AFTERGLOW
In development
Let the light in
Free grief guide
Join the waitlist
The galaxy
Move through it yourself.
Drag to travel across the sky, zoom to get closer, and open any bright star to read who they were. The small lights orbiting a star are candles, left by people who came.
Choose a name — the sky flies to their star
Explore Afterglow
A walk through what we are building.
The three things Afterglow is built around. Everything here works — type in it, click through it — with example people standing in for real ones. You cannot light a real star yet.
Light a star
Share their story
Add to a star
This is a preview. The real thing is close.
Join the waitlist and you will be among the first people able to light a real star.
Join the waitlist
Memorial pages
A permanent place, not a post that scrolls away.
Every star can open into a full memorial: their photographs, their story in the words of whoever keeps it, a timeline of the life, and the memories other people brought.
Community
Nobody should carry it alone.
The hardest part is rarely the funeral. It is month seven, when everyone else has moved on and you have not. Afterglow puts you in a small room with people whose loss looks like yours.
Small on purpose
A room of two hundred is a feed. A room of twelve is people who notice when you go quiet.
Held by their own
Every room needs two moderators who have lived that kind of loss before it opens.
Nothing is public
Rooms are not indexed and not searchable. You can leave and take everything you wrote with you.
No advice unless asked
No fixing, no stages, and nobody comparing whose loss was worse.
Why it exists
Grief is the love we carry after someone is gone.
Afterglow is not here to fix your grief. Grief is not a malfunction, and it does not need treating. It is what love turns into when the person is no longer here to receive it.
What people are missing is not a cure. It is somewhere to put it.
01
Remember them
A permanent place in a shared sky, found by their name, returned to on their birthday and on the day you lost them.
02
Tell their story
In your own words, at whatever length it takes. Not an obituary. The small things nobody else would think to write down.
03
Be heard
Someone lights a candle and it becomes a small light orbiting their star. No counts, no rankings, no most-resonant grief.
04
Find people who understand
Rooms held by people who have been in them. No advice unless it is asked for, and nobody comparing whose loss was worse.
Afterglow is being built by someone who lost his sister, and then lost his brother, who was left to carry her death almost entirely alone in a house where nobody knew how to talk about what they felt. The grief had nowhere to go.
One idea runs through all of it: do not carry it alone, and do not stay quiet.
Still to come
What comes after the sky.
Designed, not yet built. In roughly the order we intend to get to them.
Designed
Anniversary reminders
A quiet message the evening before their birthday and the day they died. Opt in, and off is always allowed.
Designed
The dates timeline
A scrollable year of every birthday and death day for the stars you hold, so nothing arrives unannounced.
Designed
Gifts, made small
Journals, candles, a pendant engraved with their star. Send one to a star and nothing is charged until the keeper accepts.
Designed
Shared keepers
Add your brother, your mother, a friend. A page nobody has to hold alone, and one that survives you.
Later
Their memorial as a book
The story, the photographs and every tribute, printed. The thing families ask for most.
Later
Memorial funds
Linked out to a campaign the family already runs. We will never be the ones holding anybody’s money.