To Die For

Entrepreneur and Charlestown resident Jeff Taylor, 47, the whiz behind Monster.com and Eons.com, a social networking site for boomers, is hoping to bring the stodgy newspaper obituary back to life.

By Geoff Edgers

July 27, 2008

You recently launched your latest venture, Tributes.com, a site that allows individuals to post obituaries online. It’s pretty depressing, don’t you think? I mean, why base a whole business around dead people?

You know what? I think it’s exactly the opposite. I have this fascination with having a storied life. I had a relationship with a grandfather, but I wasn’t old enough to appreciate it and I find I have nothing to look at to be able to enjoy that story. Read the rest of this entry »

…was a story about a family who couldn’t access the email of a dead marine back in 2004.  The story reads:

Yahoo! continued Wednesday to refuse e-mail access to a Michigan father of a Marine killed in Iraq early last month.

The family of Justin Ellsworth, 20, is trying to gain access to the e-mail before the Yahoo! account is erased at the end of next month due to the company’s policy of deactivating unused accounts after 90 days. Read the rest of this entry »

We don’t know if it changed, but in 2007, “[t]he U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer.”

Obviously, this would be incredibly stupid to prevent someone from being able to tell their loved ones their wishes and hopes especially if they died in the very dangerous military.  Can you imagine a soldier not being able to tell their mother “I love you” one last time before they were shot by accidental enemy fire?  How about not being able to tell your young wife that there was an account that was suppose to be a surprise for her and the daughter that was born just a few weeks ago — and then accidentally dying in a helicopter crash?  Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve decided we will try to make this free for everyone.  We will do our best to support the site with donations, tasteful advertising (for example, only being able to be delivered a message a maximum once a month & in a sensitive manner), and other business development deals with do NOT violate anyones’ wishes for privacy or otherwise.

Our goals are to literally just to provide a vehicle to help people message each other to fulfill their last wishes.

We just recently wrote in one of our founder’s Living/Working in Korea blog about Professor Randy Pausch who inspired many to live out their childhood dreams.  Professor Pausch died today (July 25th) despite living a very fulfilling last year of his life.  However, we truly wonder what he may have been able to say to his family.

His legacy lives on with videos online and many messages written in the media.  Also, we’re sure he’s said many things to his family because he really did try to live out his life as fully as possible.  However, if he didn’t tell his daughter Chloe something that perhaps would of guided her in her future years, we wonder if that would of been something he would of regretted.  Perhaps he didn’t even have time to think about it.

Features like being able to tell your children what you think might be good advice when they grow older would be on WhenIleave.com  The ability to communicate literally for the many years of their lives could be passed on despite people physically not being in this world.

We can’t predict the ending of our lives, but we can plan for our loved ones’ futures.  We hope we can some day be able to love well beyond our years.