It began at a funeral.

A few years ago, I went to the funeral of a man I grew up knowing well, and deeply respected.

At the service, they did what many funerals do: they invited anyone with a story to come up and share it. Some people made it through. Some just cried. And some of us, me among them, never found the moment to tell the one genuinely great story we were holding, before it passed. The few stories that were shared aloud that day are gone now, too. No one thought to write them down.

Driving home, I couldn’t let it go. What if someone had been there to catch all of it, every memory in that room, held by every person who came, and turn it into something that would last? Something that could hold the whole of who he was, instead of losing it when everyone went home. That is where Encapsoul began, and where its name came from: to encapsulate a soul, a whole life, before it fades.

I had just lost my job. I had the idea and none of the money to build it. But my mother, Kara, believed in me. She paid for the first business cards and the brochures I made, and she offered to be my first salesperson, going funeral home to funeral home to ask them to partner with a company that barely existed yet.

It wasn’t until she passed, five years later, that I finally understood what I had only imagined at that first funeral. What it is to lose someone, and to feel the sinking fear that her memories might fade with her.

So I set out to build the company she believed in all those years ago, to finish it and share it with the world. Her legacy is the first one we preserved.

Our mark is a firefly. On summer nights we used to catch them in a jar, not to keep them, but to hold their light close for a little while and watch each one flare on its own. A memory is like that: a flash of someone, bright and brief, and no two people hold quite the same one. A firefly’s light is gone in a blink. The memory of the people we love should not be.

My children are still young. They loved her. But they are at the age when a grandmother can slip into just a name and a face in a photograph. So I read them her book. In its pages she is not a name they were told, but a person they are still getting to know, the way everyone who loved her knew her. Because of it, they will never forget her.

Years from now, I imagine my children grown, with a shelf of these books, one for every person they loved and lost. My mother’s will be among them. I imagine them reading it aloud to children of their own, telling them about a great-grandmother they will never meet, and making her real anyway. And I hope that when they do, they are smiling, just as we did together when she was here.

— Austin Adams, Founder

Begin a memorial of your own