The Death Goes Digital Podcast

Rachel entered The EXIT EARTH Short Story Competition, of which she was a finalist, with her work, ‘How To Curate a Life.’ It explores and opens up a fascinating discussion about what happens to our online lives after we die in a short story format.

If you could send a letter to your great-grandchildren, what would you say? The idea of leaving messages for our loved ones is not new; it's probably as old as writing. Today using digital platforms we can create, store and send messages to the future simply and quickly. If you could post an "I Love You" to the future who would you write to, what would you say and when would you want it delivered? You can do that with GabrielsVault, a generational message platform.

What is the soundtrack to your life? Using this new life story curation website, you can now list and share the song and memories that make your life memorable using www.mylastsoundtrack.com It's the coolest place on the web to craft your legacy and it's driven by music!

The Celebrant Directory is a new website designed to be the ultimate search and review site dedicated to Celebrants. Having an online profile is quickly becoming more critical as families search for celebrants as the need and the awareness of the services they offer grow. This website allows celebrants the opportunity to develop a show-stopping profile and then give clients the opportunities to leave reviews. Could joining this service help your celebrant business? I chat to Jennifer Constantthe founder to find out.

Jane Duncan Rogers is an award-winning Life and Death coach who helps people prepare well for the best ending of life possible.  Having been in the field of psychotherapy and personal growth for more than 25 years, she is also the author of Gifted By Grief: A True Story of Cancer, Loss and Rebirth and Before I Go: Practical Questions to Ask and Answer Before You Die. She founded Before I Go Solutions in 2016. We chat about the role of digital technology in the world of grief and the upcoming training course for Before I Go, practitioners. 

Paula Kiel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.  She is thinking and researching how contemporary media blur boundaries and challenges established categories such as local and global or presence and absence - and even life and death. Her curiosity with these issues brought her to consider how digital media is involved in death-related practices (such as public mourning and memorialisation) today.

Toby Angel and I chat about how to bring together the ancient rituals of life and death, and the digital age of communication online can work together incredibly well-helping families find new ways of expressing and remembering the loss of someone they love.

Psychologist & author, Dr. Elaine Kasket is currently hard at work on All the Ghosts in the Machine. Researching the issues of death and digital legacy for 12 years, this book brings together questions about what it means to be human in a digital age.

Will your family know where to find all your vital estate planning information? In this episode, I chat with Ric Parks the founder of AfterVault.  You can centralise and organise all your vital documents with AfterVault and when you die they will pass them on to the people you’ve designated. We chat about lost valuables, digital legacy and the rise of digital estate planning. 

Justine Wykerd is a civil celebrant based in Warwickshire. In September 2017 she was awarded "Celebrant of the Year" at the Good Funeral Awards. In this episode, we chat about what it takes to be a successful celebrant and how having an online presence is becoming critical to run your business. We also get a guest interruption from you deaf dog! Makes for a fun episode.