The My Last Song Lifebox is the area of the website where people are encouraged to save their funeral wishes, letter of wishes and the personal details required by their executor when they die.

This will reduce the terrible stress and anxiety felt by the relatives immediately after someone dies when they realise they have to arrange the funeral.

All too often, the parted has left no wishes, and so families don’t know if they will be organising the sort of funeral their loved would have wanted.

Yet if grieving families know they are giving the loved one the funeral he or she wanted, they feel more positive and can come to terms with the loss more easily. The goodbye they are giving the parted is somehow more reassuring if they have arranged the funeral in a less stressful and more constructive frame of mind.

The Lifebox is also the place where people can store other personal information in sections such as Favourite Things; Friends; Life Story; My Obituary; Photos; Music; Scrapbooks and even My Secrets.

Currently with 50 megabytes of storage available in each Lifebox (and this likely to increase over time) the Lifebox subscriber can store video clips or audio recordings giving personal messages which can then be accessed by close loved ones for years after the subscriber has died.

The opportunity to go into the Lifebox and watch or hear the loved one will undoubtedly reduce the sense of loss,  because the loved one will seem to live on as people can see the face, hear the voice, recall the mannerisms, be touched by the smile.

To some extent the same is true of the written information subscribers puts into their Lifebox…to know their favourite music, favourite films, favourite holiday destinations, their achievements, their friends, even their secrets, mean their memory is much more vital and will remain so for far longer.

That is why I’m so encouraged by the positive feedback I’m getting to the Lifebox as a particularly useful online area not just to ensure the subscriber has the funeral he or she wants, but as a place that can provide a sort of digital immortality, reassuring to loved ones now and in the future.

Tags: bereavement, funeral music, funeral planning, letter of wishes, Lifebox

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 10:17 am and is filed under Funeral, Planning for the end. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.