The memorial is in two weeks

• About 15 minutes today to create the archive
• The service program or a family group chat, for sharing the invite link
• One other person willing to help review, if you are the closest mourner

First: we're sorry. Two weeks before a memorial is one of the hardest and busiest stretches a family goes through, and the last thing you need is another project. So this playbook is deliberately small. It asks you to do one fifteen-minute thing today, one five-minute thing this week, and then to let everything else wait.

Here is the one idea underneath all of it: right now, memories are at their freshest and the family is at its most gathered. That combination will not come again. The archive's job during memorial week is simply to catch what's in the air — not to be beautiful, not to be organized, not to be finished. A collection point, not a presentation.

1. Create the archive today (15 minutes)

From your dashboard, start a new archive. When it asks who this is about, the name is enough — even the name everyone actually used. When it asks where they are in life, choose "no longer living." That one answer matters: the archive becomes a remembrance archive, milestone language disappears, and dates go gentle, so nothing on the page will strike a wrong note in a hard week.

Add one photo and one memory if you have the heart for it. Then stop. That's the whole setup.

2. Send the invite link now, not after

This is the step that matters most, and it's the one families most often save for "when things calm down." Don't. Invite everyone by link this week, while the phone calls are happening and the stories are being told anyway.

The invite link is built for exactly this moment: the people you invite need no account. Your father's college roommate, your great-aunt who has never made a password in her life — they tap the link, type or record their memory, and they're done. For elderly relatives especially, this is the difference between their story arriving and their story being lost.

3. Expect the flood — and welcome it

If the link travels, memories will arrive fast, unsorted, and uneven — three sentences from a coworker, a rambling voice memo from a cousin, the same story told four different ways. All of that is treasure. Every submission arrives private or pending your review; nothing appears anywhere public without your say-so. So there is no risk in the flood, only gain.

If two people remember the same event differently, keep both. The archive is built to hold alternate tellings side by side — you never have to pick whose version is true during a week when nobody has the strength to argue.

4. Set the approval mode honestly

Your archive lets you choose how much you review: everything, only people outside your trusted circle, or nothing. In memorial week, be honest about your capacity — reviewing eighty memories while planning a funeral is too much for anyone.

• If the steward is the widow, widower, or another closest mourner: recruit a co-steward now. A sibling, an adult child, a best friend — make them an admin or editor and let them handle the review queue. This is the single kindest structural decision this playbook contains.
• If your family is close and trusted, the "trusted" approval mode lets known people's memories land without review, while anything from further afield waits for a look.
• Whatever you choose, contributions from children and anything sensitive always wait for review. That's not a setting; it's how the archive works.

5. Bring the link to the gathering itself

Memories are warmest in the room after the service. People who would never sit down at a computer will, in that room, tell the exact story you'd most want kept — and then never write it down. So put the archive where they are: a line in the printed program, a small card by the guest book, the link read aloud at the reception. "If you have a story about her, we're keeping them here."

Some families ask a grandchild to wander the reception with a phone, recording thirty-second voice memories from anyone willing. Voices captured that day are among the most treasured things these archives ever hold.

The quiet months after

A few weeks after the service, the calls slow down and the house goes quiet. That's when the archive changes jobs: from collection point to a place you visit. On some ordinary evening, start sorting what arrived into chapters — the Navy years, the Maple Street years — each at whatever privacy feels right. There is no deadline. The memories are already safe.

Many families make the first anniversary their landmark: they use the book builder to turn the year's gathered memories into a keepsake PDF and give printed copies to everyone who contributed. If a voice recording came in during memorial week, a tribute video — photos carried by that voice — is the other keepsake families return to.