Digital Legacy: Cumulus Memorial Platform with Alexander Josephson

In this episode, I talk with Alexander Josephson, a Toronto-based architect whose father's cancer diagnosis unexpectedly led him into the world of digital legacy and remembrance.

When his father asked him to design a memorial, Alex began thinking about how we honor and remember the people we love. In a time when so much of our lives exists online, he wondered if there was a better way to preserve stories, memories, photographs, videos, and family history for future generations. That question eventually led him to create Cumulus, a platform designed to bring those pieces together in one meaningful place.

During our conversation, we explore grief, legacy, ritual, memorialization, and the ways technology can support connection rather than replace it. We also talk about the importance of creating spaces—both physical and digital—that help families remember, share stories, and stay connected across generations.

At one point, Alex gives me a tour of the Cumulus website. If you're listening rather than watching, don't worry. He does a wonderful job describing what he's seeing on screen, making it easy to understand how the platform works and imagine what it offers.

00:18 Meet the Host and Guest

02:13 From Architect to Death Tech

03:24 The Spark Behind Cumulus

06:12 Celebrating Lives and Legacy

07:18 Becoming a Death Doula

09:02 VSED and MAID Debates

16:58 Designing Beautiful Memorial Spaces

21:51 Ritual, Cost, and Modern Funerals

23:59 Building Legacy Continuity

24:36 Marketing End-of-Life Innovation

25:18 Digital Burden After Death

26:11 Storage Trust Vision

28:43 Why Funeral Websites Fail

29:34 Time Capsules for Kids

30:55 Beyond Social Media Grief

32:15 End-of-Life Culture Shift

33:49 Platform Walkthrough Demo

38:01 Shared Control and Costs

39:30 Where to Find Cumulus

40:25 Legacy Projects and Feedback

41:43 Podcast Closing Call to Action

alexanderjosephson (instagram)

cumulusworld (instagram)

cumulus.world (web)

partisanarchitecture (instagram)

Transcript

Alex: [00:00:00] People are choosing these alternatives because they're seeking poetry, they're seeking agency, they're seeking experiences, and they're seeking beauty. But if they can give themselves and their deceased some dignity and beauty, they're pursuing it, and they're avoiding commodified approaches. 

Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly.

I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula, which is kind of like a life coach but for the end of life, and a funeral celebrant. I created this podcast to have honest conversations about death, dying, grief, and life itself. My hope is that each episode offers a space for you to listen as my guests and I explore these topics, challenge old assumptions, and consider new perspectives with curiosity and compassion so that you may feel more comfortable having these conversations in your life, too.

In this episode, I talk with Alexander Josephson, a Toronto-based architect turned tech founder whose father's cancer diagnosis led him down an [00:01:00] unexpected path into what some people call death tech. After his father asked him to design a memorial, Alex began thinking about how we remember people in a world where so much of our lives now exists online.

That journey eventually led to the creation of Cumulus, a platform designed to preserve stories, memories, photos, videos, and family history in one meaningful place. We explore legacy, grief, ritual, digital remembrance, and the importance of creating spaces, both physical and virtual, that help us stay connected across generations.

At one point, Alex shares his screen and walks me through the website itself. If you're listening rather than watching, don't worry. He does a beautiful job describing what you're not able to see, making it easy to imagine how the platform works and what it offers. Thank you for joining us for this conversation.

Jill: Welcome Alex, to the podcast. Thank you for joining me today. 

Alex: Thanks, Jill. It's nice to meet you, and I really appreciate the invite. I'm calling in from Toronto. Where am I reaching you right now? 

Jill: I'm in New Jersey, [00:02:00] actually, right outside Philly. 

Alex: Oh, so not, not so far away. Yes. Same weather patterns. 

Jill: Yes. Yes.

Alex: I'm in Toronto, Canada. I'm Canadian. The sovereign country of Canada, not the 51st state. I always like to joke about that with my American friends. So I'm an architect by training, a, a new dad, a new father of two lovely ladies, little girls, and I am a three and a half degrees in architecture. I actually dropped out of the Architecture Association, which is one of the oldest architecture schools in the world, after doing roughly 12 years of architecture school across the world, starting in Waterloo in Canada, which is really sort of like Caltech or MIT.

It's where JavaScript was invented, where the BlackBerry, the smartphone, was invented. So my background is design, but it intersects with technology, and lived all over the world, studied all over. Spent five or six years in Rome doing my master's as well as doing all sorts of other things there, including just living the dolce vita.

I think it was the last time you [00:03:00] could really have that in Europe before things really changed. So that was a lovely period in the early aughts. And then moved to New York for a fellowship. Spent about a year in New York And then found my way back to Toronto, Canada, and I find myself now a tech founder in what you would call, like, the digital death service or death tech space because my father asked me to design his memorial.

He was diagnosed with cancer in 2010, and it was a very slow-moving thing. And then when he had to start doing something, he asked me to design his gravestone. And, and on that same time, my uncle, who's this sort of very extroverted, incredible person, was sending me these articles about his... These sort of very, very obscure articles about his achievements in optometry and ophthalmic.

And I was like, "Where, wh-," she w- he was like, "For the family archive." I'm like, "What arc- like, what are you talking about?" Like wh- like where? You can't put this anywhere except, I guess, if you started a Facebook account and [00:04:00] called it the Josephson family feed. Like, there was no dignified way to save all this stuff, and it felt really important.

And I just was like, "There's a problem." And my father wanted his grave designed, and that felt pretty empty, didn't capture his life and legacy in a way that I thought was beautiful. And so I started designing this immersive cloud of memories and experiences that I thought would be something that our family could use.

And my wife was like, "Couldn't you build this for everybody? Couldn't everybody use this? And isn't this where we're all going?" And another friend of mine was like, "Hey, Alex, you're an architect. You do bricks and beams. What about bits and bytes? 'Cause that's where we're all going." And I was like, "I don't know."

Like, apply my knowledge to... And it all kinda came together to design this, this memorial for my father and my uncle and my family and bringing us together and, and that's sort of how I stumbled from architecture, having a f- a [00:05:00] studio of 30 people and building big buildings and master plans and even products that are sold around the world.

That's how I stumbled into memorialization and, and the death services industry. Hmm. Which, which has been eye-opening. 

Jill: Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, and I... What did you call it? Death tech, I think 

Alex: was- Yeah, death tech. There, there's all these terrible words to describe these these things that we're trying to do that are beautiful.

Jill: Yeah. 'Cause I have talked to a couple different people now with variations of this same idea, of how do we collect all of this digital footprint that somebody's leaving and bring it all together in one space so that this way it's preserved for generations to come. Because at this point, we don't have handwritten letters as much anymore.

Even in the long run, I mean, I don't know, I have some of that stuff from my grandma. I don't know who these people are. Yeah. Like, there's no extra information. So [00:06:00] I love this idea of being able to collect it, and I love the uncle was giving you some info. Like, "Here, just save this for me." 

Alex: Yeah, like I- at one point in my life, I was a big deal, uh, in my little space.

Jill: Yeah. 

Alex: Which is fine. Like, I- I think that it's like we have to celebrate our lives more. 

Jill: Mm. 

Alex: Because I think that if we don't celebrate our lives, there's this feeling of irrelevance. I was talking to a friend of mine this morning who's a very well-known designer in Italy, and he feels like AI is gonna make him irrelevant.

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Alex: And our lives are relevant because we impact each other. 

Jill: Mm. 

Alex: And we leave these traces. And what's fascinating, maybe, like if... An anecdote from architecture, like just as a profession, there's a very primal quality to it because one of the oldest, if not the oldest known description of an architect is a, a figure named Imhotep who designed the pyramids.

And what are the pyramids? They're tombs. 

Jill: Mm. 

Alex: And so did architecture evolve as a profession as a means to design tombs or, or homes? [00:07:00] Or did, did the architect start with the primitive hut, as Leger, the theorist would have said in the Enlightenment, or were we designing tombs? 

Jill: Hmm. 

Alex: It's sort of like history is not clear about.

It's sort of a chicken and egg thing, but how did you get- 

Jill: Into that end of life care kind of space? 

Alex: Yeah. 

Jill: Yeah, I mean, my background is food service, and I took care of my grandmother at the end of her life. And she was mainly healthy until she was about 90. Found out she had cancer, and the process of putting a 90 to 94-year-old is when she died.

But like 90-something-year-old person through cancer treatments- 

Alex: Oh my gosh 

Jill: Right now 

looking- 

Alex: And she made it to 90 too. It's like, wow 

Jill: That's it. 

Alex: She made it to be healthy And then, and then you whack 'em, and then you whack them with chemo and radiation and it's- 

Jill: Yeah, exactly. And I know now that I would not have done the same path that I took, but, you know, we didn't know any better then.

And so I just [00:08:00] realized that experience, even when she was actively dying, you think it's gonna look like it does on TV, which is, you know, they just sleep and, like, they have those conversations and tell you how much they love you, and then they close their eyes and they don't open 'em. And that was not how it worked.

And so I realized then that if I didn't know- Mm-hmm ... most people don't know. And so I wanted to get into this space to help prepare people for the end of life. 

Alex: How long ago was that? 

Jill: That was in 2011, so 15 years ago. 

Man, 

Alex: it's been a run. 

Jill: Yeah. It was quite a few years even until I realized that I wanted to become a death doula, because at first I was like, "I don't know, maybe I'll be a hospice nurse," but, like, going back to school for the whole thing, and then also, like, the nursing part, some of what I saw them do, I was like, "I don't know if I wanna do that."

When I heard of a death doula, that was 2019. And so even now, you know, this is seven years [00:09:00] later, and it still amazes me. Like, I'm working with two different clients right now that are choosing to use VSED, voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. I'm reaching out to palliative care teams, and they're like, "They're doing what?

What's VSED?" And I'm like, "Really?" 

Alex: I've never heard that term used for it, but, uh, a colleague of mine whose father just passed away, he had some kind of nervous kind of Parkinsonian thing happening and, you know, he was having a hard time swallowing and I think he was about 86 or 88. He, he lived a really full life.

Yeah. And he just decided he didn't wanna be poked, prodded, tubified, and he was just like, "I'm not hungry. I don't wanna eat. I'm ready." It was fascinating because he just... It was so fast. It was so shocking how fast he l- he, he left, and on his own terms, which I thought was really beautiful, but obviously my colleague was shattered by it.

You know, like, I think it's really hard to go through that, but I never heard that [00:10:00] acronym for it. 

Jill: It's just like MAID, right? Medical aid in dying, which- 

Alex: That's a big thing in Canada ... people- There's a massive, massive controversy right now in Canada over who should be eligible and just the number of people working through it.

I mean, I think it's a fascinating conversation. I also think the numbers don't really... When you look in the context of, like, how many people every year are suffering terminal cancer or terminal disease in general- It's, my guess is it's a really big number, and they didn't have this option in the past.

And I think people want agency. 

Jill: Yeah. 

Alex: They want agency. If they have the choice and they're faced with that immeasurable suffering, immeasurable, I don't see the stiff upper lip A approach to someone's suffering. I, I, I just think it's not fair. At, at the same time, I think that, like, what is suffering? And then that's what the, the debate in Canada is now.

It's starting to bleed into mental [00:11:00] health. It's so hard because in the end, bu- bureaucrats and politicians end up making these choices, and they're, you know, they're limited. 

Jill: It, it is definitely a topic that there's no easy solution from what I've seen. I actually work with a group of doulas that we meet once a month, and we just talk about medical aid in dying and our experience helping clients with it, working with the doctors, working with the healthcare teams, right?

Like, just everything that can go on with medical aid in dying. And there really is this idea that, you know, a terminal illness such as cancer, there's some people that are like, "Okay, well, that makes sense." But yet people that have been suffering from depression for their entire life and have not been able to function, they can't hold jobs, they can't get out of bed, they can't do anything.

They've tried every treatment possible. Is that not a terminal illness? I mean, I don't know. And I do think a lot of it is the autonomy, [00:12:00] that when we get to a point in our life where we are dying anyway, I think people should be able to have a choice. 

Alex: If they're not able to be autonomous. If both your knees don't work, should you be allowed to use MAID?

I don't know. I, I have a hard time making decisions for people, but it's a, it's a tough road. I, I think it's hard. I don't wanna distract from our conversation, but I think it's central to the idea of clarity, like you're seeking in your line of work, where it's like if someone has clarity around something that normally is surprise or at some point it's gonna get to the point where you're gonna lose your faculties either due to degenerative disorder or you're gonna be in so much pain that your consciousness is gonna become managed by drugs that inevitably are gonna degrade your ability to survive anyway.

To me, it's sort of like it makes so much sense, and it gives people the ability to end life on their own terms, but also leave a legacy on their own terms and feel inspired in the [00:13:00] moment to handle their affairs. And I think that going back to my experience with my father almost dying, it was just two years of brutal chemo and then COVID and intubation.

It was just brutal. And building Cumulus, the platform that I built and raised significant venture capital in the United States to build, was in a way cathartic. This process of preserving and recording and making sure that I was grieving, and that act of remembering was very positive. I, I feel like I'm better for it, and it got me through that time because I was able to build the grief rather than ignore it.

Because you don't have to necessarily lose someone to go through the grief. Like, you can be told someone's gonna die and you go through a grieving process, right? Or that you can be told that someone is probably not gonna live. And you start to go through this process of grief. And what I found was that, uh, obviously I [00:14:00] was building a memorial for him, but also my family, and I felt like I was able to get through it because of what I was doing versus watching or not processing except as a kind of bystander.

Jill: Yeah, and we definitely need to process our grief, and a lot of people don't. They just kind of sit with it and try to push it down and pretend that it's not there. And yeah, you know, it's like not only is there the grief of the person dying or just knowing that somebody's gonna be dying, but then you add in some of these degenerative diseases, things like dementias or ALS, where the person physically might still be there, but they're not really themselves anymore.

There's no quality of life. They're not able to go out and do things. You know, that really does bring with it its own set of grief for the person as well as their loved ones [00:15:00] that are caring for them and watching them go through this really just terrible diseases. Some of them are terrible. I g- I can't...

And you even mentioned, like, you know, what if your knees don't work? And it's like, who is it to say what somebody's quality of life is? You know? Like, I'm a really active person. It would be very, very hard for me to find a lot of joy in life if I was bed-bound and I could not move, even if my mind was still there fully.

Alex: But- Well, that's a bit different. Being a quadriplegic or in a vegetative state, for lack of a better way of putting it, is different than, like, a limb not functioning or, you know, being... I don't- I'm not an expert in it. No. I think the debate in Canada right now is... And I think that Canada has been, you know, a bit of a...

I'm sure there's a couple of European countries that we followed, but I think you have to give people the option if they are in [00:16:00] a terminal state or th- they're not gonna survive a long time, they're gonna suffer and eventually die in some shape or form. Like, 'cause if you're a quadriplegic, your lifespan is greatly reduced, right?

So giving someone that ability to choose I think is very beautiful. Uh, can they be productive members of society? There's tons of evidence that they can. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Alex: But, you know, like, who is it to say that, that a depressive shouldn't be able to end their lives? But that's the debate now in Canada 'cause someone has just ended their life.

Or a couple people have ended their lives in Canada because they were depressed. And so it's become a big... It's kind of blown up into this much larger thing where it, you know, like, you know, on the one hand, suicide's technically illegal. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Alex: You know? So there's this really thinning boundary between what is considered an illegal suicide and a palliative care measure.

I am not an expert in it. What I am an expert [00:17:00] in, I feel, is making beautiful places and spaces and design. And so when I look at the, at death and, and the experiences around death, I think about just the places and spaces that I've visited and been to And some of them feeling really disconnected from a design perspective from what people need.

People, people... When, when people have lost someone or people wanna visit someone, I think that every person has a desire to be in a solemn, poetic, beautiful, considered place and space. And I think that's the reason why churches and synagogues and mosques in their early incantations were always the sort of like these extraordinary architectures, because they not only brought the community together on a normal basis and spent a lot of time in these spaces, but it dealt [00:18:00] with beginnings and ends, beginnings and endings.

And those beginnings and endings had a profound impact on the way people feel and the space that they experienced that beginning or that ending. And I said to myself, "Is there a way that I can improve the experience around memorialization, around legacy building, so that there's a spatial dimension so that it's not just a scrolling exercise?"

I feel like everything that I see online is essentially a scrolling exercise, and I think that's fine. That's a result of the way technology has evolved physically from a hardware perspective, but not necessarily intuitive to the human condition, which was caves or buildings, mounds of earth. So, like, I respect that there are limitations to the digital interface, but when I built what we did, I was saying, "How [00:19:00] can I immerse people?

Can I make them feel like they went to a solemn, spiritual place?" But it was an immersive experience on a screen or with VR. And could I help someone just find a grave also without having to, like, find someone that isn't there? You know, like, so a lot of people don't even go to cemeteries 'cause they don't know where to find someone.

They don't even know who to ask to find them, and they have to call somewhere, and it's just like... I think that these days people picking up the phone and talking to someone is more and more a behavior that people are reticent to do, but maybe they have to email someone, right? But if you could pass all this information on in the equivalent of digital granite, that was my ambition with what we were gonna build and what I tried to do, and I tried to bring that from my experience as a designer and see if it could make people's lives a bit better.

Jill: Yeah. You know, I'm not A design person, right? Like, I can walk into a building and say this one's beautiful to me, right? But like, as far as the [00:20:00] elements that make it beautiful, I'm not always sure. And I love that idea of bringing back this feeling, because that's really what it is. It's like walking into a space that feels beautiful.

It makes you feel something, and it is definitely... You know, I love old churches. I love when I travel, that's like one of the first things I do is go into churches and cemeteries because I just love the way that they look. I love the way that they feel. 

Alex: Yeah, and those beautiful places are inaccessible to more and more people.

You can't get buried in a beautiful cemetery if you're not rich. And I don't mean rich, I mean really rich. You have to lease space in Japan. You don't get it forever like in North America where you buy a plot. Maybe there's some very rare examples of where you get, like, a permanent tomb. But we have an issue that you have to go further and further away from the city in these less and less ideal contexts, less and less convenient And, uh, you, you see more and more people getting cremated 'cause that's their desire, but also [00:21:00] there's a financial decision being made.

And also, I think the way people are memorializing, they just wanna do it in places and spaces that are more considered and thoughtful, that an architect was hired. It's not like a kinda decrepit, dusty, old room. This is real. This is the pressure on the industry. I see it on LinkedIn, I see it on social media, and I think that people are choosing these alternatives because they're seeking poetry, they're seeking agency, they're seeking experiences, and they're seeking beauty.

If they can give themselves and their deceased some dignity and beauty, they're pursuing it, and they're avoiding commodified approaches, or they're avoiding those experiences that don't give them joy and don't make them feel like they're in a considered environment. 

Jill: Even if we don't know that we're seeking it, you're right.

That is what we're seeking. And even this idea of ritual spaces, where I talk to so many people that'll be [00:22:00] like, "I don't want a funeral. Just, like, cremate me and, like, do whatever you want to with my ashes. I don't want that." And more and more, I'm like, "Well, it's not really for you. It's for the people that are left behind."

You know, as humans, we need that, whether we realize it or not. As part of our grieving process, we kinda need to have some ritual, and we've just gotten away from it. And I think, 'cause you're right. Like, unless you're super rich, people literally go into debt over a funeral. You know? If they have to get somebody embalmed, if they have to get the casket, if they have to do the whole thing, and then buy the plot.

It's like, you know, people can't afford it. And so I think some of that is the thing as well, is they're like, "Well, just, you know, cremate me and throw me in a corner because I don't want my family to spend the money." How do we find that in between of giving that ritual space and that beautiful space, and also not bankrupting people over somebody's death?

Which we're all gonna die, right? We're all gonna get [00:23:00] there. We're all gonna have to deal with that. So yeah, how do we do that part? 

Alex: I think your point is really good. People don't wanna make a fuss, and the question is why don't they wanna make a fuss? Because they don't wanna inconvenience their next of kin.

They don't wanna inconvenience their kids. I think it's very beautiful, but in a way, that desire to disappear- In the most light touch, low impact way. May- maybe it creates a sense of guilt on the people who are left behind because they wanted to do more, the gratitude, they didn't get to express it, there were words unsaid.

I don't know. But your point about people, it being about the people who are left over, I agree. And the question is, what are they left over with? And today you're left with Instagram, Facebook, and a gravestone. There's sometimes family albums, physical albums, but they're not really something that gets made anymore.

There's shared Google Drives. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Alex: This is what we're left [00:24:00] with, and the question is, is any of it really designed for perpetuity, for the next, you know, passing it on? Is it at all designed to do that job of, of keeping that continuity in those relationships intergenerationally? And it seems daunting to try and achieve that, but that's what we wanted to do.

And it was just like, it starts here It's gotta start somewhere. 

Jill: Yeah. 

Alex: And, you know, someone started a funeral home, someone started a cemetery, someone, you know, they ... Someone started it because they felt that there was a need. And to me, yeah, I think that there's a need for it. But, you know, marketing is complicated and getting it to people is complicated.

Jill: Yeah. I mean, yes, I'm going through the same thing with, you know, I do end of life care plans with people. I know that we need to do these things, but how do I get that out in front of the people that are willing to sit down and talk to me for a couple hours? So I don't wanna rush it, I wanna sit and talk to them.

What's [00:25:00] important to them? What do they care about? But yes, getting it out in front of the right people is always the hard part. 

Alex: But- The industry's not set up to sell innovation, right? The industry's not set up to sell anything. In fact, it's set up to down sell. And so it's a very interesting context to work in.

But I think, like, when I think about someone like you, you're working with families, like the way, the way, the reason I think that Cumulus is a great option is our lives are trapped on these devices. And when you get to the end, someone's gotta pull it all together, and that's an enormous amount of pressure.

Like, me getting all these emails from my uncle and my dad asked me to design a gra- it, and inevitably I'm like, "Listen, I run a business. I got 30 employees. Yeah, like I, I can't do it. Why me?" You know? Why me? And inevitably this pressure is enormous, and then when you fail, like imagine the guilt. But [00:26:00] everybody's going to you.

Make a PowerPoint, make a shared Google Drive, get it all together, share the links, make sure you keep on paying for the storage. It inevitably is just falling on one person. And where do you get... And the question is, is there a way to like... The way we saw it was we need to create a solemn, poetic, beautiful, non-social media alternative where people can come together as a family and friends and contribute to an archive every format and make sure it doesn't get, uh, and make sure it, it's not at risk of deletion.

Mm-hmm. You know, create protocols and constitutions for a company that cares about building a storage trust. The trust is really important. And so you can invite hundreds of people if you want to contribute to a cloud on our platform. You can save unlimited locations for graves, grave sites, scatterings, important places that were historically important or where people were buried or, or [00:27:00] memorialized in your family for generations.

You can store video websites without fearing that they're gonna go obsolete, and that idea of format obsolescence also, like these big tech companies thrive on obsolescence. They thrive on that constant churn of needing to update and pay, and for you to pay. And we were like, "What if we charge one fee for a certain amount of storage and unlimited collaboration, and eventually some AI integrations, which will be really cool, that'll allow you to animate images and search images by content better than you can on your phone, for example?"

Make a positive space for people to collaborate on that legacy and pass on, and know that also you can connect to a service partner, an arrangements partner, and know that if you go or someone else goes, there's someone else also attached to the account, and you spent 300 bucks once and you didn't have to [00:28:00] spend 50 bucks a year for your...

forever. Mm-hmm. You know, like the idea is to build a storage trust, like a financial trust, like a cemetery. Canada's a very isolated place It makes us vulnerable as a country geopolitically, but also economically. And I was like, I need to start talking to people and creating relationships, and maybe they will download the software and they'll tell a couple of people and be like, "This is actually really useful and helpful."

And you don't get advertised to, and you can download it for free if you want, if you don't have the money to have a perpetual account. You can earn into a perpetual account if you can't afford more than a few bucks a month. Like, this is a good option that gives people the agency, and it doesn't have to be connected to a funeral home's website.

Jill: Hmm. 

Alex: The big problem is what people are being asked to do right now is memorialize themselves on some random funeral home's website that you have no clue whether that's gonna exist in the future. It's not designed for that. And the software companies that are sort of enabling that are limiting the evolution and [00:29:00] improvement of those experiences from a mor- from a memorialization and legacy-building perspective because it's their advantage to keep things the way they are.

I find it fascinating just as an outsider trying to work my way in, and there, I think there's others trying as well. 

Jill: There's definitely something, 'cause, like, I have the Google Drive. I have my pictures in Google, I have my pictures in Flickr. We pay a lot to keep our pictures in Flickr, but we've also been using Flickr now for, it's gotta be, like, 20 years now, which is crazy.

There's a lot of pictures in there, and what's gonna happen to all of that? And that's where this idea of being able to keep everything in one place for my kids to have after I'm gone is- 

Alex: Yeah, you can create a time capsule. I have clouds that I've created for my daughters that are time capsules for them that- Hmm

doesn't matter what happens to me, as long as Cumulus exists, they'll, they'll be able to access them in 20 years. 

Jill: So each of them have their own separate account that you've just been dropping things into? [00:30:00] 

Alex: I just want them to know that they were adored if I'm not able to be there. And maybe some of my insights.

I think that what people underestimate is the amount of wisdom they can pass on, and they also overestimate our ability to remember. Now, you can pass on that wisdom at the end, but everybody's traumatized. They're in the middle of a giant trauma. How do you pass on that wisdom? Especially if you have journals or notes or, like, you wanted to write a book, but you never did, but you've got all the notes.

Where do you put it? How do you pass it on? The idea with Cumulus is to be the place where all that goes. There's all these people trying to do books and videos and, great. Do all these things. Create, even create an AI of yourself if you want. But in the end, where do you put all of it? Does it go onto Google?

Yeah. Like, there needs to be a place, the, the church, the cemetery where you go to, to, to access and experience all that stuff. That's what we wanted to make, and we wanted to make it really beautiful. Not [00:31:00] like Instagram, and not like Facebook, and not like Twitter. Certainly different visually and socially.

Those are no place for solemnity and honor. Th- those are set up as free-for-alls. 

Jill: And at this point too, I try not to post too much divisive, political, whatever else stuff. But for the most part now, I don't post pictures of my kids on any of my social- 

Alex: Never, never have. Yeah. You never 

Jill: have. I used to. Again, back, my kids now are 15 and 12.

10 years ago, I was like, "Oh, all right. It's fine if I post it on my Facebook, it's just my family." Until all of a sudden my family's accounts started getting hacked, and like who knows who's on there anymore. And so I don't post any pictures of my kids. I don't really post a lot of personal stuff. It's not really gonna be a great record for my children to look back and see who I was based on my social media anymore.

It's kinda all just garbage. 

Alex: Mine's just work. Yeah. And then I do run my mouth about politics [00:32:00] and stuff online, which is funny. I think that's more kind of like, that's... Who knows if that, if that matters or not. But I think that to your point, though, people, when they're trying to deal with grief- It's all over the map.

People deal with it so differently. What do you think is the... I don't know if you've visited our platform or not, but what do you think is the biggest thing that p- that, that's defining change besides the coaching at the end of life, which is, I think, in and of itself, a big change? 

Jill: I want to say that the biggest change is that people are now starting to actually talk about end of life and starting to face it a little bit more than we used to.

Yeah. Partially because death doulas and, like you said, death tech, right? There is a lot of movement in that area. Unfortunately, now it seems like a lot of stuff is going towards AI, and I don't know what that's gonna do for humanity in general, but end of life care, I feel like things are changing so [00:33:00] much.

But I do think there's going to be a need for that personal kind of touch of keeping the stories, keeping the legacy, and having the conversations with our family and our loved ones. I feel like the world is changing so much, and like you said, right now sometimes I feel like I'm just stuck in, like, a trauma state all the time of, like, not even able to function as far as I just have to be here and be in this moment.

'Cause I guess, like, I'm thinking too, if I had one of your profiles, like, is that something that I share almost like social media in that, like, I would share it with the broader family? Or is it meant more for, like, me and my immediate family? 

Alex: I can show it to you. So you log in like anything else. The sign-up is very easy.

We're not asking a, an onerous amount of information. Mm-hmm. When you [00:34:00] get into the platform, it's very familiar. This is a cloud for actually a family that has something like 80 collaborators on this cloud, 

Jill: and- Was that all their photos that they've 

Alex: uploaded? This is all their stuff. Okay. This is a note, and they can comment.

These are important pieces of family history. 

Jill: Yeah. 

Alex: There's his obituary here. There's condolences. There's websites. There's images of his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren. On your phone, you just see it like a grid of images, like you would on Instagram. 

Jill: Okay. 

Alex: But you can also see it in 3D, which is really beautiful, and if people are interested in VR, you can see it in VR.

And that's a really incredible experience, especially, especially in a place like a cemetery. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Alex: Like, it just, it brings a profound different kind of quality to the experience. He was a big golfer, so there's video of him golfing. Where is he buried? He's, well, he's scattered in two places. Thousands of miles apart 

Jill: Okay 

Alex: He's scattered, I don't know if you're a [00:35:00] golfer, but he's scattered at the Swilcan Bridge in Scotland, which is the, like, most famous golf course in the world.

And his sons went there after and scattered his ashes here 

Jill: And I'm sure the golf course did not approve of that, but I think that happens a lot more 

Alex: I think it's in the river. But to, to that point, I mean, these are just ashes in the end, right? 

Jill: Yeah 

Alex: Um 

Jill: For sure 

Alex: And then the rest of his ashes are placed in a cemetery in a corner of a very beautiful urban cemetery in Toronto.

And the other thing is, like, cemeteries are super stressed out because digitizing a cemetery is, like, millions of dollars. And by the way, it changes all the time. 

Jill: Mm-hmm 

Alex: And then if you go into the back end, it's so easy. You just drag and drop files And you can manage whether it's a public or private account.

But like, if you look at this, the, the contributors here, there's just dozens and dozens of people. These are great grandchildren, grandchildren. This is a person who had six children. Oh, wow. And they have sha- families. Yeah. [00:36:00] So you can, you can configure music, you can set more places to, to visit, you can go to your arrangements partner, which is in this case Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and a contact just in case.

You can manage the perpetuity of the account by adding people who would be, if there was a problem with the account, these people would be contacted. There's a lot of things here that kind of are based around this idea of trust. You can also search, smart search, with machine vision. So you can type the word girl and then girls will show up.

You, you can share links. So like if a website ... If you save a website, like if you put it on Facebook, it, it doesn't necessarily save the website, it saves the link. But what we do is if you save a website, it records it forever offline. Mm-hmm. So if you have a website, like a newspaper article or an obituary, it saves that.

Like this is an obituary at the funeral home. We've got the link, and this is forever here. It doesn't matter what happens to that funeral home. It's just another legacy item, [00:37:00] right? That, like the obituary is not the be all to end all of your legacy. It's just a summary, right? And so you can see all of this on your phone very easily.

You can download the app. It's so easy to sign up. The idea is y- you end up with something that's shared responsibility. Oh, and I forgot to tell you, you can just put it on auto play. Like if you're, uh, if you're at a service- 

Jill: Mm-hmm ... 

Alex: and I think this is important, like creating those presentations is always challenging, right?

Yeah. You got so many people. You can literally just put this on auto play and it'll play these images every one second, three seconds, whatever you want. It'll play the videos. 

Jill: Okay. 

Alex: It'll just go through them automatically. Yeah. And so you can set it up either as a presentation that you speak to or it's just on a loop.

Jill: Oh. So that's neat. So this way too, if somebody is at the service and they see it and they're like, "Oh, I wanna look at that again later," then they could just go on to the website and look at it again later. That's really cool because I like the idea of being able to see everything [00:38:00] right there visually.

And is there like one main person that's in charge of creating the- It's up 

Alex: to you. If you create the account, you pay for it, but you're not necessarily in charge of it. You can put someone else in your family as the administrator of it. 

Jill: Okay. 

Alex: And we're probably gonna make it so that you can ... I think one of the things we'd like to do is make it so that the cost can be shared, like several people can pay for it.

Mm-hmm. That's a hard thing to do online, but I think it could be a, a bit of a game changer when it comes to this kind of ... 'Cause there's a sort of like, oh, if everybody's just contributing 50 bucks- Once, if it's like six people, like, yeah. I mean, a gravestone costs thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, let alone the plot, which could cost tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands if you're living in a place like Boston or New York or Los Angeles, Tokyo, all these big cities.

They're building niche columbarium towers in Korea with elevators. So I think what's nice about it is you can assign administrative [00:39:00] control to several people that you trust. 

Jill: That is very neat. 

Alex: So it's not all on me anymore. E- everybody has the app on their phone, and they can contribute to the Josephson family, uh, archive, the cloud, and they can mark locations that they care about.

And if you're traveling, you can go to a family ancestral home, and you can pin it. I think that for me it was very helpful, personally. That's- Hopefully it's helpful for others. 

Jill: I, I hope so too, and I'm sure it will be. And we are just at the end of our time. Why don't you tell us where people can reach you or what website they should go to to find out more?

Alex: Amazing, yeah. So you can find everything you need to know about me at cumulus.world, and you can also find me at my architecture firm, partisans.com. And Cumulus has been written about in several newspaper and media, so Fast Company, The Globe and Mail, others as well. We're collaborating with Park Lawn, which is a [00:40:00] very large company in the States, on rolling out into their locations, so we're on almost all Park Lawn cemetery and funeral home location websites.

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Alex: And are rolling out in more across Canada and the United States, and I think I'd love more people like you, Jill, to be able to partner with and help people who are in a sort of a pre-need, at-need, managing end of life with their next of kins. And maybe this is something that they can do together, and it's joyful.

Jill: I know a lot of doulas, some of the work that we'll do is creating legacy projects with people, and- Yeah ... something like this seems like a really great way to begin that legacy project with a person while they're alive. You know, put their favorite recipes in, put in whatever it is they want, and then also give family the ability to add things in afterwards or even at the same time.

Alex: I'd love you to try it and give me the feedback. 

Jill: Yeah. I'll for sure check it out, [00:41:00] because I keep saying I need to do this with my own mother. She's 80. Oh my God, is she really 

Alex: 80? Does she know how to use her phone? 

Jill: Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. 

Alex: You just sign up for free, download the app, and start sending content.

Huh. And she can do it. It's just like texting. Like, if you go to an image or a note, upload, it's the exact same as sending it as a text. You send it to Cumulus, and it'll ask you which cloud you wanna contribute to. It's so intuitive. 

Jill: Yeah, and it is beautiful. I think you did- Thank you. Thank you ... nail that part of visually it looks really nice, which I appreciate.

Alex: I really appreciate the compliment. 

Jill: Well, you're very welcome. And thank you so much for coming on today. This was a pleasure chatting with you. 

Alex: Yeah, Jill, me too. 

Jill: If you've been listening to my podcast for a while, and you hear me and my guests talk over and over about how important it is to create a plan for the end of life, and to have the conversations with your loved ones about what's important to you, and you're thinking, "Okay, maybe it's time.

Maybe I should actually sit down and figure this out [00:42:00] instead of just hoping it all works out later," I get it. These conversations can feel overwhelming or scary or just like something you'll deal with another day. But you don't have to do it alone. If you want help creating an end of life care plan for yourself or for someone you love, maybe it's your aging parents, a spouse, whoever it is in your life, you can book a complimentary 30-minute call with me, and we'll just talk.

We'll get clear on what's going on for you and what the next right steps might be. There's no pressure, just support. The link's in the show notes whenever you're ready. And if this episode made you think of someone, a sibling, a friend, or another caregiver, feel free to share it with them. Sometimes these conversations are easier to start when someone else opens the door first.

Thank you for being here. The fact that you're even willing to listen to this kind of conversation means a lot.