Help more families find us
A page for anyone who would like to
Somebody dies, and within a year the sound of them starts to go. The photographs stay. The words are what people lose first — the thing they always said, the way they answered the phone, the sentence the whole family can still hear.
Once Spoken keeps one of those sentences. A name, the years of a life, a photograph, and something the person actually said. It is shown to strangers, one at a time, so that someone who never knew them might still stop for a moment and read what they said.
Once Spoken is community-supported. People who can comfortably contribute are asked to help meet the cost; anyone who cannot can choose community-supported. There is no account to make, nothing to subscribe to, and no advertising anywhere on the site. It is a small independent project run by one person in England, and the whole of it comes down to one thing: a person's words are worth keeping, and most of them are being lost because nobody thought to write them down.
The families who most need it are the ones who do not know it exists. That is the only real problem this project has — not money, not features, not attention. Someone hears about it, remembers a sentence, and a person who was going quiet is kept. Everyone who has ever arrived here arrived because somebody told them.
If you would like to tell someone
Below are the words, already written, and the ways to send them. You do not have to use them: if you would rather say it yourself, say it yourself — you know your own people, and something in your own voice will land better than anything drafted here. Change it, cut it, or throw it away and start again.
If it is your own person you were thinking of
Then start there rather than here. Telling other people about Once Spoken matters less than one sentence actually being kept, and the person you were thinking of while you read this is the reason any of it exists.
It takes a few minutes. A name, two years, a photograph, and something they said. Every memorial is read by a person before it is shown.
What this page is not
There is no scheme here. No ambassador programme, no sign-up, no account, no mailing list, no referral code, no leaderboard, no points and nothing to be given for doing it. Nobody is tracked for having shared, and nothing on this page can tell one person who shared from another — we can only see how many times, in total, somebody used one of the buttons above.
Nor is any of this promotion of a company. Once Spoken sells nothing and advertises nothing. Contributions are voluntary and change nothing about any memorial. The point of telling somebody is not that this site grows; it is that a family who would have lost a sentence keeps it.
Nothing on this page sets a cookie, stores anything on your device, or loads anything from Facebook, WhatsApp or anybody else. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what is recorded when one of the buttons above is used.