In fairy tales, any amount of time can pass between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after.” We will not have that luxury.
We are giving ourselves fifteen years.
Fifteen years to attempt to change something that has been shaped over centuries. To study one of the most fundamental human experiences and create another path around it. To gather the knowledge that is missing today, bring together people and organisations from different fields, find land, design spaces, navigate laws and limitations, and open the first real gardens and parks of memory.
We are taking on an area that humanity has surprisingly rarely approached as a whole. Medicine, palliative care, the funeral industry, religion, architecture, psychology and memory technologies all exist separately. We want to bring the entire human journey around death into one larger undertaking and ask what it could become if we designed it with the same care and attention that we devote to life.
We do not promise that in fifteen years humanity will stop fearing death or that the entire world will change its traditions. Our commitment is more specific, and therefore more serious: another path must stop being a story about what might be possible and become a choice available to a real person.
And then we will meet Monica again.
She is still 54. Her doctor says the same words, and she is still afraid because she loves her life and does not want to lose it. But this time, when she walks out of that room, she knows that there is more than one path ahead.
She can shape her own farewell, preserve her voice and story for those she loves, choose a religious or secular path, a traditional place of burial or a living garden of memory. And none of this is merely a concept that someone once described beautifully. Behind her choice are real places, people, rules, knowledge and infrastructure.
In fifteen years, another path must no longer be an idea. It must be a path someone can actually walk.
But if we are serious enough to say “fifteen years” out loud, those words must mean more than a beautiful date somewhere in the future.
That is why time itself must become part of our promise.