In fairy tales, sometimes one hero is enough to change an entire kingdom. Reality is more complicated, especially when we are talking about something that will eventually touch every human life.
The Ellipsis Foundation should not one day tell society what its relationship with death ought to be. If we want to create a genuine alternative path, it cannot be imagined within the walls of a single office. It must be created together with the people who may one day walk that path themselves.
That is why we want to listen to those who have experienced loss and those who have faced their own mortality. We want to work with doctors, psychologists, architects, researchers, engineers, lawyers, designers, funeral professionals and religious communities. We want to ask questions, debate, test ideas and abandon them when reality shows us that we were wrong.
Along this journey, we will need cities, public institutions, universities, hospitals and existing funeral organisations. We do not want to build a closed world called Ellipsis and invite everyone to live by our rules. On the contrary, if something we develop genuinely works, we want it to spread.
If one day a city creates a place of memory based on our research, a funeral organisation adopts an approach we developed, or a government makes a good idea accessible to millions of people, we will consider that a success, even if most of them never know where the idea began.
We do not need to own every change we help make possible. What matters is that the change happens.
But even if we know what we want to build, and understand that we cannot build it alone, one question remains, without which any fairy tale could go on forever.
How much time are we willing to give ourselves?