Disney movie, and the whole thing is about the remembrance. And whether it's, whether it's warranted or not, it's a really, it's a fear that we have. I know when my daughter passed away, she was only 15. And I was like, how much of an impact could you make in the world in 15 years? And so we wonder, like, are our kids going to be remembered or are our fathers or parents going to be remembered? So this legacy thing is a very, very important thing. And I guess it struck you. So tell me back to that room with you and your father and having these conversations. Well, your daughter is going to live forever because you're building the story around her. And she's inspired you and probably hundreds of thousands of people who have listened to you over the 11 years that you've, I don't know how many people have listened to you. Maybe it's millions. You know what I mean? Like I, in North America, I think the discussion around grief is so, it's really picking up. But I think in general, our cultural is like loss avoidant and we don't want to talk about it. Confucian culture is you have to build a shrine every year to honor your loved ones that have passed and you're honoring your daughter. How often do you do podcasts? Once a week. So you say you're honoring her every week. Yeah. So you've honored her 564 times. Yeah. Well, it's well, the podcast and the sub stack. And so I do, you know, quite a few things around her. So when you were, you know, we, and this thing becomes really real to us when someone that we are very close to is facing that, that mortality. And that was the situation with you and your father. So tell me how that inspired you to start cumulus. Okay. So first of all, everybody loves it. It was like, why cumulus? Well, cloud is, cumulus cloud is like the most beautiful cloud. Imagine it was billowing, kind of growing clouds. And to us at cross culturally, that means going to heaven. So I was like, let's call this heaven without calling it heaven. So to call it, call it cumulus. But cumulus also is like this idea of everything that we accumulate, all of our memories, all of these things, where do we put them? And we're more than the sum of our parts. And a cloud is much more, uh, just like physically than the sum of its droplets. It's this, these are, every cloud's unique. So we called it cumulus. And, you know, my family, every family is different, but my father was a doctor. And so he'd talk about death at the dinner table. And so talking about death in my family was sort of, it just was, my mother's mother died when she was 51. Like there was just a lot of talk about death in our family. No one lived to 95 and had these long, you know, beautiful, romantic lives. You know, and, and so I always heard about death and I was, and I confronted it even as a teenager, when my grandfather died, I was in the hospital with him. Um, my, one of my best friends died when I was nine. Uh, so I, I feel like I had a lot of exposure to death, but then my father and mother had this Egyptian, they collected Egyptian, uh, antiquity stuff. And so they were interested in like the cult of death. Uh, much like the Mexicans celebrate the day of death, the Dia del Muerto. Um, and, uh, and so death was sort of, and I would say more like legacy was something that our family talked about. And then I went into architecture and architecture, like the only, the oldest buildings that survive time are tombs. And there's actually like in ancient Egypt. There's a person named or a figure named Imhotep who was supposedly the first architect who designed the pyramids. No one really has proven whether this person actually existed or they were a God. And so like, I was, I just was like, this is sort of second fiddle to me in a way, this idea of dealing with mortality and grief. Not that I'm any good at it. I'm just saying I, I, I've been exposed to it. So that's one thing. And then my father was, you know, my, my mother and father have had health health issues earlier in their lives than most, you know, and, um, my father was diagnosed with cancer at like 60, but it was really indolent and didn't start chemo until the pandemic, which is terrible. Right. Cause like, if you have the whole thing about COVID was preexisting conditions equal death. Right. And so the cancer was sort of like an axe hanging over all of our heads and then the pandemic, all this mortality or death everywhere. And my father on chemo and going to work and treating people still, you know, this guy, this guy was an ENT doctor and obviously it was just a ticking time bomb. Like on chemo, when are you going to get COVID? He lasted almost two years before getting COVID, like miraculously. And then when he got it, it hit him like a freight train, basically like incapacitated. Um, and doctors are the worst patients, like the worst, so ungrateful for all the help around them. Anyway, so in the hospital, he goes, but before then he was like, I want you to design the family, uh, tomb. He's like, I want to build a tomb. I want to leave some of my money to build a tomb. And I was like, you have enough money to build a tomb. Anyway, I went to a cemetery and I costed it for him. I was like, so it's going to cost about 3 million bucks, like Canadian dollars. So like 2 million in the U S that's to get enough land at a cemetery. That's like perpetually managed and flowers and kept, uh, cause you to build a tomb, you need, you know, like, I don't know, 50, 200 feet by 50, 200 feet. You need your own plot of land. There's a minimum anyway. So, so being in cemeteries, I found out is super expensive. Like if you, I don't know where am I, where are you calling in from? I'm in Ohio. Which, which city? Uh, Cincinnati. Okay. So big cities, central cemetery. Do you have a nice cemetery in Cincinnati? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that would be probably like five figures minimum for just a plot for two people. Like just, just, just for the right before you put anything there. Yeah, exactly. So you're like, by the time you get like fancy gravestones, flower servers, perpetual management, insurance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're like, you're going to be easily six figures for a couple in a, in a managed, beautiful, central, accessible. Heritage cemetery in a, in a, in a metropolitan area. And you have some personal experience with this, I'm sure. Um, so my dad couldn't afford to build that. And, and I was like, well, I guess I'll design a gravestone. And it was just so unfulfilling. I wanted to build the tomb. No, yeah. I wanted to build the space, the place you'd visit the place that people would walk by with their dogs or go jogging in the cemetery and be like, wow, I wonder what they did or why did they build? Why did they put so much resources into doing that? What's the story? And it's funny when you go to cemeteries, you don't really get to read that on some of these tombs. It's just sort of like, maybe it's about ego, who knows? But you just want to hear that even the story about the tomb. And I said, well, I'm going to design the tomb. And what I've quickly figured out was the body is meaningless. Yeah, it's completely meaningless. What what's meaningful is all of the people you've touched, the things you said, the things you photographed, the videos, the writings, the notes, your recipe for lemon custard tart. You know, like these things that just disappear. And I started preserving them. And from an architect's perspective, I was like, how do I create this immersive poetic? Just something that did justice to the experience of those memories, the sorrow of some of it, but also the joy in a digital space. And that I could afford to build. And that's how Cumulus started, because basically I said, I'm going to do this digitally because our lives are digital now. Everything is trapped on our phones, everything's trapped on our computers. I need to put a place when I designed this, I was like, I'm going to create a cloud that you can float into. That is like, you know, we talk about our cloud computing, you know, like cloud, we want to go to heaven as a cloud. We want to, you know, all of our information is in the cloud. So I wanted to create a way to experience all that information in a beautiful way. And that's how I got to this digital solution. But to do that, I had to serendipitously and conveniently also have been a leader in computational generative algorithmic design and architecture so that I could manage all that data and give it a beautiful format, which we've done. But, you know, like in the end, it was about doing justice to my father and mother and then eventually all my ancestors. I found an album my grandmother put together in the 70s that hadn't been digitized, that I digitized of my ancestors. And I know that I have peace of mind now that, you know, based on the way we built Cumulus, which is like the equivalent of digital granite, as long as it as long as there's enough resources to support it and there's such thing as the browser, it will exist. And I thought, wow, like my grandmother took the time out of her busy days as an entrepreneur in the 70s and 80s to build this album. And then 50 years later, I took the time out of my day to build this, this platform for people so that they can, they can, any format can be preserved, web, you know, photos to websites, but also you can pin where people, firstly, you can pin anything. You can you can mark graves. You can do that all over the world. But like there's a kind of peace of mind that this is this is there and you can share it with all your relatives and even your best family friends to contribute the content. I think that in the context of like at need, when someone's passed away, there's a lot of pressure. So like decentralize the collection of that information. Yeah. And instead of making it rest on one person. But to your point, and I was making a very short story long building Cumulus in the hospital by my father's bedside as he was struggling to survive. Was my way of dealing with grief. I was do I was deal. I was I was man. I realized that Cumulus in the end was my grief mountain. And I climbed it. And in the end, my father survived, which is a miracle, like so miraculous. But we were told he was going to die three times. And when you're told someone's going to die, you start grieving. Yes. And they're not dead yet. But the idea happened. Yes, of course. Yeah. Intensivatory grief is a real thing. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's what it was cathartic. That's where like it was a release for me that I built it. I mean, it's like it was as if I mean, there's terrible analogies, but I dug the dirt myself. Yeah. And then I put it, you know, it's like in my in my cultural tradition, you you you actually shove when someone passes away, you shovel the dirt back on their on their coffin when they're buried or their ashes. And that's part of you, you know, that's part of helping you build towards the the new person you are after you, you know, you grieve. And I love the word grief because it means you're developing into something new. Right. And I felt like building that memorial platform created something new in me, too. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's really interesting. Early, you said something about you were talking about the tomb and the body is like the least and most are the least important thing there. And it's and just personally, we have my daughter's body cremated because I'm not I'm not a grave person because I think a grave ties us to a location. It gives us the false impression that our loved one is there. And I am about knocking people that that go to graves and do that kind of stuff. But I believe that you talked about the body dies, but I believe the spirit lives on. So I'm not I don't want to be tied to the body. I don't want to be tied to a location. And the tomb is a really interesting thing. And you talked about how they're big and people look at it and stuff. But the body, you're not going to view the body, of course, because the body decays, you know, the body's even if you put someone in a tomb, the body's gone after a short period of time. It's the memories that's important. It's it's all those things that make us unique. So it's really almost kind of a blessing that you weren't able to build that tomb because you would have spent a couple of million dollars. And now you've got something that's living and breathing. Exactly. And and I think also in the context of our bodies, the other fascinating thing is like the atoms, the elements in our body are not possible except at the center. They're created in neutron stars and star, of course. Yeah, iron is created inside the core of a star and it's our blood. Yeah. Yeah. And I just find the relationship between the body, memories and astronomy so beautiful. And this idea that they can all end them and and just the unexplainable of the universe, the spirit of it all. I find that the relationship between these four things is so important around death that we're part of something bigger and things do live on. But at the same time, I'm not a Taoist that's like, well, none of this matters. Right. OK, I do think it matters. And I think it gives people a sense of grounding, a sense of belonging. And perhaps that sense of belonging is is is what is missing in the world and create can contribute to some more peace. And so that's why I thought I needed to create this experience that you could feel confident would live on as a dedicated technology for memorializing our our lives, but also connecting and ensuring that we stay connected to the people that we care about the most and can continue to invite the tree of people that evolve below us in a way or after us. And what my question is, do you mind me asking you cremated your daughter? Where were her ashes? Various places. That's that's a great thing about cremation. You know, we we we love Arizona. My wife and I go to Arizona because we're part of an organization called Helping Parents Heal. So we love the desert. So we've spread some of our ashes in the desert. A few a couple of weeks, six weeks before she passed, she was 15. She was healthy. She was talking with her sister and she said, When I die, I want to be cremated and buried under a tree. So we after she passed, some friends gave us a tree. And there's a tree right outside my front door. And some of our ashes are there. So they're they're there in various places. I the the connection between the spirit and the body for me is like the body is a temporary arrangement of atoms we use while we're here. The body we have, the body I have today is not the body I have when I was five years old, you know, all those atoms have turned over. So that's just a collection that just happens to it's a vehicle that we go through. So that's why I'm very careful. I'd say I said we didn't cremate Shane and we cremated her body because we've got to we've got to dispose of the body. We can bury it in the ground and we can build a nice tumor out and stuff. I'll never forget my my mother-in-law used to say we would tease her because she was Catholic. She's like, don't burn me up. Don't don't cream me. And I don't burn me up. I was so tempted to say to her, no, we're just going to put you in a box in the ground and let the worms eat you. You know, it's like the body is temporary. I agree with you. But your story of what Shane had told you to do. Unless you well, obviously, this is a this is a form of memorialization, what you're doing, unless other people and similar contexts have a way of communicating that. That story is so beautiful and inspiring. That dies that and I said, well, you know, the story of my father wanting to create a home for us, for the after. I figured a way out to do it. Right. Right. And that story is imbued in in in how those ashes are being tended to. Right. But but the whole world can learn from your story and my father's story and and and giving that possibility, giving that giving that space to exist I think is beautiful. You know, and again, I love what you're doing because it's it is a very real fear. I talked to so many people that say I want my wife to be remembered. I want my daughter to be remembered. I want my husband to be remembered. And as I said earlier, I think it's kind of an unfounded fear because our our loved ones make more of an impact than we know. But it is a real fear and it's a real need for us to be able to do this. And I think what you're creating and I'm a digital kind of person myself. And I know people don't they don't like, you know, we're digitizing everything. But there's some great things about it. Right. You mentioned earlier, we can share this. It's a community thing to build it. Otherwise, it's one person's responsibility. If I'm going to try to memorialize my father or my mother, I've got to go collect all the stories. I've got to write them down. I've got to find the pictures. You can open this up to the community and say, you know, make your contribution. And you get to learn a lot about your loved one while you're doing that. So similar, similar to that kind of logic, there is a family on Cumulus and they they lost a patriarch and he was a big golfer. And he came with a rags to riches story has like 64 grandchildren and great grandchildren. Like he had six kids with like just crazy. I think there's something like 90 people invited to that cloud. And they spread his ashes in a in a cemetery in Toronto. They dropped some in the ocean and they put some in the over the this little bridge on the old. They went golfing to honor their father, the sons. And they went to Scotland and put a little bit on this a this very famous old golf course. Yeah. And they pinned in their in their in their family cloud. You can see all their memories and these funny notes that his wife would leave. So the kids would do their chores in the morning because she was, you know, the breadwinner while he was trying to build a successful business in this in the fifties, just these beautiful things that you'd never see. You'd never see. But then the pins had these stories like. My father, you know, Paul loved to golf and he loved the he loved he loved the ocean. So we put a pin in the middle of the Atlantic where we dropped some of his ashes and we and we put a pin on this golf course bridge and. When you see that pin and the story with it, there's something kind of profound about it humanizes. That that memory in a beautiful way. And there's a spatial quality. You talked about the space of grief and moving. You're moving through a space. And I feel like that's what why that's what my goal was. My goal was to create a poetic space for that for that grief to exist and also make it beautiful and. And recognize that. The world, all of this technology we have is flattened things and separated us more than it's connected us like, yeah, I can reach you, Brian. But in a way, our our our lives are. It's like atomic now, it's like there's so much content, there's so much information coming at us that in many ways it's overwhelming. So the question is, how do you slow it down? And and create any like. Some people ask me, like, what's the difference between this and a Dropbox? Well, you tell me, like, like when someone dies, you get these shoeboxes of photos and things. It's overwhelming. What do you do with it? It's not there's no shoebox or Dropbox or Google Drive is designed to manage the solemnity of someone's legacy, whether they're living or already passed. Those are just voids. They're not spaces. So I've really tried to build something that. Is resonant spiritually, but also allows you to capture things and and bring it all together in a way that's platform agnostic and travels with you on your phone. You can make time capsules and you can just, you know, I'm doing this for my daughters right now. Like I'm I'm making these time capsules for them because I'm a new father. So I wow. Congratulations. Thank you. And so I have two daughters. They're very young under two. And I just do these little videos with them and me and I send them to this cloud. And then when they're I don't know when they're 15 or 16. And I'll send it to them. Yeah. And that's and that, you know, that's the thing about you. You mentioned technology and I'm there is there is a epidemic of loneliness now. People are mistaking technology for human connection. There are all these issues with it, but there are also so many beautiful things that we can do with it that weren't possible in the past. You know, I imagine your daughters seeing videos of you now when they're 20 or 30 or 40 years from now and being able to have that that visceral experience of having you actually speak to them. That's something we couldn't do in the past. So that's that's something that technology does give us that that ability to do that. Yeah. And that's the good part about technology. I think that the the problem is that the technology is being used, you know, to really distract us. You know, like like those platforms are essentially now like a a stream of advertising. You know, you didn't even ask for it, but it's I mean, like TVs was the joke. A 30 minute program was only 24 minutes. Yeah, I mean, like my guess is like if you open your Instagram, it's 80 20. Like 80 percent of stuff you see in your live feed is advertising. It's not it's not your network. It's not your friends. It's pure advertising. And it's also listening to you. You can change the settings on your phone, I think. But essentially, like the things you do on your devices helps them drive either towards your in your insecurities, your envies, your desires, you know, it's essentially. I think it's a giant distraction. And so I obviously didn't want to build something like that. And so, you know, I I think technology in general is a good thing. It's just I think that the social networks that have been built are not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, it's to me, it's a tool. And like any other tool, you can take a hammer, you can build a house with it. You can take a hammer. You can murder somebody with it. It's you do you can do different things with the tool. One thing I'm curious about, you know, we talked about physical spaces and we talked about, you know, cumulus. Let's talk about the integration of the two. And I understand that your your grandmother's has like a QR code, I think, at her grave site. Yes. It wasn't the main point of what we were doing, but because of the nature of how we designed it and you can go. You've gone and seen it. You're in this incredible, essentially like a crystalline cloud of your of your memories, and it just inferred that you could make something physical as well from a design language. Like the cumulus has a design language. It's not just a flat scrolling environment and that that three dimensional. I guess you'd say like the way you can jump from the just the digital to the three dimensional made a lot of sense. And so we made we've sent this to our cemetery partners that we're working with, but basically these three inch by by three inch or four inch by four inch. What I what I would call monuments in a way that can sit on top of a grave and have a QR code on one of the panels. But instead of it just being like a sticker or something like you stick like just like here's the QR code, it's it's this sort of designed. Considered object like like a in some traditions, you put a stone on the grave and to show the community that you were there and those stones shouldn't be removed. They should stay and only nature can move those stones. And so we thought, well, how do we design the equivalent of the stone? Which is a very common tradition in in in Jewish and a few other cultures to leave a stone. And so we created the cumulus equivalent of the stone. And one of the pieces of that has a QR code very, very tastefully put on it, but also an RFID chip in it. So you can just tap your phone to it and the cloud comes up. Or if you're, you know, super tech savvy and you went to a cemetery that had these, you could bring a VR headset and you could be in full VR immersion of that person's cloud and their legacy and the memories. Yeah, yeah. So it's like what we want it. You know, I ended up raising venture capital to, you know, to to build what I what we've got today. And so it's a business. But the idea was to create a poetic digital layer to a cemetery. And, you know, you go to a cemetery and it's sometimes really hard to find people like it's hard to orient yourself. And also subconsciously, you you know, like I've been to see my grandparents. But interestingly enough, and I've been to see other people in cemeteries that are close to me, but I forget where they are. And it's and it's not it's not because they're not important. But I think that death represents something so profound subconsciously that that it's disorienting. It's very disorienting. So this idea of creating a layer in a cemetery that not only could help people always find their loved ones, but layer that with the memories and and make an immersive experience out of it. Gives form to those two dimensional graves. Yeah, gives, you know, makes it about those people's memories and not their bodies. Because because I do believe you're right, like the body. It's not daring, but neither are their memories. Right. And where do where do they go? Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting because I just have a radio program. I just recorded an episode and I was doing some research for it. There's actually a part of our brain that when people are really close to us that maps where they are physically in the world. Like you could think about your father and it's like he's here. I your wife, she's here. My daughters, they're there. When someone passes from the world physically and we're oriented toward the body, our brains short circuit because our brain goes, well, they can't be nowhere, but they're not in their body anymore. So this question of where are they becomes of it drives us crazy. We loop on it, you know, and people will say, where are they? Where are they? And if and this is why I had this insight of when Shana even when she passed, I was like, I don't want a location. I don't want to be tied to. She's over there, you know, in the Westchester Cemetery. To me now, she's everywhere. She's in the cloud, as you would say. Right. So that that if you're if you even are going to the grave site, that's a reminder that I'm here. This location is important, but that's not where they are. And that I guess that totally explains how I feel and why I can't remember where they are every time. Right. And I have to ask the person that works there that's only there because it's these cemeteries can't afford to staff them. Right. Basically, you know, but basically like you have to wait to talk to someone and then they have to look up in their files and then they find them and they tell you where it is. And if you don't keep this information, it just just it's it's just a question of like, I think you're right. Our subconscious does something spatially to us when we lose someone. So I felt like I needed to I needed a map. Yeah, to find my to find my grandparents, which is so like in the end, it's kind of ridiculous that you've been somewhere 10 times or whatever it is and you can't remember. Yes, a lot. I think there's a lot about that. Yeah, that's that's our brain going. That's not really them. If you like, I remember when I went to my grandfather's or my is my grandfather, you know, when he passed away and I looked at the body and people have a lot of people have a visceral reaction like that's not them because our brain knows that that's that body is not them. So when we when we did, we'd go visit that grave site. You kind of says like it's this flat two dimensional thing. It's not really them. It's like I know I know for a lot of people supporting to have that. For me, it's just it's just not because I don't see my daughter as being there or I've never been to my grandparents grave site. It's just because I'm like, why they're not there. Yeah, I mean, it makes total sense. But I think that everybody is. There's so many different cultures of grief. Right. Yes. Yes. Like you have a lot of I think Buddhists iconography iconography in your shelf there. So you probably so you have a particular approach to grief and death that's familiar in that cultural tradition, perhaps. Yeah. Then you've got the, you know, giant Catholic approach, which is very physical. Yeah, it's very, very physical. And that runs the full gamut. Look at look at India. Yeah, go to Vanarasi and they they go to the Ghat. And it's this fires and the river and the Ganges. And it's a gateway to the to the next dimension. And I just find all these traditions so beautiful. And the the the entire point of what what I was trying to build was that regardless of your tradition, if if there's any anything you want to preserve or or pass on or if or if you don't want to be the only person responsible for having to make that effort to to create a repository, you know, to to to document that things because it always falls usually falls on one person. This is how you do it. Yeah. The one analogy I want the one story I didn't tell you that was a lot of things came together for me to get into this world. Besides my father's mortality and my mother and father always talking about, you know, you know, mortal mortality. But my uncle, who is the opposite, my father's brother would send me these emails of like of his achievements. He actually went to Ohio State, which is your I don't know if you went there. Yes, I did. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. There you go. So my uncle from Toronto did optometry school at Ohio State, which is I don't know if you know this, but it's one of the great schools of Ophthalmology and and optometry in the world. Right. And so he became sort of like a very globally renowned optometrist and researcher that helped develop soft contact lenses. And anyway, I owe him a lot. Right. Anyways, he's a big, huge Ohio guy, right? Like he goes back there for alumni stuff and he sends me these articles like, look, I've been recognized as a Buckeye alumnus of note or whatever. And I'm like, and he's like, this is one for the family archive. And it was like, oh, who's putting that together, Josh? Yeah. Am I your secretary? Yeah. Yeah. And but I became the family secretary. I don't know how. And this was before Cumulus. Like I just was constantly sent this stuff from either him or my cousins or my grandparents, great grandparents. I found I found this album that my grandmother had put together. And my mother was like, here's all of our albums. And I was like, why is everybody pointing at me? Because I'm just like I like working a lot. And so like, I guess my point is there's a lot of stuff you can't preserve. And I felt overwhelmed by that. And I was like, I got to put I'm going to make this thing for him. Anyway, I made the thing and he's 82. And it doesn't matter because he can't even he he's he still just sends me things. And I have to put him I have to put it on. Right. So it's like, you know, no good deed goes unpunished. Right. But I guess my point is there's so many different kinds of people. And there's so many different motivations for wanting to be remembered, whether it's your achievements and ego and these kinds of things, or if it's really just about passing on the stories and the values. Yeah. And also, maybe it's about making the world a better place. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think it's great because again, I think there's there's a couple of needs that addresses that I've found with my clients. One is that need to know that my loved one's going to be remembered, know that people are going to speak their name, passing on the stories, as you said. And then the other thing is that where are they? Where, you know, where do they go? And this gives us a mental space where we can go and visit with their memory. Exactly. Yeah. So I know our time is limited today. I really appreciate you doing this. Tell people where they can find out more about Cumulus if they want to try it out. Yeah. So Cumulus is on Instagram, LinkedIn and has the website, but it's also an app. So on your phone, you can go to the App Store on Android and on iOS. Apple devices, you can download Cumulus Companion, which is your memorial companion. You download it and it helps you invite contacts and in on on the app stores and then Cumulus.world is our website. And you can go and see all the videos of the of the rationale and the promise we make to people who want to be on the platform. And and then on Instagram, that's Cumulus World. And then also on on LinkedIn. But that's more, I think, like sort of like a business thing. But Instagram, for sure, has some some some of our content. But check out the app, check out the website and try it out for free. Yeah, that's good. Sounds good. It sounds like, again, I think I know there's a great need for it. So appreciate you building that and sharing it with our audience today. Thanks, Ryan. And thanks for thanks for texting me this morning and telling your story to the world and making it a better place. All right. All right. Well, enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks. Bye.