There are organisations around the world that help people at the end of life, support families through loss, research funeral practices, create new forms of remembrance and rethink cemeteries.
But most of this exists separately. Medicine focuses on the final months of life, the funeral industry on farewell and burial, while other organisations work with grief, memory or individual technologies.
For the person living through it, those boundaries do not exist. The final decisions, farewell, burial, memory and what remains after us form one continuous human experience.
The Ellipsis Foundation is being created to look at that experience as a whole.
Not to invent a new kind of funeral or build a beautiful cemetery. The question we are asking is much bigger: what could the entire human culture around death become if we were designing it anew today?
And we do not want to stop at an answer. We want to research it, test it and build it.
We are creating The Ellipsis Foundation as a foundation that will devote its entire work to rethinking the human journey around death as a whole. Not for one country, one culture or one generation. For humanity itself.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no other foundation in the world today that has taken on this entire question at this scale. From the final decisions made in life to farewell, burial, memory and legacy. From research to real spaces, technologies and infrastructure that people may one day be able to use regardless of where they live or what they believe.
We are creating a foundation for a question that concerns all of humanity.
We understand the scale of what we are setting out to do. The next fifteen years will likely require millions of euros and an enormous amount of human effort. Researchers, doctors, psychologists, architects, engineers, lawyers, religious communities, volunteers, cities, public institutions and thousands of people we do not even know yet.
But before we count the millions, we have to begin.
€15,000.
That amount will allow us to legally establish The Ellipsis Foundation, form its first team and begin the work. That team will then be able to define concrete goals, timelines and budgets for the first year, the first five years and beyond.
€15,000 will not fund fifteen years. It will set them in motion.
After that, we will step forward as The Ellipsis Foundation, and the clock that stands still today will begin counting down our time.
The names of those who help bring the Foundation into existence will remain part of its founding story. One day, we want to preserve those names in the first Ellipsis gardens of memory, not as a record of donations, but as a memory of the people who were there when none of this existed yet.
And then fifteen years will pass.
Somewhere, a doctor will say those same words again.
Sitting in front of them will be Monica.
She will be 54 too.
She will be afraid because she loves being alive. She will still not want to leave her children, disappear from their future or think about the morning that will one day come without her.
Death will not have become any less real.
But the world around her should be different.
What exists today only on these pages should exist around Monica. She should have a real choice. The ability to shape her own farewell, preserve her voice and story, follow her faith or choose a secular path, and have a living garden become the place of her memory, somewhere her children can return not only to grieve, but to live while remembering her.
In the first chapter, we asked:
What if an entirely different world awaits Monica?
Fifteen years from now, we no longer want to be asking that question.
We want to be able to show her that world.
Today, it does not exist yet.
Today, even The Ellipsis Foundation does not exist yet.
There is this story. There are the people who will be the first to believe in it. And there is one first step, after which the countdown begins.
For now, it is only a fairy tale. We have fifteen years to make it real.