Apps for Death and Dying
Apps for Death and Dying
These days, most of us spend several hours a day on our phones. We check email, send text messages, read the news, and keep up with social media. We play games, look at the weather, and sometimes, we even plan for death.
That last one might not seem like the most natural use of your smartphone, but death and dying apps are a growing trend. Ranging from mindfulness reminders that encourage us to live our lives to the fullest to funeral planning options and end-of-life care, these apps can help normalize the reality that each of us will someday die.
- Death Clock: This website asks you your age, BMI, and lifestyle habits and uses the information to calculate your overall life expectancy. Although it is hardly an exact science, it does give you a reminder that your life, like every life before you, will someday come to an end.
- Final Wish: One of the mantras of every funeral pre-planning arrangement is to make your wishes clear to your loved ones. Final Wish is a tool that makes this easy to do. You can create photo galleries, make arrangements for your pets, fill out questionnaires, and determine how you want to be remembered on social media.
- iFuneral: Pick your music options, choose a casket, outline your burial/cremation plans, and add any other funeral details you want. This Apple app allows you to make clear all those things you would like done at your funeral so that your family has a physical resource to turn to.
- Once I’ve Gone: This app helps people organize both their deaths and their lives. A Bucket List option helps you to check off all the experiences you want to enjoy before you die, while the vault holds all your important documents, messages, and final wishes. Only the people listed on your account can access this information after you are gone.
- The Funeral App: This app allows you to put any city into the database and receive an alert when an obituary for someone in your city is published. You can follow the link to learn more about the funeral home the deceased’s family has chosen, and how to send flowers or attend the funeral. It’s a lot like scanning the newspaper obituary page, but in a digital medium.
- WeCroak: There’s a Bhutanese folk saying that to be truly happy, a person must contemplate death five times a day. To this end, WeCroak sends a reminder five times a day that you will someday die. It is not meant as a dark or depressing reminder; rather, it is a way to encourage people to appreciate every moment of our lives and remember what really matters.
Of course, we also suggest you follow the iMortuary blog for the best information on funeral planning, end-of-life celebrations, grief resources, and funeral etiquette tips. For the latest in funeral trends and what to expect when planning a funeral, we cover it all.
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