"I was sitting at my desk. And I was participating in a memorial.
Zephorum's window had been open for ten minutes. On my screen was a mosaic of faces: some wept silently, others smiled as they listened to a story about their youth. At the bottom, a frame showed a bouquet of flowers resting next to an urn. No church, no cemetery.
Yet there, in front of my laptop, we were saying goodbye.
At one point, a family member shared a video: pictures of travels, laughter, toasts. Music playing in the background. Then, a handwritten phrase: "Thank you for making my life so full." In the chat, dozens of hearts and messages followed one another. It didn't matter where we connected from: we were all in the same place, at the same time.
I wondered: What if the future of memory is this? No cold tombstones, but living spaces, accessible by anyone, anywhere. A place where memory is not only carved in stone, but also in pixels."
What happens when the place of remembrance stops having boundaries?
For centuries, mourning had a specific address: a marble field, a quiet driveway, a bench in the shade of a cypress tree. Today, it may instead be in a virtual reality room, on a web page, or in the memory of our smartphone.
It is a change that is not just about technology: it is rewriting our relationship with loss, remembrance, and even public space.
Europe now moves more than $36 billion between funeral products and services, and it is not doing so by standing still. Right now, biodegradable coffins, urns that dissolve in water and memorials that look like contemporary art installations are being designed in hundreds of European cities.
The memorial is no longer a repeated gesture in a codified place. It is a blank canvas where everyone can paint his or her own final farewell. And the brush, increasingly, is digital.
In 2023, 12,000 European funeral homes offered at least one digital service: live streaming, online spaces to leave messages, interactive photo albums. In the UK, nearly one in two families used web platforms for funerals or memorials.
"Direct cremation"-no ceremony, no procession, no flowers-now accounts for 20 percent of UK deaths and could rise to 50 percent in 20 years. It is not just a change in format: it is a reversal of the very concept of a sendoff.
Digital mourning opens up unprecedented possibilities: one can return to the online memorial at any time, leave a message years later, see a recorded voice or smile again. This creates a continuous thread with those who are gone, but it can also change the way we "let go."
Psychologists call this "permanent mourning with unlimited access"-an opportunity for comfort, but also a risk of blocking the processing. Memory becomes always attainable-but are we ready to live with it forever?
Each digital funeral is one less step toward monumental expenses and one more step toward subscriptions to platforms, cloud services, and interactive memorials. Families reduce direct costs (caskets, graves, cemetery maintenance), but create a new market for digital designers, memory archivists, and "death-tech" developers.
This opens up a memory economy that thrives even without physical land.
If remembrance moves online, real cemeteries are likely to change face. Fewer headstones, more multifunctional spaces: public gardens, art venues, meditation areas. In the Nordic countries, where cremation exceeds 80 percent, entire cemetery areas are being reimagined as urban parks.
The landscape of mourning is becoming greener, less marble-bound and more open to everyday life.
And in the midst of this momentous change, Zephorum was born: a place that not only "houses" memories, but transforms them into living experiences.
Zephorum is an answer to the question we will all, sooner or later, ask ourselves: If memory can live forever online, how do we want it to be?
The future of remembrance is not a crossroads between stone and pixels. It is a bridge that unites both. With Zephorum, remembrance becomes fluid, accessible and shareable without losing respect, depth and sense of ritual.
Marble can be chipped, the flower withers. But a carefully guarded memory, in a place where technology meets humanity, can last forever