Memory album

[coachmylife]

Before she died, my dear friend asked me to make memory albums, with memories of her from all her friends, for her children. We never had a chance to talk about this properly, so I am groping around in the dark trying to work out what to do, and I'm wondering if any of you can help me.

I am not an arty person - unlike my friend - so I am really quite anxious about this request. I want to do this beautifully, for her and for her children, but if I set my sights too high then I fear I will never ever get it done. Whatever happens, I want it to be done by the anniversary of her death - so I have a few months.

The best idea I have come up with so far is to send each of her friends two 'pages' that they should use in whatever way they wish - they could write about her, include pictures, stories, poems, drawings. I'd get these pages bound together to make a book for each child.

Another idea is to do a PhotoBook, but I can't really see how this will work well, as lots of us don't really have loads of pictures of us and her, and what she wanted I think were stories about her and her friends, so her children got to see another side of her.

Has anyone done this? What do you think might work? What do you think the children would value the most - this is really the key point...

My children are adults now and their dad died last year. When he died my brother wrote to them and told them how much he'd liked him and told him a little story about when they were born and how much their dad loved them. They really really appreciated this and it helped them enormously. They will have photos, what they want is the memories.

My dm was a young child when her mother died. She never really got anyone to tell her in any satisfactory way about her mother as a whole person. An album like this would have meant a lot to her.

I would ask people to include things like:

• Her favourite music, books, food, movies, holidays, nights out

• What kind of person she was

• things that made her laugh

• favourite stories about her

• perhaps also stories she told about the children and things she liked doing with them if they will be too young to remember

It’s really important to ask people to be honest. My mother found distant family etc would talk about her mother in a way that seemed quite fake.

Eg if it was about me this would be nice:

Fox was a very devoted mum and used to put so much effort into trying to get everything spic and span. She was always laughing at how she sometimes forgot things though and we used to laugh about the time she drove back from school with her iPhone on the roof of the car - just realising in time and went back to the first big corner to find it lying in the grass!

Rather than:

Fox was an amazing mum (which my mum felt didn’t sound real)

I wouldn’t worry too much about the creative side of it because I would be terrible at that as well. Anything you do will be cherished and your ideas sound great

I've sent you a PM as I have done something similar

Oh you have all got it so right. It's about asking questions that don't just invite platitudes. The children are young, and she was ill for really quite a long time, so it's so so important they know what she was like before.

I'm still fussing over practicalities though, so any good ideas about how to do this would be so welcome.

A friend of mine died a few years ago and her husband asked everyone who wanted to to write a page for a memory book for their kids. He asked us to detail:

• how we knew her/where we met
• the thing we first thought when we first met her
• a memorable story we had about her
• the the thing about her that would most stay with us

I remember even as I was writing if I felt like these memories on their own were a bit daft and not exciting enough for a a memory book but the total book was full of scores of pages like this- all with what seemed inconsequential stories- and the whole thing was amazing.... it was lovely to flick through and see that all of those individual little stories added up to one, amazing woman. I have no doubt that this book will be treasured by her kids as they get older.