At LifeTales, we like to spotlight unique or exceptional uses of our Memoirs, and we’re happy to share one with you today! We recently chatted with Mike F., who used LifeTales while it was in Beta. We sat down with him to get his honest opinion on how he found the experience, from top to bottom.
Mike, what brought you to LifeTales?
Sadly, our friend Phil suddenly passed away of a heart attack and took us all by shock. I knew Phil for 30 years on the west coast, but he had this whole life before I met him. He started out in Louisville, Kentucky, and we have pictures of him growing up. In fact, baby pictures with his twin sister.
And then he got a dance scholarship to University of Illinois and he met his dance partner, and they moved to New York and started a small dance company. And so she got into the Memoir and rounded up people from New York and from University of Illinois. So we had all these people that knew Phil at different parts of his life and were eager to contribute because he was a really cool guy.
Luckily we had spent time together on Zoom, through Covid, and we're scattered around the country and I was looking for a way to share pictures and we had video clips and stories. And that’s when I found LifeTales.
What was the experience like of putting the Memoir together?
I have to say this has been extremely helpful for us, working through our grief. It was a way to bring out the funny, neat things that we remembered and share them with people. So my wife pulled up a photo shoot that she did of him for a photography class and she dug up a ton of photos from our files just to add. Then people commented on some of them, or asked questions.
So as a way to handle the grief, it really worked well, and I think the family will treasure it more, now that it's been longer and it's not so stressful to see him as if he was still alive.
What made you choose LifeTales over any competitors?
Making the memoir, the oddest little things came up. One person, had been Phil's friend for years and years and she had tons of photos that she would scan. I keep a journal, and I posted little notes from different dates of things. And others uploaded photos from his dance company, and even programs and short videos.
And one example of us using the comments feature was that I made a story for the memoir, and I named it “Karaoke Party for Phil's 50th birthday.” And then one person commented that she left early, but commented that in the photos there's a lot of ice cream on the floor. And then someone else commented, I think that ice cream was my fault!
So the comments became the rich part for us because people who didn't even know each other would say, “Oh, I remember hearing about that! This person in that picture is so and so,” and then they would go and invite so and so to join our group.
It was really great for us as friends to use the comments feature because once something was uploaded, anybody in the group could comment, and since you’d get notified when someone commented on your story, you could go back and reply to their comments.
And so we learned a lot, filling in the details of different stories and photos. And it's still fun reading through them now.
Do you have any last comments about LifeTales that you want potential users to know?
I am an extremely satisfied customer. Extremely, extremely satisfied. It was really, really, really wonderful. It was fantastic for us. And we ended up doing, a memorial party four months later, and people had met through each other's comments about the stories they’d posted.
So people now knew each other through LifeTales as well. So we had people from Hawaii, we had Illinois, we had New York, we had Los Angeles, Portland, you know, I mean, people all over the country. And he had traveled, you know, because he taught dance in Japan for a while and he hiked up to base camp at Everest, and that's in the stories. So LifeTales is a brilliant way of organizing things.
Lifetales has been extraordinarily, extraordinarily helpful for us after Phil passed away. It really, really helped. And I like the idea of making some of this stuff public, you know!
Thanks so much for chatting with us today Mike! We are sure Phil’s family and friends will remember this for a lifetime 🥰
