There Are Things She Wants to Leave Behind: Rethinking Legacy in a Digital Age

There are things she wants to leave behind.

Not because she has to.
But because she has the chance to.

When I think about another kind of person this work is for, I think about someone like Marta.

Marta is a research persona, drawn from conversations, lived experiences, and the kinds of situations that shape how we think about this space. Personas are commonly used in CX and product design to help teams design responsibly for the people they aim to support.

She is 85.
She is in good health.
And she has lived a full, deeply connected life.

She has been with her husband for over 60 years.
She has children.
Grandchildren.
A lifetime of stories, decisions, memories, and small moments that only she can tell.

Marta is not facing an immediate loss.

But she is thinking about what happens after she is gone.

Not just what she leaves behind.
But how she leaves it.

She wants her family to remember her voice.
Her perspective.
The way she would respond to life’s moments.

She is not trying to hold on to life.

She is trying to pass something forward.

Not a collection of files.
Not a static archive.
Something more intentional than that.

This is a different kind of problem.

Not the silence that follows loss.
But the question of what we choose to preserve before it arrives.

Today, most legacy tools capture fragments.

Photos.
Videos.
Documents.
Family trees.

They are valuable.

But they rarely capture a sense of presence.
Or the continuity of a person’s voice, thinking, and way of being.

This is the kind of situation we are building Solace to support.

A way for someone like Marta to capture her stories, her voice, and her perspective, creating something her family can return to over time.

Not just to remember.
But to understand where they come from.

To hear her again.
In moments that matter.

This is not about replacing absence.

It is about being intentional about what we leave behind.

And questions like this shape how the work evolves because what we preserve, and how we preserve it, carries meaning across generations.

Personas like Marta help us think differently.

They remind us that not all use cases begin with grief.

Some begin with care.
With foresight.
With a desire to create continuity across time.

Technology should approach that responsibility with care.

First published on Linkedin 22 MARCH 2026