Where it began
My wife lost her mum when she was still young — too young to lose the person who knew her first, and longest. There is a particular kind of grief in that: you do not only miss the person, you miss all the years you were supposed to have. The conversations that never happened. The advice you can no longer ask for.
“You do not only miss the person — you miss all the years you were supposed to have.”
The quiet fear
In the years that followed, we noticed something quiet and frightening. Memory fades. Not all at once — slowly. The exact sound of her voice. The way she said certain things. The small, ordinary details you never think to write down, because you are certain you could never forget them. And then one day you reach for one, and it is not quite there anymore.
For the ones who come after
There was something else, too. We have children now. One day they may have children. They will carry her name, maybe her laugh, and one day they will ask about the grandmother they never got to meet. We did not want to hand them only a photograph and a few half-remembered stories. We wanted to give them her — how she spoke, what she loved, the things that made her herself.
So we began writing
So we began writing it down. All of it. And out of those pages came Still With Me: a guided journal made to hold one person’s memory, so that it does not have to live only in the parts of us that forget.
What the writing gave back
Something happened in the writing that we did not expect. Putting it into words — slowly, a page at a time — gave the grief somewhere to go. We are not going to promise you that a book heals anything; nothing does that neatly, and anyone who says otherwise has not been where you are. But sitting with the memories, instead of bracing against them, turned out to be its own quiet kind of comfort.
“A way of grieving that felt less like losing her again, and more like keeping her close.”
One person, one edition
Each edition is devoted to a single loss — a mother, a father, a partner, someone whose place in your life no one word can hold — because no two people are the same, and none of them deserve to be an afterthought. Inside, around eighty gentle prompts help you capture what you do not want to lose: the details, the stories only you know, the things you still want to say. There is room for tears, and room for the occasional smile. You do not need to be a writer. You only need to be ready, in your own time.
Made to last
It is 120 pages, printed on quality paper and bound to last — a keepsake, not a printout. Something a grandchild can open in thirty years and, page by page, meet someone they were never able to meet.
If you are here too
If you are here, you may have lost someone too. We are so sorry. Whatever you are remembering, and however long ago it was, your memories are worth keeping. There is no timeline for this, and it is never too late to begin.
This started as our way of making sure that a mother would never truly be gone — that she could still be known, and loved, by people who never had the chance to meet her. We hope it can do the same for the person you love. Their story is still yours to hold, and yours to pass on.
— Still With Me