More than a decade ago, Mandy Benoualid went looking for her late mentor's Facebook page and found nothing there. She'd been asked to put together a slideshow and some items for his memorial service, but when she wanted to look back on those memories, the page was empty.
Not being able to see these memories online, Benoualid says, “was kind of like a second loss.”
When her aunt died not long after, the funeral home website posted condolences and messages from family and friends, but “after her funeral, they took it all down.” Naturally, Benoualid asked about preserving those messages; the funeral home told her to print them out. “I was like, really, you want me to print a piece of paper from a terribly designed website?”
The catalyst came in a cemetery. "I saw this columbarium with a blank CD, and I was like… the family obviously wanted to preserve this person's story… all that kind of came to a head, and it was like… there has to be a better way for us to remember our loved ones today."
Facebook is "for the living," as she puts it. The dead needed somewhere of their own. That somewhere became Keeper.
Living memorials and the traditional funeral industry
The first version of the idea was straightforward: QR codes on headstones that "would bring you to a page where you can learn about the [person's] story." What Keeper became borrows more from social media, but the resemblance stops at the interface. It's a space controlled by loved ones and dedicated to one life.
Keeper is a site and app made to create memorial pages for people who have died, with a feature called "living memorials." While you're still alive, you build your own page: photos, life milestones, favourite songs and videos, family trees, and map stories that let you pin the places that mattered. Choosing which memories make the cut forces you to sit with what you want left behind.
“It helps you live your life in a way that is more meaningful,” Benoualid explains. It eases some of the burden of planning for the family of the deceased. “With all that in mind,” says Benoualid, "the idea was [that] we're talking to people about pre-planning their funeral, which is helpful to the family and to the people you leave behind [because then] they don't have to plan everything."
Pre-planning is already a well-established model in the traditional funeral industry, but something that, typically, leans more logistical than anything else: picking out a casket, putting your money in a trust. With Keeper, “it’s more about the person’s legacy and their story and not just about the financial part of it.”
Trends in death care
The rest of death care is shifting too, in ways that have little to do with technology. Religious ritual is receding as a default, while green burials, conservation burials and human composting gain ground.
"Traditional funerals are meaningful and great for some folks and for some cultures," Benoualid says, "but the reality is that there are still a lot of people who are not as religious, and what religion does is it gives you a ritual."
People without that framework turn to "people like death doulas and celebrants" for ceremony and structure.
The other shift is environmental. "A really big casket laid in the ground with a headstone… I love cemeteries, but it just doesn't resonate with a lot of people."
Quebec is behind on this. Nothing in the law forbids green burial outright, but every burial has to happen inside a licensed cemetery, and no cemetery in the province has opened a section for it. The closest you'll get here is a plot for a biodegradable urn. Benoualid wants that to change. "If we keep just doing the traditional cemetery… it's not necessarily fair to the generations coming after us."
How TalkDeath grew out of Keeper
It started with a marketing strategy, where team members wrote articles about basic things like what to wear to a funeral, the etiquette at a funeral, or easy words of sympathy to send someone. Soon, they began getting recognized at conferences for their articles, rather than the memorial platform.
The name came from a YouTube interview series, #TalkDeath, and stuck. The blog eventually outgrew Keeper and became its own site, a home for the conversations and politics around funerals, end of life, and grief.
Now, TalkDeath is bringing these conversations offline with in-person events all over the continent, including its home city of Montreal. Organized around five pillars, one of which is community, the company has held death-positive community events like a “Deathy PowerPoint Party,” a “Let’s TalkDeath” night, and “Cinq-à-Sad” happy hour events.
Next up: Death at a Comedy Show.
Let’s talk about death
There's a running joke between Benoualid and her husband, Jeremy Cohen, who co-founded TalkDeath and co-edits it with her. "We show up at a party, or a dinner, and the whole conversation always ends up turning to death. People want to talk about it, they just don’t have the outlet to do so… We don’t even bring it up, people just start talking to us about it.”
A mentor's Facebook page gone overnight. Her aunt's condolences wiped after the funeral. A blank CD in a columbarium. She has spent a decade building the place those would have gone.
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