Memorial Board for Mom

[ysabetwordsmith]

During the Planner Snowflake event here, I mentioned that I was working on a memorial scrapbook and a memorial board for my mother, who passed away on December 26, 2021. I thought that you folks might enjoy seeing the posts I made about the construction process and final results.

Her Celebration of Life service was today, and I just finished the board last night. The memorial board has a chronological and thematic structure, using some of the same techniques I use in my journal and planner projects.  It even includes a couple of scanned excerpts from my mother's journaling.  The posts talk a lot about the tools and materials I used, the process of planning and constructing the board, and resources on memorial boards as a healing tool for grief work.  So now this project exists both in hardcopy and in electronic format.

* Memorial Board: Mockups
* Memorial Board: Finished Pictures
* Memorial Board: Text Blocks and Scanned Text

Those are the main posts with the detailed descriptions and pictures.  The gather page "Come and Cry with Me" has links to a bunch more short posts where I talk about the steps of planning the project and collecting components for it.  For anyone working with memorial projects, I hope these resources help.

Comments

[finch]

Thank you for sharing. The results are lovely and I appreciate you sharing the emotional as well as the technical aspects.

You're welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Thank you for sharing.<<

I'm glad people are enjoying the project; I've gotten a lot of positive feedback in various places.

>> The results are lovely and I appreciate you sharing the emotional as well as the technical aspects.<<

I think the emotions are just as important as the technical aspects in a project like this. With a practical planner, not so much; but any kind of life journaling tends to rely on feelings, and grief work is primarily about feelings. Modern America is not great with feelings and downright bad at handling death. People flounder because they don't know what to say, repress things because they don't know how to handle feelings, and don't say anything when friends are upset because they don't know what to say. And all of that is fixable if folks talk about what they're feeling and how they're working with those feelings. The technical aspects explain how to make it work, well enough that hopefully other folks can do it themselves, especially with the supporting resource links.

Journaling in all its forms is a great way to process emotions and record memories. It's a kind of timebinding -- the excerpts from my mother's albums are becoming part of my memorial projects, carrying that little bit of her forward. The feelings are part of the project, so I touched on them here. If folks want more, following the links will lead to other parts of the grief work beyond just the journaling aspects of the memorial board.

And in the planning sense, when you process feelings and timebind them, then they stay put in their place within your personal narrative, and they're much less likely to spurt out sideways at the least opportune moment. Journaling is very good at organizing your thoughts, feelings, and experiences well enough so they do indeed stay put instead of snarling into memory malfunctions like PTSD. People are more likely to learn these skills if they can see examples. I happen to be good at this, so I'm comfortable sharing at least some of it.

[octahedrite]

Really lovely. Nice to see the final product; you've done a great job. My condolences on the loss.

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Really lovely. Nice to see the final product; you've done a great job. <<

I'm glad you liked it.

>> My condolences on the loss.<<

Thanks. Working on stuff like this helps. I'm looking forward to doing the scrapbook too. This community, and finding bits of Mom's handwriting in her photo albums, have got me thinking about including at least some handwritten journaling along with (probably more legible) text printouts.

[lunabee34]

Thank you for sharing this. What a lovely tribute. It's wonderful to see the finished product and the steps that went into making it.

You're welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Thank you for sharing this. What a lovely tribute. MM

I'm glad you liked it. This has proven quite popular.

>> It's wonderful to see the finished product and the steps that went into making it.<<

I like having the record of what I did and how. I'm looking forward to starting the scrapbook soon.